I’ve seen hundreds of pitches as an investor, and thousands if you include my time as a writer. Naturally, with such large datasets, trends start to become clear. Two such trends have emerged in the past several months. And they’re both related and unrelated.

They’re related in that they’re both new platforms on which massive companies may be built. And this seems a bit odd since we’ve gone quite a long time without a true new platform to take the baton from mobile.

They’re unrelated in that they’re quite different. One is The Blockchain. The other is Virtual Reality.

Both should be fairly obvious to anyone who follows tech news. No less than Mark Zuckerberg has declared VR as the next platform, following Facebook’s $2 billion purchase of Oculus. But the key is that developers are buying in — big time.

I feel like every other pitch I see these days is directly or indirectly related to one of these two spaces. A year ago, this was not the case. It was still mainly social and mobile applications that had the mindshare amongst developers.

But both of those spaces are long since saturated. That’s not to say there can’t be great startups build in those spaces anymore — there undoubtedly will be. But the barrier to entry is so much higher because those platforms are now more mature. There is no longer any sort of first-mover advantage. The only real path to success left is to be leaps and bounds better than what everyone else is doing in those spaces.

(A caveat being that new mobile devices and APIs, such as those just unveiled by Apple in iOS 8, have the potential to unlock new markets.)

In both VR and The Blockchain, it’s still the early, Wild West days. But both sectors now seem to have their catalysts to move them from simply promising technologies and into real platforms. VR has the Oculus. The Blockchain has Bitcoin.