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In today’s newsletter:
🔎The biggest crypto winners of 2024
📊On-chain alpha
😂Crypto meme of the week
🗞️The latest DeFi news
🔎The biggest crypto winners of 2024
2024 is coming to an end.
So I thought that now would be a great time to take a look back at some of the biggest crypto success stories from the past 12 months.
Without a doubt, this year has been extremely interesting for crypto.
Let’s dive in👇
AI Agents
AI has been the #1 crypto narrative by X minshare in 2024.
One subcategory within this sector that has exploded in popularity recently is AI agents, which has seen tremendous growth and for a good reason.
AI agents are AI-powered systems designed to perform specific tasks and work towards certain goals without human intervention.
They have the potential to significantly improve our lives by automating certain activities as they can function as personal assistants.
Virtuals Protocol is the go-to platform for launching AI agents.
Over 11,000 tokens/agents have been launched using Virtuals in the past months. What’s insane is that its token $VIRTUAL did a 200x in 2024 alone.
aixbt, which is essentially an AI-powered KOL that shares up-to-date crypto insights on X, is the most popular project from its ecosystem.
If you want to take a closer look at this sector, Coingecko created a category named 'AI Agents' where you can see all the major projects. (click here)
Hyperliquid
We can’t talk about crypto success stories without mentioning Hyperliquid.
Hyperliquid, a perpetual DEX, made the impossible a reality:
A project with no VC funding, a big airdrop allocation, and no tier-1 CEX listings managed to conduct one of the most successful token launches.
In less than 3 weeks since its token HYPE went live, it did a 12x and reached a whopping $27 billion fully diluted valuation.
On top of that, what’s really interesting is that now some very big projects are starting to join the Hyperliquid ecosystem.
Solv, a popular BTCfi project, has recently announced that its token SOLV will be launched on Hyperliquid.
For context, Solv currently has over $3 billion in TVL.
Solv is building a Decentralized Bitcoin Reserve that offers lots of attractive yield opportunities for the holders of its BTC liquid staking token.
Right now, most projects with a token listed on the Hyperliquid spot exchange are memecoin projects, but Solv is actually a dApp that has found product-market fit.
I anticipate many other big projects to release their tokens on Hyperliquid as well.
Solana Ecosystem
Solana has seen tremendous growth in 2024.
And for a good reason.
There are hundreds of L1 blockchains right now, but I believe there are two main things that make Solana stand out:
the network is able to consistently process thousands of transactions per second (TPS) with minimal transaction fees
Solana has a very strong community on social media
While lots of blockchains claim to offer a high transaction throughput, very few are actually able to process a large number of TPS with low tx fees.
I believe that Solana proved it’s here to stay. And the fact that the network is now regularly surpassing Ethereum in DEX volume shows that it’s thriving.
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Real-World Assets (RWA)
The world’s largest institutions are starting to show interest in developing RWA products.
Most of you probably remember that BlackRock, the largest asset manager, released a tokenization fund called BUIDL on Ethereum earlier this year.
And I expect many other financial institutions to make a similar move.
Hence it should be no surprise that RWA tokens like $ONDO, $CHEX, $OM, and $CPOOL have performed extremely well lately.
Since the beginning of this year, the total RWA value almost doubled, and I think that the growth of this sector will be exponential going forward.
On-chain Prediction Markets
Polymarket, a native crypto app, is now the largest prediction market in the world.
It got massive attention this year from non-crypto people as a lot of them have been checking it regularly to see the odds for the US presidential election.
In November alone, Polymarket visits hit a record high of 40M, almost 10 times more than Uniswap!
Interestingly, CNN also featured it a couple of times.
My hope is that the Polymarket team will finally decide to release their token in 2025.
With that being said, those were the main fast-growing sectors and ecosystems in the past year that I wanted to cover today.
Besides those, a few other honorable mentions are:
Memecoins - $PEPE alone did a 16x this year
Base - which has been the fastest-growing Ethereum L2 in 2024
Off The Grid - first web3 game to become the most downloaded game on Epic Games (even though only for a short period of time)
Ethena - the protocol behind USDe, the stablecoin that managed to go from $86M in TVL to over $6 billion in 12 months
In the coming weeks, I’ll also cover my top crypto-related predictions for the next year.
So if you haven’t already subscribed, I highly recommend doing so👇
On-chain Alpha🔎
Solana was the #1 ecosystem for new devs in 2024
This marks the first time that another ecosystem has surpassed Ethereum in new developers since 2016.
While Solana is known by many ppl only for its memecoins ecosystem, this data shows that lots of developers are starting to build real dApps on Solana.
In the past year, Solana was also the fastest-growing ecosystem by TVL outside of Ethereum.
Crypto Meme😂
The latest developments in DeFi
Sonic has officially released Sonic L1 mainnet
Ethena launched USDtb, a stablecoin product backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund
Frax Finance started developing a tech stack for on-chain AI agents
Zero1 Labs partnered with Nvidia’s Ignition AI Accelerator and announced Terminal - an intuitive interface for creating AI agents
Merchant Moe announced Moe’s Rager - a 1M $MNT rewards program for MOE stakers. The bribe incentives will be distributed to MOE stakers over the next 54 days
Chintai announced that RealNOI will release a $124M tokenized real estate cash flow platform on Chintai. RealNOI plans to tokenize billions of dollars in assets over time
Avalanche rolled out its largest upgrade ever, reducing the cost to deploy an L1 using Avalanche tech by 99.9%
Mantle announced an upgrade that will bring a 168x improvement in transaction finality and Season 2 of its Scouts Program. 40 industry leaders will nominate projects to receive $MNT token grants
Fluid launched its token $FLUID and proposed launching Fluid DEX on Arbitrum
Kelp DAO introduced its token $KERNEL and announced that 20% of the total KERNEL supply is allocated to airdrops
pSTAKE Finance launched $PSTAKE Staking Season 2 on Base. The protocol also crossed $35M in BTC deposits on Babylon
Stacks released sBTC, its own BTC-backed DeFi token
Texas filed a bill to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
Ether.fi proposed to buy back $ETHFI tokens with the protocol revenue
That’s all for this week!
Until next time,
The DeFi Investor
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