Original title: Crypto’s greatest app innovations in 2024

Original author: Donovan Choy

Original source: https://blockworks.co/

Translation: Daisy, Mars Finance

Pendle

Pendle's existence stems from the demand for speculation in the crypto space.

Throughout Pendle's brief development history, its team has continuously optimized yield trading products, from stablecoins and the notorious 'DeFi 2.0' (Olympus DAO) during the 2021 bull market to liquid staking tokens, real-world assets on Arbitrum, and liquid restaking during the bear market.

It wasn't until early 2024, when the points metaverse exploded, that Pendle truly welcomed its moment in the spotlight, with its total value locked (TVL) skyrocketing from millions to billions of dollars. Pendle's principal token (PT) and yield token (YT) yield mechanisms have become indispensable tools for any user looking to engage in leveraged points or fixed-income farming.

Fluid

Fluid is the perfect example of innovation. It integrates many successful primitives in DeFi, such as concentrated liquidity from Uniswap v3 and the utilization curve from Aave, and then redesigns the liquidity provision method of traditional automated market makers (AMMs) from the ground up.

Through its 'smart debt' and 'smart collateral' mechanisms, Fluid supports deep multi-million dollar DEX liquidity pools, while technically, these pools have a TVL of zero. This capital efficiency is achieved through the clever combination of user-generated debt from lending protocols and AMM liquidity pools.

Ethena

Stablecoins are one of the most competitive areas, making USDe's achievement of a $6 billion market cap within a year particularly impressive.

Previous stablecoins often sought a balance between centralization (USDT) and scalability (DAI), whereas Ethena launched USDe through a series of business collaborations with centralized exchanges (CEX). This stablecoin utilizes funding rate arbitrage from CEX and DEX perpetual contracts to generate returns for users and achieve scalability.

GEODNET

To achieve centimeter-level accuracy with GPS technology, traditional companies need to deploy thousands of real-time kinematic (RTK) networks globally, such as base stations and mobile receivers.

GEODNET utilizes a crypto token incentive mechanism to expand the deployment scale of the RTK network. As of November data, GEODNET has deployed at least 10,000 base stations in 140 countries, far exceeding the total of 5,000 base stations from traditional providers Trimble and Hexagon.

It is noteworthy that GEODNET's deployment cost advantage is significant. Deploying a base station through GEODNET costs about $700, which is 97% cheaper than the traditional cost of $25,000. If this isn’t innovation, what is?

More information can be found in Blockworks Research's free report.

Virtuals

Virtuals is the standout 'tool-oriented' project in the recent AI agent craze.

It is an AI agent factory that allows anyone to create a tokenized AI agent. Similar to pump.fun, once the agent reaches a market cap standard of $420,000, its native token will be bound to the DEX liquidity pool (Uniswap v2).

Built on Base, Virtuals has generated at least 12,000 AI agents since its inception, including the popular anime robot Luna. Luna operates around the clock and supports tipping through its native token.

The innovation of Virtuals combines several key elements, including large language models (LLMs), crypto wallets, innovative value accumulation token economics, NFTs, and IPFS data storage.