After a three-year absence, the "FAT Awards 2024" selection initiated by Odaily Planet Daily is officially launched.
"FAT" is a list ceremony + summit forum brand founded by Odaily Planet Daily in 2020. It aims to reward leaders and innovators in the Web3 and crypto industries, and focus on value paradigms and consensus moments. It has been held in Beijing for two consecutive years, with more than 500 first-line projects participating, more than 3,000 participants, and covering more than 5 million people.
In 2024, as the crypto industry is changing with each passing day and narratives are recognized by the mainstream world, fresh narratives are emerging, the ecosystem is flourishing, and high-quality projects are launched one after another. Odaily has once again started the "FAT" list selection and will hold a summit forum and awards ceremony at the Conrad Centennial in Singapore on September 16.
As a warm-up chapter for the event and list collection, Odaily has selected and outlined the top ten trend narratives from Q3 2023 to the present. Meme, AI, DePIN, Bitcoin ecology, re-staking, TON ecology, prediction market, parallel EVM, chain abstraction, modularization - these ten new industry trends that have shined in the past year, narratives that are favored by everyone and repeatedly laid out, are shortlisted for the "FAT" list.
Let us appreciate the shining brilliance of the ten new narrative trends one by one and review the progress of important ecological projects in the corresponding fields.
Meme
Looking back at the past year, Meme is undoubtedly the industry narrative with the longest duration, the highest community participation sentiment, and the strongest wealth-creating effect.
From the "new king" PEPE to the animal "upstarts" FLOKI, WIF, BONK, to BOME which refreshed the "Binance Fastest Pass" record, as well as a large number of tokens about topical politicians such as Trump, various Meme themes emerge in an endless stream, continuously igniting market enthusiasm.
Benefiting from the emergence of the Meme craze, Solana, Base, Ton and other Layer 1/Layer 2 that are more in line with the Meme tone have become the biggest beneficiaries. The influx of countless real users and hot money has driven the data of these Layer 1/Layer 2 to rise, creating a group effect of "exchanging money for coins" and giving birth to phenomenal projects such as pump.fun, providing emotional support for the continued rise of tokens such as SOL and TON.
Behind the popularity of Meme is the deep hatred of market participants represented by retail investors for the VC tokens with "high FDV, low circulation", "sky-high opening price, and falling all the way". Although Meme itself is difficult to avoid the occurrence of malicious incidents such as "big investors setting up a game", "robot sniping", "rat warehouse" and even rug, its commonly adopted "fair sale" and "full circulation" models are more in line with the original purpose of cryptocurrency advocating fairness and openness, and are undoubtedly more popular in the market - what is reflected behind this is the change in the market participants' preference for the type of target and the structure of chips in the new market environment.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is perhaps the biggest narrative of Earth Online over the past year.
With the stunning launch of ChatGPT, the imagination boundary of AI has been broadened again, and a wave of AI entrepreneurship has been set off in the entire Internet field and even in related hardware service fields.
The cryptocurrency field is no exception. Web3 + AI has become the most watched topic in the industry and one of the most favored tracks by VCs. Countless new and old projects are being developed or expanded at different levels, such as computing power acquisition, training reasoning, proxy services, and data capture. In this trend, many AI concept projects, including FET, TAO, and RENDER, have achieved quite amazing gains in the secondary market, and the AI sector has become one of the few bright sectors in this round of bull market where altcoins are absent.
However, considering the current development status of Web3 + AI, the industry still faces the dilemma of homogeneous infrastructure and less actual application implementation. However, this track started late and has huge costs, so developers and project parties should be given more time and patience.
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN)
As Vitalik said, "This seems to be a new name for something that has existed for ten years." DePIN is not a new narrative. TIPIN, PoPW, EdgeFi, MachineFi... are all names used by the industry to explore concepts related to physical hardware.
In the current industry context, DePIN has unified the definition of such concepts through a more intuitive name - Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, which refers to a network system that connects and manages physical hardware devices in a decentralized manner.
At the same time, DePIN has further expanded its business coverage. From computing power markets represented by io.net, cloud services represented by Akash, data sets represented by Grass, wireless networks represented by Helium Mobile, and representative projects in various sub-sectors such as new energy and Internet of Vehicles, DePIN has shown a strong development trend of "blooming in multiple places".
On the whole, since the business operation is tied to real physical hardware, DePIN may be one of the segments in the cryptocurrency field that is closest to real commercial use. The introduction of the token economic model is DePIN's advantage over similar businesses in traditional fields. However, the pace of cryptocurrency adoption is also an objective limitation for the accelerated breakthrough of this track.
Bitcoin Ecosystem
The development of new business models around Bitcoin, the network with the highest asset value, is a major trend that cannot be ignored in the cryptocurrency industry over the past year.
From Ordinals to BRC-20 to Runes, backed by the most secure network in the cryptocurrency field, native assets above Bitcoin have been enthusiastically sought after by the market, especially after the gradual improvement of infrastructure such as Unisat and OKX Web3 wallet, which has removed the entry barriers for more retail investors, and eventually gave birth to many popular tokens such as ORDI and SATS.
At the same time, a large number of Bitcoin-based Layer 2 networks and compatible chain projects have emerged. Even Starknet, one of the backbones of the Ethereum camp, is exploring the use of OP_CAT to expand into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Restaking
ReStaking is perhaps the most eye-catching innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem. In essence, restaking is actually trying to expand the boundaries of node verification services, using AVS to expand node verification services that were originally only used for network consensus maintenance to more niche scenarios such as oracles, sequencers, and cross-chain bridges.
From the perspective of Ethereum, the main battlefield, EigenLayer, with its obvious first-mover advantage, is still the "absolute king" of this track; Symbiotic, backed by Paradigm and Lido, started late but is coming on strong; Karak has also won large-scale financing.
On top of the re-pledge protocol layer, a number of projects including ether.fi, Renzo, Puffer, Mellow, etc. have completed the replication of the staking scenario gameplay under the re-pledge scenario, using derivative tokens to unlock the liquidity of the re-pledged assets, while simplifying the back-end AVS delegation issues that users need to consider.
Of course, there are also some attempts to develop re-staking services outside of Ethereum, including Babylon in the Bitcoin ecosystem, Jito and Solayer in Solana, and so on.
TON Ecosystem
Unlike almost all projects in the field of cryptocurrency, TON has taken a completely "reverse" development path.
The normal development path of most projects is to build infrastructure and products (assets) first, then expand the community and attract traffic. However, for TON, which is backed by the social media giant Telegram with a total user base of over 900 million, it first has a community and traffic, then builds infrastructure and perfects integration. This also means that TON has almost no precedent to refer to in its development, and latecomers are also trying to replicate its rise path.
As TON improves its network, storage, DNS and "mini program" services, it has gradually demonstrated strong traffic capabilities. One million daily active users may be an astronomical figure for other ecosystems, but it does not seem too difficult for leading TON ecosystem projects such as the mini-game Banana.
With the moat of user base and traffic scale, established institutions like Pantera are not afraid of being "slapped in the face" and publicly declare that TON is their largest investment.
In August, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France, the TON ecosystem was abruptly hit, and TVL plummeted. However, clarifying the value connection with Telegram may be a new starting point for the TON ecosystem to take off again.
Prediction Market
Before this year, few people could have predicted that prediction markets would become the most popular product type in DeFi, and few people could have predicted that Polymarket would be able to dominate the market.
Benefiting from the US presidential election, ETF approval, European/American Cup, Olympic Games and other widely watched and uncertain "events", Polymarket's attention and trading volume have also risen. In many topical events including Biden's election, the platform's odds data has even developed into a source of information with certain reference significance.
As of the end of July, Polymarket's cumulative trading volume exceeded US$1 billion, and political events dominated the platform's user interest. Nine of the top 10 betting pools were related to politics, with the only exception being the Ethereum ETF.
It is foreseeable that Polymarket will continue to take advantage of the momentum as the US election moves towards its final climax in November.
Parallel EVM
Capacity expansion has always been one of the main tasks of the blockchain industry, and in recent years, "Parallel EVM" has become the latest darling of the market. Represented by Monad, which has raised $225 million, the vision of "Parallel EVM" is to massively improve the execution efficiency of EVM on a single layer of Layer 1 through "parallel processing", thereby unleashing the potential of the EVM ecosystem.
"Parallel EVM" is essentially a reform of the order of transaction execution in the EVM environment. In the classic EVM environment, each transaction is executed in sequence, which ensures that transactions and smart contracts can be executed in a deterministic order, making it easier to manage and predict the state of the blockchain, helping to ensure the security of the network, but at the same time it also limits the transaction execution efficiency of the network and restricts the operational space for expansion on the Layer 1 single layer.
"Parallel EVM" hopes to break this shackles. This mechanism will partition or group all pending transactions, and then rely on scheduling algorithms to effectively manage the synchronous processing of transactions in each zone or group. Its ultimate goal is to allow multiple independent transactions to be executed in parallel, thereby greatly improving the execution efficiency of transactions on the Layer 1 single layer.
Chain Abstraction
Chain abstraction is another attempt by the industry in the direction of mass adoption, and behind it lies the industry’s great expectations for promoting the concepts of cryptocurrency and blockchain to a wider audience.
The premise for chain abstraction to be valued is that with the continuous development of the cryptocurrency industry, new concepts emerge in an endless stream, and the learning threshold for ordinary users to enter the market is also constantly increasing. Based on this background, projects including Near and Particle are exploring solutions that are more user-friendly.
Specifically, the vision of chain abstraction is to abstract complex blockchain technology into a unified model or interface so that developers and users can create applications or interact more easily without having to deal with the underlying complex technical details. In other words, complex technologies and concepts are hidden behind the scenes, so that users cannot perceive the existence of the chain when actually using it, thus solving the current problems of entry barriers and poor experience that plague the industry.
Modularity
The concept of modularity aims to split the architecture of a single chain according to specific tasks. Specifically, it can be split into a consensus layer responsible for transaction sorting, a data availability layer responsible for data publishing and storage, a settlement layer responsible for developing status data, and an execution layer responsible for executing smart contracts. Each layer can coordinate with each other, thus breaking the trilemma of "decentralization, scalability and security" faced by the single-chain model.
In terms of the development progress of each layer, the modular solution of the data availability layer is relatively mature. Celestia has attracted a number of Rollup deployments that use its DA service. Avail DA, which focuses on the concept of "unified chain", has recently launched the mainnet. EigenLayer's first AVS EigenDA also focuses on data availability services. Of course, other layers also have their own representative projects, including Dymension of the settlement layer and various new Rollups of the execution layer.
Although modular design opens up new ideas for blockchain expansion with its more flexible and composable design, the combinatorial architecture also brings new complexity to development, which will also be the main challenge for the continued implementation of the modular concept.
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