Having been involved in the crypto space for three years, I have witnessed too many instances of madness and collapses. Some people have multiplied their holdings with just one message, while others chase the highs and end up losing everything. I myself have paid quite a few tuition fees—buying popular trash coins on hype, engaging in short-term contracts that eventually got liquidated, and after all the tossing around, I didn’t make much profit. Instead, I exhausted my energy in the process.

The turning point came in the second half of last year. I decided to calm down and start seriously researching projects with real business implementations. That’s when I truly understood what investment logic is. Protocols that don’t rely on hype but are rooted in their ecosystems actually hold the most solid opportunities.

My encounter with Ocean Protocol was purely by chance. Initially, I was attracted by its layout in privacy transactions and decentralized storage, but the deeper I delved, the more I realized how significant the use case for WAL, its native token, really is. This is completely different from coins that are purely speculative concepts. Performing private transactions on the platform requires WAL, massive file storage incurs WAL transaction fees, and if project teams want to map real assets like real estate or commodities onto the chain, they need to stake a certain amount of WAL as a credit guarantee. It’s because of these genuine needs—"transaction + storage + staking"—that WAL’s consumption remains stable. This is fundamentally different from tokens that are pumped by funds without practical use cases.

What makes me even more optimistic is WAL’s governance weight. Token holders can directly participate in ecosystem decisions—from adjusting fee rates to voting on which types of assets to add to the platform. In Q4 last year, the community voted via WAL to include art assets in the trading scope. Now, the platform supports six categories of assets. This "token as governance" mechanism makes me feel that I am not just investing but participating in a truly user-driven ecosystem evolution.