Are there new stories in the public chain narrative? Who will be the protagonist in the next cycle?

My view is: each generation of public chains revolves around the concept of "value."

The earliest ones like Bitcoin and Dogecoin addressed the problem of going from nothing to something—how to generate value on the blockchain, relying on on-chain consensus and the accumulation of attention. This was the first wave.

Later, Ethereum, SOL, and BNB emerged, and the game changed to who can transfer value faster and more stably. During those years, the focus was on TPS, security, and cost—who had better performance metrics could "siphon" value. This was the second wave.

Now? The track has changed. The third-generation public chains are no longer about speed but about whether they can truly store value. Most assets on the first two generations of chains are driven by consensus and attention, making them easy to symbolically process. But real-world assets are different—complex rules, numerous details, not something that can be simply fitted into a standard protocol. Look at those DePIN projects, most of which haven't survived, and that illustrates this point.

A few projects have made breakthroughs in this direction. One is an L1 public chain targeting AI assets; currently, market makers are experiencing changes, and it remains to be seen whether new funding will come in. Another is a RWA public chain supported by a major exchange, exploring on-chain real-world assets. There’s also a rising intellectual property public chain aiming to establish a new asset rights confirmation system in the IP field.

In the next market cycle, capital attention in the public chain sector will gradually shift toward store-of-value public chains—that's the main trend.