Author: Donovan Choy, Blockworks; Compiled by Bai Shui, Jinse Finance
Pendle
Pendle's existence is due to the desire for speculation in cryptocurrencies.
In Pendle's brief history, the team has repeatedly reiterated its yield trading products, using stablecoins and the notorious "DeFi 2.0" (Olympus DAO) narratives of the 2021 bull market, to liquidity-staked tokens, real-world assets on Arbitrum, and liquidity re-staking during 2021.
It wasn't until early 2024 that Pendle's token saw a breakout, achieving remarkable success, with its TVL soaring from millions to billions of dollars. Pendle's Principle Tokens (PT) and Yield Token (YT) yield mechanisms remain indispensable tools for anyone looking to execute any form of leverage play or fixed income.
Fluid
Fluid is a perfect example of innovation. Fluid has borrowed many successful primitives from DeFi, such as Uniswap v3's concentrated liquidity and Aave's utilization curves, and then redesigned the traditional AMM liquidity configuration from scratch.
With its "smart debt" and "smart collateral" mechanisms, Fluid has achieved DEX deep liquidity pools worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with a technical TVL of $0. This capital efficiency comes from the clever combination of user debt from lending protocols and AMM liquidity pools.
Ethena
Stablecoins are one of the most competitive areas. This has allowed USDe to reach a market cap of $6 billion in a year, which is impressive.
Previous stablecoins were built along the spectrum of centralization (USDT) and scalability (DAI). In contrast, Ethena has struck a series of impressive business development deals with CEXs and designed USDe, a scalable stablecoin that leverages CEX-DEX funding rate arbitrage and provides yield to users.
GEODNET
To enable GPS technology to achieve centimeter-level accuracy, traditional companies have deployed thousands of real-time kinematic (RTK) networks globally, such as base stations and mobile stations.
GEODNET leverages cryptocurrency token incentive mechanisms to scale the deployment of the RTK network. According to November data, GEODNET has deployed at least 10,000 sites across 140 countries, surpassing the total of 5,000 sites from traditional providers Trimble and Hexagon.
Notably, GEODNET has a significant cost advantage. Deploying a base station with GEODNET costs around $700, 97% cheaper than the traditional $25,000. If this is not innovation, I don't know what is.
Virtuals
Virtuals is the prime "picks and shovels" play in the recent AI agent hype.
It is an AI agent platform where anyone can generate tokenized AI agents. Similar to Pump.fun, once a $420,000 market cap threshold is met, the agent's native token is bonded to a DEX liquidity pool (Uniswap v2).
Built on Base, Virtuals has spawned at least 12,000 AI agents since its inception, including the popular anime ship Luna, which runs 24/7 and can be tipped in the agent's own token.
Virtuals' innovation comes from the combination of many different components, including LLM models, crypto wallets, innovative value-accruing token economics, NFTs, and IPFS for data storage.
