THE KOL CYCLE
Every cycle, crypto admits a little more about what it actually is.
There’s only one admission left.
01
The pattern within the pattern
The big money in a bull market comes from being early to the main meta. What almost no one notices is the market telegraphing it in advance every time.
In fact, it’s always the same: the biggest anomaly of each cycle becomes the theme for the next.
Ethereum in 2017 proved that a smart contract platform could hold tens of billions in value. But the tooling to actually build on it (wallets, AMMs, composability, etc.) didn’t mature until the next cycle.
Dogecoin in 2021 proved that pure attention without product, team, or purpose could sustain a top-ten market cap. But it seemed impossible to imitate a pump 7 years in the making with the richest man in the world as its shill.
TRUMP proved a single individual’s reputation and audience can be converted directly into a tradeable asset. No meme community pretending to be leaderless. Just one really famous guy’s social media distribution with a ticker and a token.
But can you recreate something that came from the President of the United States?
First the market finds out something is possible. Then by the next cycle, someone builds the assembly line. Then everyone gets rugged by the assembly line while 2-5% of them, mostly insiders, get very rich. Repeat.
The assembly line for repeating the TRUMP trade doesn’t fully exist yet. But it’s being built out. It’s probably being worked on by multiple teams, and at least one of the founders is describing it as “the next stage of internet capital markets” in a pitch deck.
If that hasn’t happened yet, well… you’re early. I’m early. We’re all very early. And maybe someone reading this is going to pivot their current SaaS plans to start working on it. If that’s you, dm me, I’m interested in seed round.
02
Getting closer to the truth
Each cycle, we strip away a layer of pretense. The market has been slowly admitting what it actually is underneath the stories.
Bitcoin clones pretended to be better money. Nobody used them as money. It was a way to trade pure emotion and volatility.
L1s pretended to be decentralized computers. Nobody used them to compute much. They were a way to launch tokens.
DeFi gov tokens pretended to be equity or board seats (DAOs, etc). They were not equity. They governed nothing of value.
Memecoins didn’t pretend to be anything. What a breath of fresh air! A memecoin makes no claims. Just a community and vibes… unless?
Just as with each iteration before it, memecoins hid one final little lucrative lie:
That the attention was organic. Communal. Ownerless. A grassroots movement of vibe enjoyers having fun together, rather than what it actually was: a game of KOLs.
WIF didn’t succeed because it was the best cute dog. There is no best cute dog. They are all the same dog. WIF won because Ansem had functional control of Solana retail flow at that moment in time, and he pointed it at a dog with a hat.
The memecoin cycle’s real alpha was never token selection. It was proximity to distribution and attention. The traders who made money weren’t researching dogs… well, things did get pretty dark. That was happening.
But profitable traders were mostly monitoring the wallets and timelines of 25-100 KOL accounts, trying to front-run where the nuclear-powered liquidity firehose was going to point next.
The meme cycle was already the KOL cycle. It was just hiding behind a mask.
KOL coins remove the final layer of pretense.
The attention has a clear and undeniable owner. Skip the plausible deniability games and just trade the owner directly.
Why hold the thing Ansem might shill when you can hold tokenized Ansem? Which is riskier? Which is he going to be more dedicated to? Which is harder for him to walk away from?
BTC CLONES→L1s→APP TOKENS→MEMES→PEOPLE
Each step is the market getting more honest about what it was already doing.
The end state of hyper-financializing everything is financializing everyone as individuals.
03
“We tried this and it failed”
The obvious objections: friend.tech existed somewhat recently and was rugged for eight figs for seemingly no reason. Celebrity coins in 2024 were a disaster. If you were unlucky enough to remember it, BitClout was even a thing (kind of) for like a month.
Creator coins have been tried repeatedly and every attempt has ended in a smoldering crater with 0 remaining users… not even the founder.
But prototypes dying before their cycle is the most consistent pattern in crypto. It’s not a real rebuttal to a thesis at all.
ICOs existed before 2017. Ethereum itself was founded through ICO in 2014.
NFTs existed before 2021. Rare Pepes traded in 2016 to a small audience of autists on the fringes of the terminally online crypto diehard experience.
DEXs existed before 2021. EtherDelta had been mildly popular in 2017, but the UI/UX was absolutely atrocious. Trust me, I’m still triggered thinking about it.
Memecoins existed as early as 2012. BBQcoin was one of the first altcoins ever made. Dogecoin followed a few years after.
dYdX preceded Hyperliquid by 7 years.
And on and on we could go.
The prototype for the next big meta shows up a cycle (or two) early, falls to the wayside because the anomaly hasn’t yet proven the product-market fit, and then gets rebuilt at industrial scale once it’s validated.
04
Trading the KOL cycle
If the asset is just a person, then the core fundamental is trust. That single variable sets the scene for the whole game.
Crypto-native KOLs go first. They already understand wallets, launches, narratives, and how to hand-hold the audience through a casino on fire. No onboarding required.
Facedoxxed will beat anon for the first time in crypto history. A face feels like some kind of collateral. Skin in the game becomes literal.
Mainstream celebrities will show up and mostly underperform. They’re famous, but famous doesn’t mean trusted, and their audiences don’t have wallets.
The exception, and possibly the biggest single winners of the cycle, will be politicians and heads of state.
They’re the only outsiders whose position forces a kind of trust: markets believe a president matters whether or not anyone likes him. TRUMP already proved the trade.
And underneath the majors, the low-cap casino: memes and derivatives of the top KOLs. The KOLs will be the new blue chips, and their parody coins will be the new high risk memecoins.
05
The final layer
For ten years the market has been removing layers: first the pretense of better money, then the pretense of technology, then the pretense of equity, and now the pretense of community.
Each cycle, the thing being traded gets closer to the thing that was always actually being traded.
Take away the whitepapers, the roadmaps, and even the funny pictures, and what’s left is the only assets crypto ever really had:
Humans and liquidity.
Welcome to the KOL cycle. Having the thesis early will always give you an edge on the first rotations. Maintaining it will be up to you.