I’ve been fascinated with bubbles for as long as I can remember. As a child, I didn’t have the language for it, but I now understand I was watching ideas form. In hindsight, those delicate spheres reminded me of neurons, of somas pulsing with possibility. I loved seeing them grow, rise, and inevitably, pop.

Later, I lived through the dot-com crash and the housing collapse, two macroeconomic bubbles that reshaped not just markets, but belief systems. Now, something subtler is emerging: a new wave of micro-bubbles, flickering and fleeting, yet just as telling. Think prediction markets. Meme coins. Social tokens. Fleeting assets of attention that rise fast, shimmer, then vanish.

What gives these bubbles their power isn’t infrastructure, it’s behavior.

Unlike traditional macro bubbles built on slow accumulation, research, and capital, micro-bubbles are animated by behavioral transits, shifts in attention, urgency, and mood. They are not engineered. They are felt. They surge through communities like emotional electricity. They are the “likes and follows” of a pre-onchain world.

Meanwhile, macro bubbles are quietly forming elsewhere, within platforms and agents, the systems and intelligences building the long game.

The deeper inquiry, then, isn’t “what’s valuable?” but who is shaping the narrative? In a post-offchain era of overstimulation and digital fatigue, many are beginning to feel a quiet numbness. A societal response is building. Not loud. But deep. Mental health is becoming the economic indicator we haven’t learned how to measure.

And yet, there’s something anchoring us beneath the noise: stablecoins. Quietly, they’re emerging as the ballast of a new economy. But beyond price stability, we need something more profound: liquidity reversion, a return to meaning, utility, and values that endure beyond the moment.

The pop, when it comes, won’t be a spectacle. It will be a silence.

Not panic. Not collapse. But a drying out. A moment when micro bubbles evaporate. Only then, in that quiet correction, can the macro truth of a new industry begin to surface.

Until then, I’ll be watching the bubbles.

And maybe, so will you.

Caro 🫧✨