Variant Fund Investment Partner: The Crypto Market May Be Entering the Early Stage of a New Bull Market

BlockBeats news, October 2 — Variant Fund investment partner Alana Levin posted that as the market's previous question of "when will the bottom be reached" is gradually being answered, current market attention has shifted to whether a bull market has truly begun and which projects will benefit from it. She believes that if the market is indeed in the early stages of a new crypto bull market, new capital may mainly flow to two types of projects: protocols that inherently have monetary properties, such as store-of-value assets, and protocols that can generate revenue. For the former, BTC remains the primary benchmark for digital store-of-value assets; for the latter, investors will focus more on revenue quality, sustainability, profit margins, and exposure to traditional financial activities.

Levin believes that projects able to benefit from the growth of RWA and stablecoins, with the potential to attract institutional users, and that have weathered previous bear markets, may command higher revenue and earnings valuation multiples. She points out that as the crypto market gradually matures, the way investors evaluate protocol revenue may become increasingly similar to traditional capital markets, including examining whether revenue sources are sustainable and whether the business can remain resilient during market pullbacks. She also distinguishes such projects from protocols that rely purely on native crypto activity for revenue.

Levin also lists projects that draw analogies between on-chain projects and non-crypto businesses as a third category of assets, arguing that many of them may become narrative-driven trades rather than long-term investment targets. She notes that the related areas currently drawing market attention mainly include routing, inference, computing power, data collection, and interaction interfaces in AI infrastructure, but she remains skeptical about whether these businesses truly need blockchain. At the same time, some projects have value distribution issues between tokens and equity, meaning that corporate profitability does not necessarily mean the token can capture value in tandem. She believes that if such projects significantly outperform in the later stages of the market, it may instead become a signal of a marked increase in market risk appetite. Overall, she believes the crypto market is moving toward maturity, and some assets with continuously improving fundamentals may, even if they experience drawdowns in the future, more likely see traditional-market-style corrections of 10% to 30%, rather than the deep drawdowns of more than 90% seen in previous cycles.