Author: Donovan Choy, Blockworks; Translated by: Bai Shui, Golden Finance

Pendle

Pendle exists because cryptocurrencies want to speculate.

In Pendle's brief history, the team has consistently reiterated its yield trading products, using stablecoins and the notoriously 'DeFi 2.0' narrative from the 2021 bull market (Olympus DAO), to liquid staking tokens, real-world assets on Arbitrum, and liquidity re-staking during 2021.

Until early 2024, Pendle's score explosion led to remarkable achievements, with its TVL soaring from millions of dollars to billions. Pendle's Principle Tokens (PT) and Yield Token (YT) yield mechanisms remain essential tools for anyone looking to execute any form of leverage point or fixed income.

Fluid

Fluid is a perfect example of innovation. Fluid draws on many successful primitives of DeFi, such as concentrated liquidity from Uniswap v3 and utilization curves from Aave, then re-designs traditional AMM liquidity configurations from scratch.

With its 'smart debt' and 'smart collateral' mechanisms, Fluid has achieved millions of dollars in DEX deep liquidity pools, technically resulting in a TVL of $0. This capital efficiency comes from a clever combination of user debt from lending protocols and AMM liquidity pools.

Ethena

Stablecoins are one of the hardest fields to compete in. This has led USDe to achieve an impressive market value of $6 billion within a year.

Previous stablecoins were built along a spectrum of centralization (USDT) and scalability (DAI). In contrast, Ethena has reached a series of impressive business development agreements with CEX and designed USDe, a scalable stablecoin that leverages CEX-DEX financing rate arbitrage and offers returns to users.

GEODNET

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

GEODNET utilizes crypto token incentives to expand the deployment of the RTK network. As of November, GEODNET has deployed at least 10,000 sites in 140 countries, surpassing the total of 5,000 sites from traditional providers Trimble and Hexagon.

Notably, GEODNET has significant cost advantages. Deploying base stations using GEODNET costs about $700, which is 97% cheaper than the traditional cost of $25,000. If this isn't innovation, I don't know what is.

Virtuals

Virtuals is the primary 'pick and shovel' game in the recent artificial intelligence agent craze.

This is an AI agent platform where anyone can generate tokenized AI agents. Similar to Pump.fun, once the standard of a $420,000 market value is met, the native token of the agent will be bound to the DEX liquidity pool (Uniswap v2).

Virtuals is built on Base and has spawned at least 12,000 individual AI agents since its inception, including the popular anime ship Luna, which operates 24/7 and can use the agents' respective tokens to tip.

The innovation of Virtual comes from the combination of many different parts, including LLM models, crypto wallets, innovative value-added token economics, NFTs, and IPFS for data storage.