Author: Anil Lulla, CEO of Delphi Digital; Translator: Gold Finance Xiaozou
People like to say that cryptocurrency lacks PMF (product-market fit), but from my perspective, saying so indicates they are a bunch of cynics who haven't taken the time to explore the various applications developers around the world are constantly launching.
I want to highlight some of my favorite crypto applications that I have used in 2024, hoping to inspire some of you to give these a try. These teams are working hard to create useful products, and we can at least take the time to test their efforts.
Before we dive deeper, I want to make some disclaimers and disclosures. I have personally interacted with these products and/or their tokens in various ways. I use * to indicate any projects I have interacted with in any capacity. None of this constitutes financial advice—just my thoughts on the projects I liked this year. The order in which the projects appear in this article does not represent importance.
1. HyperLiquid
To stand out, HyperliquidX has performed exceptionally well. You may have read thousands of tweets about it in the past month, so I will briefly share my thoughts. Every person who regularly uses the product has fallen in love with it without exception. In fact, I haven't heard many complaints so far—we still dare not say that about many crypto applications.
I try not to use leverage too often anymore, so I’m not the target user for HyperLiquid. In fact, I first used this app to buy HYPE* tokens when it was released. Soon, I saw the reasons why its fans have been crazy about it all year. Not only is the UI/UX quite CEX (centralized exchange) styled (yes, I know it only has four validators), but it’s even more heartening to see how quickly the team responds to user criticism, concerns, and feedback in their Discord.
Since its establishment in 2023, HyperLiquid has built a fervent community of over 200,000 users, with a total trading volume approaching $450 billion. The platform currently has over $2.5 billion in open positions. It is very successful, currently capturing over 60% of all USDC on Arbitrum.
Since HYPE launched, the interest in it has not only been due to its clean UI/UX as a trading platform. Although it is still in its early stages, it has already formed an impressive ecosystem. The project not only promises an exciting future but has already achieved an ambitious vision.
2. Polymarket
Since entering the crypto space in 2017, prediction markets have been a use case that excites me, and I thought this would be the first to truly take off, like early projects such as Augur. Obviously, that hasn't been the case. Nearly seven years later, thanks to Polymarket, prediction markets are officially becoming mainstream in 2024. It played a perfect role on the night of the U.S. presidential election, announcing what I believe to be the most significant election winner of our generation. To provide some background, Polymarket handled $3.6 billion in election betting and predicted Trump's victory six hours ahead of the AP.
It has created a new form of media and provided the world with other data points for people to reference when informed about future situations by other sources that may be biased. Many called for its abolition after the election, but to be honest, it has performed well. Below the peak in November, but still above mid-October levels. I still frequently use it to see which markets are active, and it seems that the sports sector has started to gain more share on it.
Additionally, we should give credit where it's due. Fun.xyz built a great checkout product for Polymarket, allowing users to deposit any token on any chain, card, or CEX (like Binance, Coinbase, etc.). Some of my non-technical friends are even using it with no complaints. The crypto user experience isn't as bad as everyone says!
3. Farcaster
To be honest, while I was a daily user of Warpcast in the first half of 2024, I opened it only once or twice a week in the second half. One thing I want to do as we enter 2025 is to change this situation.
At the beginning of 2024, I attended the FarCon conference held in Los Angeles, where most of the people I spoke with were builders of Farcaster. This is indeed a bullish signal. Although it is still early, many builders are focused on creating some very cool niche projects, giving Farcaster a chance to attract communities that are focused and adventurous. I think you will see a lot of strange things emerging around this social graph in 2025.
I also believe Dan Romero and his team will continue to innovate rapidly. They are focused on helping core users expand their social graphs and reputations, creating a great sandbox for builders to create new experiences. Features like channels, frameworks, and tipping tokens (like DEGEN) have developed new ways to coordinate social interactions. Games like Clankermon and Stokefire have shown me some interesting and unique content.
Although it has dropped 50% from its peak, it still performs excellently in terms of user retention.
4. Ethena
At Delphi, we had high expectations for the launch of Ethena, but somehow it exceeded our expectations. Over the past year, Ethena's synthetic dollar USDe has grown to nearly $6 billion. Among stablecoins, it now ranks just below Tether and USDC.
What impressed me particularly is that Ethena recently collaborated with BlackRock to launch a new dollar stablecoin, USDtb, backed by BlackRock's BUIDL fund. Similar to USDC, USDtb is backed by reserves of cash and cash equivalents. In the short term, USDe's yield may remain high due to financing issues. However, Ethena can now flexibly adjust the treasury yield to supplement USDe. This effectively creates a 'lower bound' APY around treasury bond rates, allowing Ethena to scale further.
Like most people, I am optimistic about the growth of stablecoins in 2025. The current market cap is about $200 billion, and I think it is expected to exceed $300 billion, potentially reaching over $400 billion next year. I believe Ethena, with its smart products and ongoing focus on integration, will play a significant role in attracting large amounts of capital on-chain. We have already seen other decentralized stablecoins or synthetic dollars incorporated into DeFi in various ways, and Ethena's USDe seems to be the first to perform well in integrating with CEX (centralized exchanges) and TradFi. This helps them establish a strong moat early on while chasing the largest crypto markets.
5. Gunzilla
It is well known that Delphi is passionate about the crypto gaming industry. Through our early work and investments in teams like Axie Infinity, Yield Guild, and Immutable, we have been working to help bring games to market and bring the masses into the crypto world. Gunzilla Games has done just that—users have not encountered any friction from the crypto components.
Off the Grid, a cyberpunk-themed battle royale game, is the first crypto game released on PlayStation and Xbox, attracting over 12 million wallets and 230 million transactions. Players have streamed over 4 million hours of gameplay on platforms like Twitch, and the game has ranked among the top three live games twice. It uses Avalanche's play-to-own mechanism, putting into action the widely discussed benefits of cryptocurrency for gaming: digital ownership can enhance player retention.
I highly recommend you listen to Piers Kicks' conversation with the founders of Gunzilla on the Delphi podcast last month. The team's unparalleled attention to detail and their commitment to providing what players truly want is evident. Currently, they are developing their own products as they strive to become the infrastructure that enables more mainstream AAA games to launch within their ecosystem. I am really excited to see how Gunzilla continues to evolve and shape the future of crypto gaming.
6. Lighthouse
Over the years, Delphi has invested in several portfolio trackers (Zapper, Debank) and wallet observers, and we believe these tools have the potential to become mainstream tools in the crypto world. Tools like these, along with Nansen, have become my main tools for managing wallets and observing others. Until a few weeks ago, I was still manually using spreadsheets and other applications to track my total portfolio.
Will Price casually mentioned Lighthouse to me, and I have been fascinated ever since. It is by far the best and most comprehensive portfolio tracker I have used. EVM, Solana, Cosmos, Aptos, Sui, CEX, Hyperliquid, DyDx; they can track anything. During the few days I trialed this app, I spoke with the team, and they are extremely privacy-focused.
Among all the applications I mentioned in this article, I guess this is a product that many people are hearing about for the first time. I am very impressed by it, and I think it is a wise attempt. I have been looking for such products for years, and I am glad to have finally found one. I have no financial ties to Lighthouse, although I did request the Lighthouse team to allow me to invest. I am just a very satisfied user of their product.
7. Pump.fun
This year, pump.fun has turned attention into liquidity. I don't think this mechanism has received enough credit—it is a simple yet necessary solution with strong and direct PMF (product-market fit). It lowers the barriers while promoting a fairer distribution, and its bonding mechanism mitigates the risk of rug pulls.
In a year, pump.fun has already garnered over $300 million in fees and helped issue over 5 million tokens. While everyone in this space hopes the team will vertically expand by launching a DEX (decentralized exchange), they have chosen to horizontally grow by exploring new ways to attract attention. In my conversations, live streaming initially seemed an unexpected direction. It ultimately got out of control, but mainly because it was too successful.
Like it or not, anything that can be financialized will inevitably be financialized. Pump.fun has the potential to build a social application around speculation, so they cannot be overlooked here. By the way, my investment in pump.fun was through a small angel investment, not through Delphi Ventures. Betting on the founders is an easy decision, but I am still blown away by their execution.
8. GOAT
This year's favorite crypto moment for me might be that the Crypto x AI field found a sandbox—Twitter and wallets. Our Delphi team has been vocal about our excitement and curiosity about this intersection. Just as we were conducting our Crypto x AI research, GOAT launched and captured all the attention in the crypto space.
Witnessing the Turing test come to life is an incredible experience, as people on Crypto Twitter are questioning which bots are AI and which are real people. No matter how early it is now, I believe GOAT is one of the most important events of 2024 because it offers a tangible way to think about the interactions between cryptocurrency and AI in this important intersection. Since then, we have witnessed an explosion of these agents, seeing teams innovate, stand out, and attract attention. The coolest part is the high interoperability of all these upgrades, maximizing the efforts of each developer through applications that can be applied to other agents. While some of these bots can be annoying, I really believe that by 2025, these agents will bring truly interesting and even quirky things to the internet in droves.
9. VIRTUAL ecosystem
I don’t plan to write much about Virtuals right now, as it’s one of the new projects I’ve been researching. I just feel it’s a ‘pickaxe and shovel’ strategy for AI agents. So far, they have released over 12,000 agents. Don’t get me wrong, most agents are still quite bad, sometimes just annoying responders at best. However, I expect exponential improvements in the coming months that will make this project worth following.
Aixbt* is a particularly compelling account worth following and observing. Data doesn't lie; it occupies a share of cryptocurrency's mindset for good reason. It simply posts alpha on Twitter—but it is backed by years of research from 0rxbt, who took the time to collect a lot of crypto data and curated a smart Crypto Twitter social graph that gives aixbt its 'personality'. While many crypto celebrities often talk about the same projects in the echo chamber of Crypto Twitter, aixbt always manages to present fresh alpha, mostly projects I haven't seen anywhere else.
10 and 11: MetaDAO and MetaLeX
Few people know or remember this, but Delphi was one of the first companies to receive DAO (Synthetix) rewards back in 2019. Since then, we have been active in dozens of governance processes and even helped design governance systems and projects for cryptocurrencies like Gitcoin. Initially, DAOs were the most exciting aspect of this field for me. However, as we faced the complexities of working with DAOs, my enthusiasm waned. Most DAOs are established to achieve some ambitious vision, but they spend all their time figuring out how to 'DAO.' This year, two projects stood out for their practical approaches to solving these challenges: MetaDAO and MetaLeX (despite both having 'Meta' in their names, the two projects are unrelated).
MetaDAO has sparked many interesting discussions internally at Delphi (largely thanks to our META maxi mrink0). While some criticize Solana for a lack of innovation, MetaDAO is the world's first project to deploy futarchy. I have to mention it here because it is one of the coolest on-chain experiments I've seen in 2024.
Unlike traditional voting methods, MetaDAO uses markets to predict and determine the best outcomes for DAOs. It is interesting to see different protocols integrating it into their decision-making processes. For example, Drift utilizes MetaDAO for market-based token listings on its exchange. As we move into 2025, I am closely watching MetaDAO, hoping it can enhance voter participation in cryptocurrency and improve voter diversity.
On the other hand, MetaLeX is a concept that Lex node and Delphi Labs have been refining for years. It finally launched in 2024, building a future where DAOs can focus on their tasks without getting bogged down in governance challenges. Through BORGs, MetaLeX enables DAOs to connect with the real world while maintaining their crypto-native essence.
This is the culmination of Gabe's years of experience accumulated from the traditional world and the crypto world. He served as the technical director at Delphi Labs for many years, and honestly, I have great respect for him. For Delphi Labs, making this concept a reality is a no-brainer, as no one else in the world can build it the right way. MetaLeX fills the legal gaps with code and fills the code gaps with law. Their BORGs can mutually execute multi-party trusted commitments and reduce trust assumptions on all counterparties.
MetaLeX has already helped teams like Lido, Curve, and ZKSync transition to BORGs. They have been developing a comprehensive set of tools for trust-minimized governance, and I believe that in 2025, we will start to see the impact of their work on the integration of their DAOs.
12. Sandwich
This is a product created by one of my friends. Sandwich is a private trading tool used to execute CEX orders (and HyperLiquid orders). It allows you to access institutional-level algorithms, helping to save on fees and reduce slippage, and lets you access multiple tools and exchanges through a unified user interface.
Given that I primarily buy and hold tokens and do not often use leverage, I am not the target user in this area. That said, every trader friend who has seen it has become a super user. A Mac app is coming soon, but if you have a desktop, I encourage you to give it a try.
13. 9dcc
I think what Gmoney and 9dcc are doing is the coolest thing in the crypto space right now. He successfully combined his passion and carved out his own path, providing another mainstream attempt for cryptocurrency.
Essentially, cryptocurrency is a very powerful coordination tool. Gamifying universally prevalent things like fashion and interpersonal interactions is a genius move—surprisingly, this remains an under-explored area. Gmoney is still deeply involved in this domain, allowing him to connect cutting-edge on-chain ideas and bring them into the real world.
14. DeBridge
Over the years, I have tried many bridging tools, but DeBridge is the one I have used the most this year. Not only is the experience seamless, but their team has consistently been one of the fastest to integrate new chains. No matter where your assets are or where you want them to go, the experience is the same.
They leverage cross-chain intents to connect DeFi in real-time, making the bridging experience feel almost magical. According to deAlex, they have settled over 4 million intents, with a trading volume exceeding $6 billion.
This is the first bridge I recommend to my non-technical friends that doesn't require answering any questions about how to use it. Just this alone is impressive, and I thank the team for their work.
15 and 16: Echo and Legion
2024 is the year of the ICO's return. I am a fan of Cobie's approach with Echo—it seems to fit very well with Crypto Twitter users, having product-market fit. Supporting people you trust and having them bring interesting deal flow directly to you is a win-win. Echo has already helped facilitate over 150 deals and raised over $55 million for projects from nearly 6,000 users.
On the other hand, Legion adopts a more bottom-up approach, putting project tokens in the hands of more consistent community members. They developed a Legion Score that currently consists of three main variables: (1) on-chain activity, (2) social influence, (3) development experience. This score will change over time, allowing projects to better understand who they are letting into their capital structure.
Legion is a project that we at Delphi Labs have incubated for over a year, and just a month ago, its platform saw its first trades. The numbers speak for themselves: over $5 million raised, with nearly 100,000 users already registered for Legion Score.
I believe that by 2025, we will see more projects utilizing platforms like this to help distribute tokens. The timing for a new U.S. government to come into power couldn't be better. I strongly recommend that everyone register for both platforms and check in weekly. As these platforms strive to curate high-quality projects for their members, there may be many appealing opportunities.
17. Kaito
In 2024, Kaito has quickly become a very powerful tool for cryptocurrency users. In a way, Kaito and Delphi Research aim to solve a similar problem: helping crypto members cut through all the noise in the crypto world to find alpha and valuable insights. To this end, our research team spends hundreds of hours researching and then condensing all necessary and relevant information into about 30 minutes of reading, focusing on areas where we think alpha will emerge. In this process, our analysts spend time thinking through and filtering out most of the noise, only analyzing the understanding and conclusions that are important for any specific protocol or niche. What Kaito does well is using its smart algorithms to help mine nuggets of gold from all the noise on Crypto Twitter. In fact, when I search for a specific project or token, it helps me skip so much noise that I am genuinely amazed.
I can see it being a very useful and necessary tool for all traders. However, I have been using it to scout for talent. Typically, some of the most vocal people in any particular field will become potential hires for our Delphi team. In fact, we just sent an offer to a talent I discovered through Kaito, and they will be joining our team in January.
I believe Kaito has the potential to serve many different user groups through a single product, as there are many cryptocurrencies still active on Twitter.
18. Grass
Grass allows users to earn rewards by sharing their excess internet bandwidth with the rest of the network. It’s a simple plug-in that I have been running in the background for most of 2024. Our venture capital team has invested in many Crypto x AI projects, but Grass might be the one I am personally most excited about (at least among the projects I can publicly discuss right now).
Data is the next frontier in model development. We have seen AI labs trying to collaborate with platforms like Reddit or StackOverflow to gain API key access to their data. Grass provides an API key for the entire internet.
It can do this efficiently and at scale. They already have 2.5 million nodes on the supply side, providing unfiltered data for training and AI responses. There will also be new ways to join the network, such as people being able to plug mobile and hardware devices into their WiFi routers. According to 0xdrej's research, the demand for onboarding onto this network is already in the nine-digit range.
The Grass project has been helping traditional AI people take the Crypto x AI intersection seriously, and I am optimistic about their prospects in 2025.
19. Ostium
Since our team collaborated with Kain and the SNX family in 2019, we are excited to bring the on-chain world closer to traditional assets. Ostium seems to be fulfilling this promise.
Kaledora has made it clear that she is keen on making Ostium an all-encompassing market. Currently, Ostium offers users long or short perpetual trading in forex, commodities, cryptocurrencies, and stock indices. So far, they have completed over $166 million in trades. It’s cool that trading volumes for certain pairs have surged, for example, the USD/JPY pair has completed $21 million in trading volume since its creation, most of which occurred during Japan's interest rate decision (not sure if you remember the 72-hour short-term bear market).
They have launched some sleek structured products based on Polymarket. So, for example, once the Polymarket odds of Trump winning the presidential election reach a certain percentage, you can set Ostium to 10x long Bitcoin. You can set it like this and then go to sleep while the rest of the world waits to see what happens, waking up very happily (and well-rested).
With the new U.S. government no longer opposing cryptocurrency, I feel it will allow Ostium to launch some things on-chain that we couldn't have imagined in the past four years. (By the time I publish this article, Ostium has actually launched SPX Perps!)
20. Moonwalk Fitness
Moonwalk Fitness leverages the coordination capabilities of cryptocurrency to create a powerful accountability tool for fitness.
Currently, the main goal of the first version of Moonwalk is to motivate people to walk daily. You can create a group, set a daily step goal, and deposit USDC/SOL/BONK tokens. As long as you meet your set goal, at least you will get your money back. If others do not meet their goals, their money will be distributed to the winners. It is a simple yet powerful tool to incentivize good behavior, and I am excited to see what its next iteration will look like. You can see that this concept applies not only to step incentives: setting goals for daily sleep time, water intake, etc. Regarding rewards, I am very curious about which projects sponsor competitions to help different people enter this field.
Although it is still early, they already have nearly 100,000 registered users; locked in over 500,000 to take responsibility. They will soon release a mobile app, which I have been bothering the team about for quite some time. This could be the first crypto application that my parents will use weekly.
Well, this is my list of favorite projects for 2024. These are just a few products I like, and I want to thank the hard work of their teams. Unfortunately, I clearly cannot list all the teams I think did well in 2024 in detail. Other projects that quickly come to mind include Morpho, Jito, Cowswap, Jupiter, Pendle, and wallets like Phantom/Rabby.
I am curious—what are your favorite projects for 2024?
