Confidence in crypto is sky-high as we enter 2024, with and other cryptocurrencies having made impressive gains towards the tail end of last year. Given the bullish state of the market, many investors believe crypto is in for a wild and exciting ride, driven by several different trends that promise to catalyze more widespread adoption and acceptance.
Whether or not the crypto winter has truly thawed remains to be seen, but by understanding the key trends that underpin this renewed confidence, investors can decide for themselves more easily if 2024 is going to go down as one of crypto’s most memorable years or not.
So let’s dive right in and look at the top five crypto trends to watch in 2024…
Real World Asset Tokenization
The tokenization of real-world assets carries huge potential, bringing tangible, physical assets such as real estate, precious metals and fine art on-chain, where they can be traded far more easily.
A growing number of traditional financial institutions are looking at the possibilities tokenization will enable, such as secure and decentralized trading, fractionalized ownership and greater transparency.
In the case of illiquid assets such as real estate and blue-chip art, tokenization paves the way for fractional ownership, where a single asset such as a hotel or million-dollar painting can be represented as thousands of tokens on a blockchain. By selling these individual tokens, these assets suddenly become more accessible to investors, lowering the barrier to entry.
The transparent nature of blockchain transactions will also enable investors to check and verify the status of everything from real estate and fine art pieces to bottles of wine and individual diamonds. At the same time, transactions are made much easier on the blockchain, as they cut out the middleman. Tokens can be bought and sold in seconds without any intermediaries or paperwork to be filled out and notarized, making these markets much more liquid.
2024 is expected to be a big year for tokenization as players such as Blocksquare have made significant progress, devising mechanisms that provide full legal protection to token holders without any changes to existing regulations. With Blocksquare, each tokenized property is owned by a corporate resolution that mandates title holders to pledge the real estate in question as collateral, taking out a loan in Blocksquare Property Tokens. Through these mechanisms, the title holder has no legal way to transact the real estate without first reimbursing token holders.
Blocksquare has already demonstrated how these mechanisms work through the purchase and tokenization of a single parking space in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, authenticating the transaction through that country’s Land Registry. It’s an encouraging development that may well give investors the confidence to take tokenization more seriously, and 2024 could indeed be the year that it finally starts to go mainstream.
Data Availability Layers
Blockhain’s future is expected to be a modular one, with multiple networks likely to handle different aspects of transactions, such as settlement, consensus and execution. It means a single blockchain will only handle one specific operation, enabling networks to scale more easily.
For this to happen, modular blockchains need a data availability layer that’s used to store and verify transaction data where it can be accessed as the different components need it. Storing this data on-chain will lead to network congestion, hence the need for an off-chain system.
With a data availability layer, blockchains can offload data storage and ensure that transaction data is available when it’s needed, for instance, if someone needs to verify a transaction took place. The narrative around data availability has grown measurably over the last year, thanks to its inclusion in Ethereum’s rollup-based scaling roadmap. With the emergence of more specialized rollups, the demand for data availability layers is only going to increase.
This will be accelerated by the emergence of data availability-focused blockchains, such as Celestia, which launched its mainnet in October. Other data availability layers worth keeping an eye out for include NEAR DA, EigenDA and Avail.
Liquid Staking
Perhaps the hottest narrative in DeFi right now, liquid staking protocols provide a way for investors to obtain additional yield on their crypto investments.
It refers to the use of liquid staking tokens, which are provided to investors when they stake a traditional digital asset such as ETH on a protocol like Lido or Rocket Pool. For instance, if someone stakes ETH of Lido, they’ll be given a proportional number of stETH (staked ETH) as a kind of receipt. These stETH tokens can then be taken to specialized liquid staking protocols and staked again, to earn additional yield beyond what is already being earned with the original ETH.
In many ways, liquid staking is similar to yield farming, but it vastly simplifies the process for DeFi users, making it easier for everyone to try.
To understand restaking, we can look at the example of Veno, the leading liquid staking protocol on the Cronos blockchain. Cronos is a proof-of-stake blockchain that requires validators to lock their CRO tokens in smart contracts to help verify transactions, earning rewards for doing so. When users instead stake their CRO on Veno’s protocol, they are given LCRO tokens that allow holders to accrue additional yield, in addition to the rewards earned by their staked CRO. Through mechanisms such as Veno’s Reservoir or Garden, users can stake their LCRO to gain additional yield in the shape of Veno’s VNO token, while simultaneously pocketing the original CRO rewards.
Investors love yield, and they have every reason to maximize their earnings potential so we’re expecting big things of liquid staking in 2024.
SocialFi
Blockchain has hundreds of potential applications, and one of the most interesting is to use it as the foundation of more inclusive social networks. The term SocialFi is shorthand for the convergence of social media and finance, and it’s a trend that has really caught on with the emergence of protocols such as Friend.tech.
Friend.tech was able to generate more than $25 million in protocol fees between its launch in July and the end of November. Although it isn’t growing at quite the same rate now, it remains in beta ahead of its full launch later this year, when the doors will open to anyone who wants to participate.
SocialFi is the answer to the perceived unfairness of traditional social media networks, which make use of user-generated content to drive traffic but pocket all of the advertising revenues for themselves. SocialFi networks are built on crypto-native ecosystems and provide a way for content creators to extract the full value out of their content, earning money in the form of tips, or by minting their content as NFTs, for example. In the case of Friend.tech, it is somewhat different in that it doesn’t have its own social network, but rather, provides a way for X users to tokenize their profiles. Users can acquire a “share” of their favorite X users, which entitles them to a portion of the revenue they generate.
Other promising SocialFi protocols include Lens Protocol, the Twitch clone Theta, Stars Arena and Friendzone. While these networks are still much smaller than the likes of Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube, they are rapidly gaining traction as more users come to realize the potential they offer to creators, and it’s likely they will play an increasing role in our social interactions in the years to come.
Bitcoin
Interest in the world’s original and most valuable cryptocurrency is heating up as we head into 2024, and there are a number of reasons why that is the case. has seen significant changes on the technical side with the emergence of Ordinals, a new protocol that makes use of “inscriptions” to allow the creation of Bitcoin NFTs and altcoins on the same network. It was a key development in the first half of 2023 that caused interest in Bitcoin to stir.
There have also been positive developments about traditional finance, with the U.S. courts ruling in favor of Grayscale over its dispute with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commision. Greyscale is advocating for the transformation of its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into a true, Bitcoin spot ETF.
The ruling has prompted dozens of other traditional financial institutions, such as BlackRock, Fidelity and Invesco, to apply for their own Bitcoin spot ETFs, and it’s looking increasingly likely that these applications will be approved sometime this year. All told, there are 13 Bitcoin spot ETFs reportedly under consideration by the SEC.
The optimism over the apparently imminent approval of these Bitcoin spot ETFs is due to the way these investment vehicles will open the door to Bitcoin investing for hundreds of institutional investors who have previously always avoided crypto due to its lack of regulation. With their debut, it’s expected that millions of dollars in value will flood into the Bitcoin ecosystem, increasing demand for the asset and pushing its price upwards.
Another development that promises to add to Bitcoin’s momentum is the so-called “halvening” that will see the value of the block rewards paid out to Bitcoin miners halved by 50%. It’s an event that occurs approximately every four years, and on each prior occasion it has been followed by a big jump in the value of Bitcoin. That’s because Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million units, which means there can only ever be 21 million Bitcoin in the world. The halving of the mining reward rate introduces further scarcity to Bitcoin’s ecosystem. For instance, when Bitcoin launched in 2009, miners earned 50 BTC per block, but after a number of halvings in 2012, 2016 and 2020, the reward is now just 6.25 BTC per block, and will be reduced further to just 3.125 BTC in April.
Spurred on by these positive developments, Bitcoin has outperformed most other digital assets over the last year, with its market capitalization rising by more than 162% at the end of December, compared to a year earlier. As Bitcoin gains more utility, institutional investors enter the picture, and mining rewards are reduced, it all adds up to yet more gains for Bitcoin in 2024, and some believe it could even reach a new all-time high.
Final Thoughts
The second half of 2023 led to a shift in sentiment within the crypto industry, following more than two years of bear market blues. With the growing buzz around crypto as we enter 2024, it’s key for investors to stay ahead of the most interesting trends, which can provide strong hints about where the industry is headed.
Still, investors must remember that crypto has always been unpredictable at best, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that a bull market really is imminent. That said, there are plenty of reasons to believe that crypto is ready to embark on the next stage of its journey towards mainstream adoption, and that alone is a good enough reason to start paying attention.
