The year 2024 is about to end. Some summarize the silence of the Bitcoin ecosystem this year with the term 'failure,' while steadfast ecosystem OGs choose to 'believe' as always. As an ordinary player in the Bitcoin ecosystem from the beginning to the end, I choose to conclude this year with the term 'regret.' (Background: A review of the potential infrastructure of the Bitcoin ecosystem: Is BTC DeFi Summer coming?) (Supplementary background: A quick look at eight emerging DEXs in the Bitcoin ecosystem, their development status, and challenges) As 2024 comes to an end, people in the crypto space also have their own year-end summaries: one is to see if this year's investment return has outperformed the market (reminder: BTC has risen over 130% this year), and the second is to summarize the development of the track/ecosystem they are concerned about over the year. The Solana ecosystem, Base ecosystem, TON ecosystem, and AI Agent track have all had their highlights this year. As for the Bitcoin ecosystem, although many things have happened this year, with ecological infrastructure and application innovation developing, it is far from meeting the expectations people had at the beginning of 2024. Therefore, some summarize the silence of the Bitcoin ecosystem this year with the term 'failure,' while steadfast ecosystem OGs choose to 'believe' as always. As an ordinary player in the Bitcoin ecosystem from the beginning to the end, I choose to conclude this year with the term 'regret.' Actually, 2024 had a good start. 2024 actually had a good start for the Bitcoin ecosystem. People had high hopes for the Bitcoin ecosystem at the beginning of the year, believing that 2024 would be the year of a complete explosion and entry into the mainstream view for the Bitcoin ecosystem, just as people now believe that 2025 will be the year of the explosion of the AI Agent ecosystem. Why did we have such great expectations for the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2024 back then? Perhaps it is because since the birth of the Ordinals protocol in December 2022, the Bitcoin ecosystem has experienced a year of growth and consensus building, transitioning from the 'barbaric era' to the 'industrial era,' with project parties, VCs, and mainstream exchanges all entering the space, forming three main tracks: asset issuance protocols, L2, and Bitcoin staking. From the perspective of asset issuance protocols, influenced by Binance's launch of BRC 20 tokens ORDI and SATS spot trading at the end of 2023, the concept of inscriptions has once again become popular across the internet at the beginning of 2024. Not only did this popularity lead other chains to follow suit in starting inscription models, but it also drove the rise of other layer one asset protocols such as ARC 20, SRC 20, PIPE, and others. At the same time, the rune pre-mining and airdrop gameplay initiated by RSIC and Runestone in January 2024 also filled people with expectations for the upcoming Runes protocol. From the perspective of L2 development, the Bitcoin L2 ecosystem experienced explosive growth at the beginning of 2024. With the heat of asset issuance and trading, the congestion issues of the Bitcoin mainnet and players' demand to enhance the playability of mainnet assets made Bitcoin L2 a popular entrepreneurial direction. By early 2024, statistics showed that there were over 100 Bitcoin L2 projects in a short period of time. Although many of these were poorly made or 'cut and run' projects, overall, domestic and international VCs began to invest heavily in Bitcoin L2, and everyone looked forward to Bitcoin L2's ability to replicate the glory of the Ethereum L2 ecosystem in 2024. In March 2024, @Bitvmclub summarized 69 Bitcoin L2 projects. From the perspective of Bitcoin staking, the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon announced in December 2023 that it had completed $18 million in financing, officially launching the Bitcoin staking and re-staking narrative. With the top-tier Ethereum ecosystem project—re-staking narrative project EigenLayer as a model, people believe that with Bitcoin's stronger consensus foundation and security compared to Ethereum, the prospects for Bitcoin staking and re-staking in 2024 will be very broad. It will not only awaken sleeping Bitcoin whales to participate in the Bitcoin ecosystem but also create a re-staking ecosystem that is comparable to Ethereum. In addition to the overall positive trends displayed by these three main tracks at the beginning of 2024, the general infrastructure of the Bitcoin ecosystem (such as wallets, cross-chain bridges, and trading markets) has also gradually improved during this time. Unisat and OKX Wallet have technically supported multiple asset protocols, becoming major wallets and trading markets in the Bitcoin ecosystem. The Bitcoin spot ETF was approved and listed on January 11, 2024, marking Bitcoin's official integration into traditional finance. At the same time, this further strengthened people's expectations for the Bitcoin ecosystem because a network worth trillions of dollars will inevitably develop into a market scale of hundreds of billions of dollars. However… Regrettably, the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2024 did not receive attention and development that surpassed the heat of previous bull markets, and it also entered a long period of silence. The mainnet assets performed increasingly poorly. On April 20, 2024, Bitcoin experienced its fourth halving, while the token protocol Runes developed by Ordinals founder Casey announced its launch. The project party raised on-chain transaction fees to over 2,000 satoshis/byte to compete for inscription numbers. People believed that this was the beginning of the Runes relay BRC 20, which would lead to continuous prosperity in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but unexpectedly, the Runes peaked right at the start, and speculative enthusiasm faded within just two weeks. Although the market cap of Runes briefly broke $2 billion in June and November, the vitality and liquidity of the ecosystem remained in a long-term state of stagnation. Meanwhile, other asset protocols performed similarly this year, with ORDI's peak drop reaching 70%, and new assets causing FOMO among market participants initially but then declined due to the absence of new funds and traffic, such as the PIZZA airdropped by Unisat and CAT 20 born from the Fractal network. The reasons are twofold: one may be due to the fact that after experiencing previous Bitcoin bull markets, the narrative of fair asset issuance in Bitcoin after Runes no longer excites the outside world and fails to generate a wealth effect again; the second is that there is no synergy between domestic and international markets. The ecosystem has not formed a cohesive force, with the larger communities of Runes being mainly led by overseas users, while the primary funds in the Chinese-speaking region remain in BRC 20, like the currently popular inscriptions 'ground-pushing coins' 𝛑 and 𐊶. The survival rate of Bitcoin L2 is below 20%. At the same time, regrettably, the Bitcoin L2 ecosystem in 2024 also did not have the prosperity initially expected. 'Except for the Lightning Network, all other Bitcoin L2s are castles in the air,' Casey, the founder of the Ordinals protocol, criticized Bitcoin L2 in an interview. In the past 12 months, the market saw over 100 Bitcoin L2 projects, but according to data from DefiLlama, only 19 L2s remain today, with a TVL of about $2.8 billion. Meanwhile, the TVL of Ethereum's L2 ecosystem, with just Arbitrum, reaches $3 billion. So, similarly, in terms of scaling, the Ethereum L2 ecosystem has been validated...

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