#稳定币应用 3.1 trillion USD in market cap, but it can't compare to the imagination space starting from zero in 2009 — this contrast is quite interesting.

Nick Tomaino's point hits the key: the era of easy money has indeed ended. Venture capital harvesting, Meme coin bubbles, token speculation frenzy — these quick-money models have proven ineffective in 2024. But the real signals worth paying attention to are, for the first time last year, products that outperformed without relying on speculation, driven purely by application value — Polymarket and stablecoins.

What does this indicate? Capital is flowing from speculation to practicality. The growth of stablecoins is no longer just conceptual hype but a real increase in on-chain transaction demand. On-chain data shows that daily stablecoin trading volume, cross-chain bridging, and usage in DeFi are all expanding — this is genuine capital flow.

As for the "trustworthy neutrality" judgment limited to BTC and ETH, from an investment perspective, it means: in a macro environment where institutional trust is generally declining, these two assets, which are hardest to manipulate by a single entity, have become scarce commodities. The remaining opportunities in the race are indeed to be found on the application side — such as stablecoin payment settlement scenarios, counterparty risk management, etc. These are the tangible sources of excess returns that can truly be realized.

In other words, 2025 isn't without opportunities; it's just that the opportunities are shifting from buying coins to using coins.