Insider Info From a Crypto Expo in Tel Aviv

Crypto’s Next Bull Market Has Already Begun… 

Upbeat, deep-house trance music drifts from the speakers in a darkened room here at the Tel Aviv Expo on a temperate day in Israel. Around me… a sea of geeks, noses buried in laptops. 

This is a so-called “hacker house”—an event that brings together software developers, business-development professionals, and founders of crypto projects from all over the world. This one in particular is focused on the Solana blockchain, the backbone of the Solana cryptocurrency network. (Blockchain is the unhackable digital ledger technology behind bitcoin and all other cryptos.) 

I popped down to Israel from Prague last weekend to attend this four-day hacker house, not because I’m a developer, a biz-dev pro, or a crypto founder. I’m here because I wanted to take the pulse of the crypto industry by way of one of its most significant blockchains.  

And what I’ve heard over the last three days—during the expo and in the numerous sidebar conversations I’ve had with founders and team members—tells me that those with the foresight to lay away some crypto now will gather up meaningful wealth in a new bull market that has already begun under the surface of this bear market. 

The mood here is palpably bullish, summed up by a founder who told the crowd, “I’m never more excited to build than during a bear market.” The reason: Bear markets always yield to bull markets. And when the next bull market arrives, the projects building today—and investors investing today—are going see big returns on their effort. 

It’s no different than in the real world. 

I’ve noted this before, but Microsoft, Ford, Netflix, and scores of other household names all got their start in bear markets or bad economies. And any number of academic studies have pointed out through the years that the investors who earn the biggest returns are those who buck the mood of the moment and put their cash to work when the rest of Wall Street is wringing its hands with worry. 

This crypto winter—encompassing the last year or so of death and destruction in the crypto market—has certainly been a bummer. 

But I’ve not once been worried about my crypto wealth. In fact, I’ve been buying and buying and buying throughout this entire bear market… to such a degree that if bitcoin dashes past $100,000, and if particular other cryptos explode higher in the bull market to come, my crypto wealth will afford an apartment in Portugal, and leave me with excess cash to stash away for retirement. 

Yes, that’s an “if,” for sure. 

“If” crypto returns to previous highs.  

But personally, I’m confident that’s already written in the stars because of what I’ve been hearing at the Tel Aviv Hacker House. 

The way the blockchain is expanding beyond simply trading cryptocurrencies or digital art tells me that we are on the cusp of explosive mass adoption. 

One project here gives investors a way to invest in individual real estate markets such as New York, Denver, Miami Beach, and others. Based on per-square-foot pricing tied to real-time real estate transactions, investors can bet on whether specific housing markets will rise or fall in value. 

This gives people an entirely new way to invest in real estate, and they can do so with investments of less than a dollar, or more than a million dollars—not something easily accomplished on Wall Street right now. That’s already attracting institutional investors and will clearly bring in retail investors in time. 

There’s a company tying real-world consumer purchases like shoes, high-end watches, and even kids’ toys to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the blockchain.  

NFTs are one-off, one-of-a-kind crypto tokens. They started a few years ago simply as digital pictures of cartoon monkeys and penguins and punks.  

Today, their use has expanded to act as digital representations of physical items like artwork or real estate, meaning they can certify ownership and authenticity of the physical item or digital art and assets. Some even act just like shares of stock in a company generating the equivalent of dividends. 

Now there’s talk of using this technology to buy, sell, and trade barrels of whiskey and rum as NFTs on the blockchain. There’s talk of authenticating luxury goods like pricey bottles of wine and Louis Vuitton handbags with NFTs. There’s talk of using NFTs to grant anonymity when paying for purchases online, meaning the world of “cookies” that track us all over the internet is a dead man walking. 

What I’m saying is that we’re approaching a tipping point in which crypto in various forms, as well as the blockchain itself, is going to be a standard part of our daily lives. In many ways, it will be unseen… just part of the infrastructure of living. 

You won’t have to know about crypto or NFTs to interact with them. You won’t have to create crypto wallets on your own, or even interact with them. Projects will create those wallets in the background for you and allow you to manage them if you want to, or totally ignore them if you want to. 

The developers and founders here are crystal clear in their vision that today’s bear market is a non-entity. That the future is predetermined at this point, and it orbits the blockchain. 

For me, the way to benefit from that future is to own exposure to it. And, granted, I own deeper exposure than most across cryptocurrencies and NFTs. 

But the simplest way to profit is to just own major cryptos such as bitcoin and Ethereum. That duo will do exceptionally well in the bull market that’s already awake and waiting for its moment to run again.