During the time I've been watching the crypto-sphere and especially cryptocurrencies and crypto-speculations we've already had a number of good hypes -- The Great Crypto Hype of 2017, ICO and Shitcoins Hype, DeFi Hype, the tiny NFT Hype, and now the Institutional Bitcoin Hype. And I often try to imagine what will be the next hype (in order to profit from it, of course). I want to identify the place or sphere where all the money will flow into next.

Well, I must agree that with my school math background and amateur coding skills I may be simply too dumb for serious research in the IT-sphere. However, I've seen many amateurish dyors in the internets, so my dyor is hardly worse than average.

First, I ruled out the blockchain-based solutions which are not related to cryptocurrencies. For example, it's possible to have a blockchain-based BoL tracking system, but to profit from it you'll probably need to invest real fiat bucks into an IT company that will create such a platform widely accepted by shipping agencies. In other words, such solutions (no matter how successful they are) have no "cryptocurrency" shit to speculate with.

Then I thought about some vogue stuff like "blockchain-based AI" or "self-sovereign identities". There's already quite a lot of such projects, and most of them share the same problem. It's hard to tell what exactly a real-life issue these projects aim to solve, if the proposed clients are really so concerned about the problem as to use the proposed solutions, where the projects' profits will come from, and why.

Let's take AI, for example. Do people really need a "blockchain-based" Siri and Ok-Google? Or it's supposed to be a kind of Deep Thought to answer the ultimate question to life, the Universe, and everything? Well, could you show it to me, and who's going to pay it for the answer? Digital identities, Web3.0... Pages of well-rounded blah-blah-blah, a playground for mathematicians and coders, at best. I don't mean these projects are bad, or useless, or don't deserve investments. I mean I don't see why the big speculative money would want to flow into them.

Recently I thought about gold. Investing in gold has one big problem -- gold doesn't pay interest. Basically, you buy gold only in the hope of selling it later to some dumbass at a higher price. Inflation is on your side -- but the storage costs are not (unless you "invest" into "gold investment accounts" or similar "mirrored" shit with no atom of gold in it). The best way to deal with it is to get a loan against your gold and try to profit from it. Kinda yield farming, yeah.

"Digital gold" has the same problem. What if Greyscale, Microstrategy and Co. buy all available BTC? Will they just seat on that shitpile waiting for the next dumbass buyer, receiving no interest and paying for "custodial services"?

In theory, it's possible to get a "traditional" loan against BTC collateral. Besides, it's the most secure way to take a loan against crypto. But in reality, I can hardly imagine today any bank to do it. A bank simply may not (is not permitted to) give loans against any shit, no matter what Mr. Musk thinks of this shit on Twitter.

Binance, Celsius, BlockFi et al do offer interest-bearing BTC accounts, but this implies transferring your Precious from your custodian to some other guy. Besides, even if you secure your BTC with some legal paperwork, Celsius or BlockFi may not agree to pay interest on 100K BTC deposits -- e.g. they simply can't lend so much BTC out. "Wrapped Bitcoins" ("Bitcoin DeFi on Ethereum", if you wish) also requires transferring your BTC out of your hands, besides it's complicated, it bears all risks of "Ethereum DeFi", and so on.

Yes, I mean we (or rather, "they") need Bitcoin DeFi on Bitcoin, nearly the same as on ETH -- only better. Trustless public and private lending, borrowing, yield farming, you name it -- with all lessons learned from the ETH-based DeFi, and without the need to transfer BTC "on Ethereum" or anywhere.

There have been already numerous attempts to bring DeFi to Bitcoin. It was a tricky thing, and until recently the majority of crypto-enthusiasts were quite happy with ETH-based DeFi anyway. Now if The Bitcoin Hype continues, soon there will be shitloads of idling Bitcoins to put at work, and they will be concentrated in the hands of those who're interested in money-making IT innovations and are able to stimulate them financially.

At the moment I don't want to name particular BTC DeFi-related projects because the above dyor overall is more like tossing a crystal ball, than a professional research. But such projects do exist, maybe I will make an article about them later. In any case, the Bitcoin DeFi idea doesn't look worse than a blockchain-based Ok-Google.

Photo by Maurício Mascaro from Pexels