Entering next year, the participation logic in the crypto market is undergoing subtle shifts—shifting from chasing growth expectations to exploring certainty of returns. Market observers have summarized three noteworthy directions.

First is the on-chain perpetual contract arbitrage mechanism. Such strategies have never been speculative driven by market trends but are long-term cash flow businesses with compound interest. After more than half a year of refinement, from capital allocation and team division to trading systems, they have become increasingly mature and stable. Interestingly, market downturns seem to be more friendly to these strategies—although profit margins decline, the reduced volatility enhances stability, making them more similar to financial products with steady returns.

The retreat of the track also has another implication: participants engaged solely in expectation arbitrage are gradually being filtered out. Take Lighter as an example: after issuing tokens, all uncertainties are anchored to the price, making subsequent participation more difficult, especially for farmers whose accounts are hard to settle and hedging is not smooth. In contrast, genuine users, regardless of whether they are incentivized with tokens, will continue to participate and can complete the entire cycle. Platforms like Variational, which extend the积分赛 to September next year, naturally filter out heavy contract traders. This "marathon" model favors long-term participants—providing stable cash flow as a foundation and an additional chance to speculate on token options, resembling early tech company compensation structures.

Second is the prediction market track. This area has clear logic: planning to test the waters with arbitrage strategies by the end of the year, then expanding product offerings and capital scale next year. It is similar to the ecosystem position of derivatives: one end is a zero-cost traffic entry point, and the other can serve as an asset portfolio layer, connecting other strategies. Currently, automation is being gradually developed by platforms like Opinion Labs, which have good data quality, to refine models step by step.

The third perspective is the embodied intelligence in the crypto context. The humanoid robot’s bipedal design is fundamentally to adapt to the existing physical environment of humans rather than to reinvent a new system. The data annotation business in the Web2 era is already a mature profit model; when moved into the crypto ecosystem, it is likely to evolve into a combination of "large-scale financing + hardware packaging + points incentives + eventual token issuance." The social value of such projects may be questionable, but their narrative appeal and traffic magnetism are undeniable.