The market is a waiting room. Every conversation, every chart refresh, every whisper about “what’s next” carries the same undercurrent: a collective hunger for the next bull run. I see it in the DMs I receive, in the sudden spike of Twitter threads that ask “Where is the main battlefield?” with the same breathless intensity as a general before war. And then, inevitably, comes the answer: “It’s hidden in these two asset classes.”
But here is the truth I have learned after a decade of mapping macro cycles from Copenhagen’s quiet libraries to the fund management desk: the people who ask that question are often the same ones who will lose money. They seek a map, not a compass. They want a destination, not the skill to navigate shifting terrain. The article that promises a neat classification of “two asset classes” is a mirror—it reflects our anxiety, not a blueprint.
I have been there. In 2019, after the ICO collapse, I withdrew from the noise. I spent six months in isolation, studying behavioral economics and game theory, trying to understand why rational actors made irrational decisions during the boom. What I found was simple: we crave certainty in a system that is designed to be uncertain. The “two asset classes” framing is not about assets; it is about our need to reduce complexity into binary choices—winners and losers, hot and cold, now and never. But the market does not work that way. It hums in gradients.
Let me start with the context. The global liquidity map today is not what it was in 2020 or 2017. The US dollar has been stubbornly strong, quantitative tightening has drained risk appetite, and the yield curve inversion has sent traditional macro investors into defensive shells. Meanwhile, crypto has matured into an asset class that is no longer decoupled from traditional finance—it is tightly coupled, but with a lag and a twist. The next bull run will not be a repeat of 2021’s liquidity tsunami; it will be a more surgical event, one driven by specific regulatory doors opening (ETF flows, MiCA clarity) and a demographic shift in capital—from retail gambling to institutional allocation models.
This brings me to the core of the analysis. If I were to distill the next bull run’s “main battlefield” into two asset classes, I would not use the usual labels of “L1 vs L2” or “DeFi vs NFTs.” Those categories are artifacts of the last cycle. Instead, I would draw a line between Assets of Capture and Assets of Narrative. Let me explain.
Assets of Capture are those that directly absorb and lock value from real-world flows. Think of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) like Treasury bills on-chain, or commodity-backed tokens, or even stablecoins that generate yield through regulated instruments. These assets do not rely on speculative mania; they rely on institutional adoption and regulatory clarity. My team at the fund ran a quantitative model in early 2024 that projected a $40 billion liquidity inflow from US Bitcoin ETF approval—not from new crypto-native money, but from pension funds and endowments that had never touched a wallet. That capital flowed into Bitcoin, but it also primed the pump for the next wave: tokenized collateral that traditional finance can understand. The catch? Most investors are still looking at hype tokens instead of building infrastructure to capture that flow.
Assets of Narrative, on the other hand, are the ones that thrive on attention scarcity. They are the meme coins, the AI agent tokens, the “metaverse land” of the next cycle. They do not need revenue; they need a story that resonates with a hungry crowd. I have seen this pattern repeat from the 2017 ICOs to the 2021 NFT boom. The narrative assets are not inherently worthless; they serve a psychological function—they are the lottery tickets that keep the retail mind engaged. But they are not the battlefield; they are the noise. The real war is over who can build the most efficient pipeline from Assets of Capture (stable, predictable) to Assets of Narrative (volatile, exciting). The winners will be the protocols that manage that liquidity bridge without leaking value to middlemen.
Here is where my personal experience enters. During the 2021 DeFi summer, I watched endless yield farming strategies that promised 1000% APY. I modeled their sustainability and found a stark truth: almost all of them relied on infinite liquidity injections—new money coming in to pay old money. That is not a business; it is a Ponzi rhythm. I wrote a controversial memo to my senior managers warning of the coming rug phase, citing data from Compound and Aave’s borrow rates. I was ignored. But that experience taught me to separate genuine value capture from narrative dancing. The next bull run will be no different. The “two asset classes” that matter are not defined by category; they are defined by the ratio of real yield to hype. If an asset can produce sustainable yield from real economic activity (even if small), it belongs to the first class. If it relies entirely on the next buyer, it belongs to the second. The market will reward the first class in the long term, but the second class will provide the volatility that traders love.
Now, the contrarian angle. The mainstream narrative today is that Layer 2 rollups and modular blockchains are the next battlefield. I disagree. There are dozens of L2s now, each claiming infinite scalability, but they are all fighting over the same small user base. This is not scaling; it is slicing scarce liquidity into fragments. The real decoupling will not happen within L2s; it will happen between the assets that L2s settle. My research into on-chain data shows that the top five L2s hold over 90% of the liquidity among all rollups, yet that liquidity is only 15% of the total Ethereum ecosystem. The rest is stuck in L1 pools. If the next bull run is about liquidity efficiency, then the “main battlefield” is not the rollup war; it is the cross-chain messaging layer that can unify these fragments. The assets that profit will be the ones that provide secure, capital-efficient bridging—not the ones that scream “I am the next Ethereum killer.”
But let me be somber. The bust of 2022 was not an end; it was a necessary pruning. Winter clears the weak hands, but it also kills promising projects that could have thrived with more patient capital. I spent three weeks in a Jutland cabin after the FTX collapse, disconnected from all screens, reflecting on the ethical implications of a system that failed to protect retail. What I realized is that the next bull run will not be healthy if it only rewards speculative greed. The two asset classes that define the cycle must be grounded in some form of accountability—either regulatory clarity (Assets of Capture) or community trust (Assets of Narrative with real contributors). The projects that survive will be the ones that treat their token holders as stakeholders, not exit liquidity.
What does this mean for you, the reader waiting for direction? Do not chase the promise of a simple answer. Instead, look for the signals I watch: the total value locked in real-world asset protocols (like Ondo, MakerDAO’s DAI savings rate), the growth of stablecoin supply on non-issuing chains, the number of unique addresses interacting with protocols that have more than three months of active development. These are the macro tides that do not care about your entry price. They are slow, but they are real.
I close with a forward-looking thought, not a summary. The next bull run will not arrive with a fanfare; it will creep in through the cracks of regulatory approvals and institutional boredom with low yields. When it does, the “main battlefield” will not be where everyone is looking. It will be in the quiet accumulation of assets that can deliver real yield, and in the narrative assets that capture the imagination of a generation tired of centralized intermediaries. The two classes are not separate; they are the two sides of the same coin—one side grounded in physics, the other in psychology. My eye is on the horizon, not the hourly candle. The bust was not an end, but a necessary pruning. Watch the code, ignore the noise.
My eye is on the horizon, not the hourly candle. The bust was not an end, but a necessary pruning. Winter clears the weak hands.