Narratives are crucial in the crypto space. Let’s track the trend of narrative transformation.
Text by Sandra and Kaito AI
Compiled by Alex Liu, Foresight News
How to measure what is the hot narrative in the current crypto market? Kaito has a method to calculate the user's attention to the narrative (mindshare, also translated as mind share). Simply put, this metric measures the dominance of the narrative in social communication relative to the entire market (percentage). The denominator is composed of users in the crypto Twitter circle from proprietary search engines and social graph data, and the numerator is the number of social platform mentions of each narrative. This provides the most quantitative and comprehensive view of narratives in any market cycle.
Let’s look at how narrative heat has changed since the beginning of the year:
Artificial intelligence (AI) remains one of the strongest narratives in the first and second quarters of 2024. AI is also a significantly dominant narrative in 2023, accounting for 30-50% of the buzz for most of 2023. This suggests that the AI vertical is here to stay as the entire AI field grows exponentially (not just the crypto bubble).
SocialFi has seen the biggest change in popularity since January 2024, driven by the resurgence of friend.tech, the explosion of fantasy.top, and other well-known projects.
It is clear that memes will become one of the strongest narratives in the first and second quarters of 2024.
BRC20 saw the largest drop in popularity, likely due to narrative fatigue following the Bitcoin halving and a recent drop in interest in Ordinals/Runes. Notably, BRC20 as a vertical held a large amount of popularity at the end of 2023.
Decentralized social (DeSoc) is also expected to become a strong competitor in the heat-dominated field - projects such as Farcaster, friend.tech, and DeSo are attracting attention.
The GameFi narrative has cooled a bit compared to the beginning of the year - there was a lot of talk that it would only take one breakout game to revive the entire GameFi space, but we haven't seen any big game releases so far this year.
With the announcement of the EIGEN token, both LSD and LRT narratives have declined slightly compared to the beginning of the year, while major LRT protocols like Renzo and Etherfi have ended their points programs or phase 1 and 2 activities.
Given how the current narrative has developed this year, what does the future hold?
AI and memes have been the dominant narrative since the beginning of the year. The question is whether the enthusiasm for these two fields can be sustained. For AI, the theory is very clear, because there are many external factors such as OpenAI's continuous iteration of ChatGPT model, AGI discussions, NVIDIA, etc., which may have a positive impact on the AI vertical throughout the year. Memes also generally have no upper limit and depend entirely on market trends and culture.
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) as a vertical has also been growing steadily this year, and similar to AI, we see continued interesting experiments in this space.
Discussions about Ethereum ETFs will heat up again, and Ethereum ETFs will continue to be a hot topic.
ZK (zero-knowledge proofs) is also a potential narrative that has yet to really see widespread adoption but could see a resurgence with zkSync’s TGE token generation event (hopefully soon).
Comparison of narrative popularity now and at the beginning of the year:
