Summary of investment experience in 2024: How to allocate reasonably and outperform the market?

The author shares their 2024 investment strategy, combining Dalio's all-weather rules and Taleb's barbell strategy, focusing on disruptive tech like chain abstraction, AI Agent, and PayFi projects.
They highlight two crypto investment logics: technological determinism and "community is king," initially favoring the former but recently exploring community-driven projects like Fat Penguin NFT and Sonic SVM.
Sonic SVM, a Solana L2 Stack project targeting TikTok's Gen Z users, demonstrates the power of consumer-focused adoption over abstract tech primitives, with its app SonicX attracting 2M+ users.
The article contrasts TikTok's high-value user base (1.5B+) with Telegram's, emphasizing the monetization potential of community-driven ecosystems in Web3.
A key takeaway: Post-blockchain infra saturation, winning projects will prioritize rapid consumer adoption and mindshare over pure technical innovation.

Author: NingNing

To summarize my personal 24 years of investment experience, it is to copy Dalio's all-weather investment rules and diversify the investment portfolio into every cycle that affects the crypto market (intra-year seasonal cycle, 4-year bull-bear cycle, Geithner technology innovation cycle, Merrill Lynch clock cycle), and follow Taleb's barbell strategy, focusing on allocating Alpha assets in the Bata track and Beta assets in the Alpha track.

Therefore, the Alpha assets in my investment portfolio are now mainly chain abstraction, AI Agent, and PayFi projects. The addition of these assets helped my overall portfolio yield easily outperform the market in December. When I was rebalancing my portfolio at the end of the year to capture the 25-year Q1 Alpha returns, I suddenly realized that my Alpha asset allocation logic was relatively simple, and it was purely centered around the main line of "disruptive innovation" of technology.

Especially after hearing MegaETH co-founder Bing Xiong’s remarks about community Vibe in Space recently, I reflected on it while lying in bed late at night.

In the field of crypto investment, there are actually two investment logics, one is the so-called technological determinism, and the other is that community is king.

Generally speaking, as a non-hypothetical rational person, I tend to regard things like community vibe and cult culture as noise created by big scammers and small fools for their own interests, and I don’t like to pay much attention to them.

But recently, I bought the Fat Penguin NFT because I was optimistic about the consumer chain Abstract in the chain abstraction track. This allowed me to experience the community vibe for the first time as a stakeholder rather than a spectator. This experience made me feel the long-lost sense of social belonging and community acceptance. Inspired by Brother Bing’s views, I began to intentionally break through the original cognitive cocoon and try to understand projects with a strong community vibe, such as Monad, Sonic SVM, MegaETH, BeraChain, etc.

Sonic SVM is the first instance of Sonic’s Solana L2 Stack architecture HyperGrid. It is positioned as the Web3 TikTok Chain and its target users are TikTok’s millions of Generation Z game consumers.

Previously, I wrote a long investment research article for Sonic (see retweet), and the "split disk" theory of the owner kept coming to my mind when I was writing it. Frankly speaking, I didn't realize the true value of these narratives such as consumer chain/community vibe at that time, and from a technical perspective, Sonic's HyperGrid makes sense, but it is far less sexy than new L2 technical primitives such as Preconf, Based Rollup, and parallel EVM.

But half a year later, when we compare the operating status and community maturity of Sonic SVM with those L2s with sexy technical primitives, we will find that there is a huge gap in products and results between consumer-oriented construction and abstract Web3 Mass adoption.

The current Sonic SVM is building a TikTok App Layer - SonicX, which will airdrop its native token $SONIC to all users who have completed registration through TikTok. Relying on Account Abstraction, TikTok users can directly experience on-chain interaction in the app and complete the airdrop on the TikTok side without having to configure a separate Web3 wallet.

Through TikTok's advanced advertising and creator collaboration, SonicX has attracted more than 2 million users to participate in games, challenges and live broadcasts in the app, creating a seamless experience similar to Web2. In addition, Sonic SVM plans to connect more games on http://SonicX.app and gradually build the "TikTok Chain" ecosystem. Eligible users can receive token rewards during the airdrop period.

TikTok has more than 1.5 billion global users, and Telegram has 900 million global users, but the lifetime value of TikTok users is much higher than that of Telegram. The crazy hype of ChillGuy some time ago showed us the monetization potential of TikTok users. We don’t seem to have to worry about the chaos like the previous Telegram applet, which ultimately only exchanged precious crypto market liquidity for a large number of low-value junk users.

When I was working at a small crypto fund in 2023, a senior told me that one of the main themes of value investing is "go to big market". After completing 0-1 innovation, whoever can better occupy a larger market through rapid replication + strengthening the growth flywheel will be the final winner. Now when Vitalik feels that blockchain infra is already in oversupply, whoever can reach consumers faster and occupy more of the consumer's mind will be the Web3 Infra of the next era.