I sat across from a founder wearing a hoodie that cost more than most developer stipends. His deck was immaculate — projections of billions in tokenized AI compute, partnerships with names I recognised from the Forbes crypto 50 list, and a roadmap that promised to redefine the bull market battlefield. He paused for effect. “So, Evelyn, where do you see the two asset classes that will dominate the next cycle?” I leaned back. “Show me your GitHub.” The silence that followed was not a pause for thought. It was a vacuum. No open-source repository. No audit trail. No verifiable history. That silence is the loudest audit I have ever performed. And it taught me more about the coming bull run than any market report.
Everyone is searching for the holy grail of asset allocation. The question “What are the two asset classes for the next bull market?” has become a mantra on Twitter spaces, in Telegram groups, and in the boardrooms of family offices I now consult for. It’s a seductive question because it promises clarity in chaos. But it is also a trap. The true battleground is not between one token category and another. It is between trust and narrative — between code that holds under stress and stories that evaporate when liquidity flees. I have lived through enough cycles — from the 2017 ICO mania to the 2021 DeFi summer to the 2022 crash that left me emotionally hollow — to know that the asset class that wins is the one that can survive an audit of both its code and its incentives.
Let me deconstruct the premise. The original article, titled “下一轮牛市的主战场在哪？答案就藏在这两类资产里”, captured attention precisely because it weaponised our collective FOMO. It promised a map to the promised land. But after parsing every available line of its content, the only concrete fact I could extract was the title itself. No protocols named. No data. No technical analysis. The article was a shell — a hollow vessel designed to exploit our hunger for certainty. As an open-source evangelist who has spent 24 years in this industry, I find that more dangerous than a flawed whitepaper. A flawed whitepaper can be dissected. A vacuum of substance cannot. It simply absorbs your attention and returns nothing but anxiety.
So let me offer what that article did not: a real, technically grounded, values-driven identification of two asset classes that will be the true battlefields of the next bull market. Not the ones the hype machine sells you. The ones that pass the smell test of an engineer who has audited contracts that held millions, and watched those millions vanish when the code broke faith with its users.
Asset Class One: Verifiable Infrastructure
When I say infrastructure, I do not mean any L1 that raised a $200 million valuation from venture capital and promised to be the “Ethereum killer.” I mean the layer of the stack that can be independently audited, that has a history of resistance to capture, and that is gradually decentralising its own operational control. Bitcoin remains the poster child, but it is no longer alone. The shift toward verifiable infrastructure is now evident in the modular thesis: Celestia for data availability, EigenLayer for restaking with open-source slashing conditions, and the L2 ecosystems that are finally shipping decentralised sequencers.
I learned the importance of this in 2017, during the peak of the ICO madness. While everyone was chasing returns on tokens that were literally copy-pasted ERC-20 contracts, I spent three months auditing the Ethereum Classic fork. Why? Because I wanted to understand what immutability meant when humans could still gather and decide to fork. That deep dive taught me that code is law only when the human community agrees to enforce it — and that enforcement requires transparency. Every line must be open. Every upgrade must be discussed in public. Every dependency must be signed by maintainers who have reputational skin in the game.
Fast forward to 2024. I was asked to guide a major Abu Dhabi family office into the crypto space. They had $10 million to allocate and wanted the “safe exposure” that ETFs offered. I pushed back. I argued that true safety came not from a regulated wrapper, but from holding assets whose value could be verified by anyone with a terminal and a curiosity for code. We ended up building a portfolio that included Bitcoin, a position in the Optimism ecosystem (because its OP Stack is fully open-source and now powers multiple L2s), and a small allocation to privacy-focused projects like Monero. The result? When the market wobbled in mid-2024, the family office didn’t panic. They could verify the chain states themselves. Trust, as I tell them, must be earned by transparency, not by brand name.
This asset class — verifiable infrastructure — will be the bedrock of the next bull run. Why? Because the cycle will be defined by institutional inflows that are risk-averse. Institutions cannot bet on closed protocols with admin keys that one person controls. They need assets that pass the “your keys, your code” test. The surge in Bitcoin ETF approvals was just the first wave. The second wave will be ETFs and structured products built on verifiable L2s and data availability layers. The asset class is not “infrastructure” in abstract. It is the subset of infrastructure that can be proven sound.
But here is the nuance: not all open-source infrastructure is equal. I saw a project in 2025 that had beautiful documentation and a vibrant Discord. Yet when I ran its sequencer code through a symbolic execution tool, I found a race condition that would allow a malicious operator to reorder transactions for profit. The developers fixed it only after I published a vulnerability report. That is the culture we need: one where silence is not an option. The loudest audit is the one that forces a patch before the deploy. This asset class demands that we, as a community, keep auditing even when the bull market screams that it is time to buy.
Asset Class Two: Human-Centric Protocols
The second asset class is less obvious, and it is where my heart truly lives. I call it human-centric protocols — projects that explicitly preserve individual sovereignty and distinguish human activity from machine generation. This class includes privacy chains like Monero, decentralised identity systems (DID), and proof-of-humanity mechanisms.
Why will this be a battlefield? Because the next bull market will unfold in the shadow of AI agents generating content, trading, and potentially voting by themselves. We are already seeing AI-generated NFTs, AI-written proposals in DAOs, and AI-run trading bots that execute strategies faster than humans. In such an environment, the premium asset becomes the one that cannot be forged: a human signature backed by cryptographic intent.
I know this territory intimately because I launched a project in 2026 called “Proof of Human Intent.” We built an open-source standard that uses zk-SNARKs to allow a person to prove they generated a piece of content or signed a transaction without revealing their full identity — but with a guarantee that a human, not an algorithm, performed the action. It was born from my fear that the line between human and machine would blur beyond recognition, and that the value of human creativity would be diluted. Five developers joined me. We wrote the code in the open. We had no token at first. But the community that formed around it became the most engaged group I have ever seen. They understood that the asset of the future is authenticity.
This is more than a philosophical exercise. In DeFi, we already saw how vulnerable systems are when they ignore human behavior. During the DeFi summer of 2020, I audited a high-yield farming contract and found a reentrancy vulnerability that could have drained $5 million. The team thanked me, patched it, and then proceeded to launch an exploit-proof version. But the deeper lesson was that the economic model assumed all participants were rational profit-maximizers. It ignored the human element of panic, of greed, of coordinated attacks. Human-centric protocols acknowledge that people are not perfect machines. They build in safeguards: social recovery, intentional sign-offs, and reputation slashing that requires a real person to lose something.
In 2022, after the FTX collapse, I withdrew from public life for six months. I needed solitude. I studied the history of internet bubbles — from the dot-com crash to the housing crisis. The pattern was the same: a new technology captures imagination, capital flows based on narratives, and then the narratives break when people realise that the underlying trust architecture is rotten. In crypto, the architecture is code. If the code doesn't preserve human agency, it will eventually betray its users.
This second asset class — human-centric protocols — will be the sleeper hit of the next bull market. Why? Because as AI-generated content floods the feed, the market will start paying a premium for verifiable human origin. Think of it as a digital hallmarked gold: the token that has a proof of human work attached to it will trade at a multiple of the anonymous token. Already, we see projects like Worldcoin (with its iris scan) and Gitcoin (with its quadratic funding) experimenting with this. But the full potential is untapped. The asset class is not “AI” or “RWA” — it is the protocols that protect the human from being indistinguishable from the bot.
The Contrarian Twist
Now, the contrarian angle that almost no one discusses: the two asset classes I just described are not tokens. They are, in fact, approaches to building. The real battlefield is not between one coin and another, but between code integrity and marketing spin. The market will reward projects that treat their code like a living audit — constantly tested, constantly improved — and that treat their community as co-owners, not as exit liquidity.
In 2024, when I consulted for that family office, I saw first-hand how traditional capital views crypto: as a casino. The only way to change that perception is to force transparency. The best “asset class” you can hold is the network effect of verifiable code. The second is the network effect of verified human contribution. Everything else — the L1s that still have admin keys, the DeFi protocols with unsolved oracle problems, the NFT collections with no provenance — those are not assets. They are liabilities waiting to be marked down.
I have seen too many builders pour their souls into projects that crumbled because they prioritised the pitch over the protocol. Silence is the loudest audit because it reveals where the confidence ends. If a project cannot produce a public audit, if it cannot link to a GitHub with recent commits, if it cannot show its failure mode — then it is not an asset. It is a speculation.
The Takeaway
The next bull market will not be kind to the empty vessels. The two asset classes worth your attention are infrastructure that can be verified by anyone, and protocols that put human agency at the core. Do not buy the story. Buy the code. Test it yourself. Run a node. Read the comments on pull requests. The next bull run will reward those who trust the protocol, not the pitch. And if you hear silence where there should be code, walk away. Because silence is the loudest audit of all.