Original Foresight Foresight Research December 28, 2024 12:41 Shanghai
A. Market Perspectives
I. Macro Liquidity
Currency liquidity has improved. Powell's Christmas gift this year was the hawkish rate cut; last week, the Federal Reserve lowered its rate cut forecast, suggesting only two more cuts in 2025, down from four suggested in September. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield reached a high of over 4.6%, the highest since May. U.S. stocks traded lightly during the Christmas period, with the crypto market fluctuating downwards.
II. Overall Market Trends
Market Cap Rankings Top 100 Increases:
This week, BTC fluctuated downwards, entering the second half of the bull market. Altcoins generally declined, with the market focus on DeFi and AI, and funding from South Korea showing active performance.
Top 5 Increases
Increase
Top 5 Declines
Decline
MOCA
170%
EIGEN
30%
ZEN
150%
ACT
20%
MOVE
80%
APT
20%
UXLINK
70%
QUBIC
20%
COW
70%
PNUT
15%
PHA: is the tee solution provider for the Eliza framework, with the recently popular on-chain Aipool as the launch platform, and Spore as the AI breeding evolution sandbox; these projects are related to PHA.
BIO: is a DAO organization for decentralized science, primarily in the biomedical field, and will airdrop to sub-tokens URO, RIF, and VITA.
BGB: Bitget exchange platform token market cap of $12 billion, surpassing OKB.
III. On-Chain Data
Solana still has room to reach bull market highs. Since September 2023, Solana has maintained positive net capital inflow. For the first time in history, demand from new investors for Solana has exceeded that for Ethereum, highlighting its strong demand situation.
Stablecoin market cap remains flat, with growth significantly slowing.
Institutional funds continued to see net inflows this week, but inflows dropped significantly under the Federal Reserve's hawkish policy.
The long-term trend indicator MVRV-ZScore, based on the total market cost, reflects the overall profitability of the market. When the indicator is above 6, it is at the top range; when it is below 2, it is at the bottom range. MVRV falling below the critical level of 1 indicates that holders are generally in a loss state. The current indicator is 3.0, close to the midpoint of the market.
IV. Futures Market Trends
Futures Funding Rate: This week's rate has returned to healthy levels. Rates of 0.05-0.1% indicate more long leverage, marking the market's short-term top; rates of -0.1-0% indicate more short leverage, marking the market's short-term bottom.
Futures Open Interest: This week, BTC open interest slightly decreased as market players cashed out.
Futures Long-Short Ratio: 1.0, market sentiment is neutral. Retail sentiment is often a contrarian indicator; below 0.7 indicates fear, above 2.0 indicates greed. Long-short ratio data is volatile, reducing its reference value.
V. Spot Market Trends
The market is experiencing a volatile decline. In the last week before Christmas, both BTC and leading altcoins have given back their December gains. The Federal Reserve's hawkish stance on future monetary policy is the main driver behind the sell-off. Microstrategy only purchased $500 million worth of BTC last week, which is also one of the reasons for the weak performance for the remainder of this week.
B. Public Chain Ecosystem
I. ETH Ecosystem
1. ETH DeFi Lock-up Volume
In the past week, the total locked value (TVL) of Ethereum has remained stable at around 77 billion USD, highlighting its resilience. According to DefiLlama data, notable increases over the past 30 days include Ethena (up 49%) and Morpho (up 47%). Most Ethereum DApp deposits have increased, but Maker has dropped by 12% during this period.
2. ETH NFT Mints
After seven months of silence, the NFT market is experiencing a slight recovery, with Pudgy Penguins' floor price breaking 34 ETH, Lil Pudgys surpassing 4 ETH, and Mocaverse's floor price exceeding 3.8 ETH, with a daily increase of 79%. The current rebound appears to be driven more by top blue-chip projects and core user groups rather than large-scale market enthusiasm or speculative behavior.
3. Ecosystem Trends
Unichain released its phased roadmap for the mainnet and announced that the mainnet will launch in early 2025.
Cointelegraph reports that the Ethereum L2 network currently holds over $13.5 billion in stablecoin supply, a historic high. Additionally, the total circulation of stablecoins exceeds $205 billion.
Base accelerates the adoption of Reth, announcing its use as the main execution client for archival nodes. Reth has significant advantages over Geth, including saving over 80% of disk space and faster node synchronization.
The 2024 on-chain user report shows that Base is one of the biggest success stories in user growth for 2024. The chain's low user quality rating contrasts sharply with the narrow range of on-chain activities currently engaged by its large number of new users, highlighting the potential for guiding these users towards deeper and more diverse on-chain activities.
AAVE and Lido have consecutively announced their voting exit from the Polygon ecosystem, primarily due to the 'Polygon PoS Cross-Chain Liquidity Program' Pre-PIP improvement proposal released by the Polygon community on December 13. If AAVE's withdrawal proposal is officially passed, the TVL on Polygon will drop to $765 million, below the proposed $1 billion capital reserve.
II. Solana Ecosystem
1. Ecosystem Trends
2024 is set to be a glorious year for memecoins, with Solana's low fees and rapid throughput, along with support from Pump.fun, giving rise to a highly active Launchpad. These memecoins, especially AI Agent Meme, are showcasing a new product-market fit model: First, gather a community, attract target users, and establish a sense of social identity. Then, add products or revenue streams that drive utility. For instance, FXN, ZEREBRO, and AI16Z all started with concepts and initial AI Agents, then issued tokens without utility. Subsequently, they announced plans to create more infrastructure to utilize their tokens.
Payments on Solana continue to evolve, with @SolCardCC launching a Solana Apple Pay debit card.
2. Technology
Solana developers have surpassed Ethereum. The Solana ecosystem is thriving, and according to Electric Capital's developer report, Solana has overtaken Ethereum to become the blockchain with the most new developers, indicating a strong outlook for 2025.
The new article 'Breaking Bots: MEV on Solana and how to prevent frontrunning, spam attacks, and centralization' discusses solving the MEV problem on Solana using the Solana-MEV client. The MEV issues present on Solana include: 1. Frontrunning and spam traffic that lead to network congestion. 2. A significant number of failed transactions consuming computational resources and network bandwidth. 3. A small number of MEV searchers capturing most of the profits, leading to power concentration. The article proposes using the Solana-MEV client to address this issue, embedding MEV extraction into the Banking stage of validators (the batch processing and execution phase of transactions) to achieve low latency, high transparency, and decentralized MEV solutions. This solution not only aligns with Solana's network characteristics but also provides an effective path to reduce spam transactions and optimize profit distribution, representing a significant innovation in the current blockchain MEV model.
Commentary: The Solana-MEV client aims to make MEV transparent and fair, preventing unnecessary resource waste and user losses.
3. This Week's Data
$SOL has dropped to $190, down 18% from its all-time high. TVL surged to $9.17B mid-week (up from $8.76B last week). Daily active addresses increased by 20% to 6.5 million. DEX trading volume fell by 12% to $28.2B.
Other DEXs have shown weak performance, while Raydium has shown resilience.
$ PENGU surged 642% after launch. AI16Z rose 21.38%. FARTCOIN nearly doubled.
(Data source: https://defillama.com/chain/Solana)
III. TON Ecosystem
1. TON DeFi Lock-up Volume
(Data source: https://defillama.com/chain/TON)
2. TON Mini App Data
TON Chain Trends
The TON chain has officially integrated Dune Analytics. Users can now delve into on-chain data through Dune tools, including transaction patterns, wallet activity, ecosystem growth, and cross-chain trends.
The TON Foundation teamed up with GMX to launch a developer competition, encouraging developers to build innovative perpetual contract DEXs on the TON chain.
The TON Foundation announced that 2025 will be the inaugural year for TON DeFi, and in collaboration with Curve, held a competition to develop stable asset swap technology, with Torch Finance and Crouton Finance as winners.
Telegram Trends
Pavel Durov summarized Telegram's achievements in 2024. This year, Telegram's subscriber count tripled, exceeding 12 million. Total revenue surpassed $1 billion, with over $500 million in cash reserves, excluding crypto assets. Telegram's innovations in monetization include: Stars, Gifts, Giveaways, Mini Apps, Membership Platforms, Telegram Business, and Telegram Gateway... demonstrating that social media platforms can achieve financial sustainability while maintaining independence and respecting user rights.
The Telegram platform has introduced tradeable NFT stickers. This feature is realized through the 'sticker shop' launched in collaboration with the Open Builders team (behind the popular tap-to-earn game Notcoin) and the DOGS sticker community. Users can purchase limited-edition digital stickers using the built-in Stars currency in Telegram, with stickers collaborating with well-known projects like Pudgy Penguins, Flappy Bird, and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
IV. DeFi Ecosystem
1. The currency that 'revives' in 2024 may continue to rise in 2025
$ Doge has risen over 350% from a low of $0.081 in January to $0.466. This rebound has been driven by political, technological, and cultural factors.
$ XRP has seen one of the most unexpected yet impressive rebounds of 2024, soaring over 350% since the presidential election in November. This surge has allowed XRP to surpass Solana and Tether. Ripple has begun to launch the RLUSD stablecoin.
$ Hedera has risen by over 800% between November and December, with Canary Capital applying to list a spot HBAR ETF in the US, which has also increased expectations.
2. Ethena and Usual Spark Stablecoin Season
Ethena launched USDtb, supported by BlackRock's BUIDL; · Ethena collaborates with Usual to mutually transfer TVL and incentives;
WLFI collaborates with Ethena to integrate sUSDe into the lending market.
V. Innovative Perspectives
1. Perspective: ai16z founder's observations and evaluations of different AI Agents
Shaw mentioned that several games based on the Eliza framework are about to be launched.
To develop Marc Andreessen into a practical AI Agent investment tool, a DeFi AI Agent.
Openness and ease of use are the core competitive advantages of the Eliza framework.
The future of AI Agents may lie in social media platforms like Twitter and Farcaster. Shaw believes Farcaster will become a fertile ground for the development of AI Agents, and Eliza is in deep collaboration with Farcaster.
Shaw thinks Zerebro and aixbt are cool and is trying to collaborate with Zerebro.
Shaw highly appreciates and admires Truth Terminal, and he and Andy are working hard to find solutions where AI will not replace humans in managing the world.
He likes FXN and Project 89; both are working on 'AI Agent swarms.' Shaw believes that 'AI Agent swarms' can be divided into two types: cabal swarms and open swarms.
Shaw thinks Clanker is great and hopes that people will develop a clone version of Clanker on Eliza. He stated that they would not issue tokens on Clanker. As of November 26, 2024, in just two weeks, Clanker has issued 3,500 tokens and generated $4.2 million in revenue.
Shaw believes the biggest challenge for ai16z currently is how to revert to establishing a tokenomics model that proves the project's value aligns with its current token market cap.
2. Perspective: Dephi Digital's stablecoin research, entry of fintech giants, transformation of revenue-sharing models, and underappreciated future potential
The stablecoin ecosystem is rapidly taking shape. Regulatory frameworks are gradually improving; fintech companies like Robinhood and Revolut have begun launching their own stablecoins; Stripe also seems to be exploring the possibility of controlling more payment processes through stablecoins. More notably, industry giants like PayPal and Visa are actively laying out plans in the stablecoin space, even knowing that stablecoins may undermine their profit margins, because they fear that if they do not act, other competitors will seize the opportunity.
The stablecoin market has a 'winner-takes-all' feature, stemming from the network effects of currency. This is primarily reflected in liquidity, payment functionality, and pricing effects (nearly all centralized/decentralized exchanges use USDT/USDC as the pricing unit).
Revenue-sharing stablecoins are more promising. Issuers of stablecoins earn over $10 billion in revenue annually, and the value of stablecoins is actually driven by the distributors. In other words, without exchanges, DeFi applications, payment platforms, and wallets as distribution channels, USDT would lose its practical use and consequently could not capture any value. Revenue-sharing stablecoins help applications profit through their distribution capabilities.
C. Latest Financing
D. Project Progress
1. Blade Games — GameFi
Blade Games held its TGE on December 23 at 20:00, with tokens launching on exchanges like Gate, MEXC, and BingX. Blade Games is an on-chain gaming ecosystem on Arbitrum and Mantle, with over 850,000 registered users. Monthly ecosystem revenue exceeds $300,000, with over 200,000 active addresses on-chain.
2. Bio Protocol — DeSci Protocol
Binance Launchpool listed BIO tokens, allowing users to mine BIO by locking BNB and FDUSD. The total supply of BIO tokens is 3.32 billion, with an initial circulating supply of about 1.3 billion, accounting for 39.05%. Of this, 56% of the tokens are allocated to the ecosystem and community, 25.4% to early contributors, 18.6% to early investors, and 99.6 million tokens are allocated to Binance Launchpool (about 3% of the total). Additionally, Bio Protocol released its roadmap for the first quarter of 2025, with the BIO token set to complete its initial token issuance (TGE) on the Ethereum mainnet on January 3, 2025, and plans to successively launch on Solana and Base networks, alongside the launch of Long COVID Labs, new BioDAO projects, and BIO/BioDAO liquidity pools. In February 2025, Bio Protocol plans to launch the Curetopia platform and initiate a new version of the BIO Launchpad, followed by the release of a Solana version of the BIO Launchpad.
3. Apus Network — Data
Apus Network launched its TGE on December 23, 2024, with over 500 stETH and more than 250,000 DAI deposited within the first 24 hours.
4. dappOS — Infra
Launched a user incentive campaign in collaboration with Binance Web3 wallet
dappOS collaborated with Binance Web3 wallet to launch an event with a total reward pool of $300,000, encouraging users to complete 'intent transactions' by experiencing dappOS's intent execution network's spot trading functionality. intentEX aims to provide a CEX-level on-chain trading experience and enhance user experience through an internal order book and institutional-grade liquidity support.
Cooperated with Cheems
Cheems became one of the first projects supported by intentEX, jointly promoting the development of the BNB Chain ecosystem and community.
Spot trading features based on opBNB chain
dappOS announced its intentEX feature now supports opBNB chain settlements, utilizing opBNB's speed and low cost advantages for seamless cross-chain asset transactions, further enhancing user liquidity.
5. Pixelverse — GameFi
Pixelverse's new battle strategy game MemeBattle will launch on the Base network in the first quarter of 2025. MemeBattle is a tactical game featuring characters based on well-known cryptocurrencies and meme tokens from the Base network, including Based Brett, Toshi, and Keyboard Cat, and expanding to other projects like Pudgy Penguins, Turbo, and Mew. Players can form teams to engage in battles and earn rewards.
Pixelverse's previous success includes the Telegram mini-game PixelTap, which attracted millions of players and laid the foundation for the issuance of the $PIXFI token. The release of this new game is supported by top investment institutions such as Gate.io Meme Fund and Delphi Ventures, Mechanism Capital.
6. Xterio — GameFi
Strategic cooperation and breakthroughs in on-chain data: Xterio has formed a strategic partnership with OKX Wallet and Bybit Wallet to support the BeFriend AI Beta project. After one week of launch, the number of Xterio Chain addresses has exceeded 15 million, with 14 million registered users and nearly 2 million daily active addresses.
BeFriend AI's impressive performance: BeFriend AI Beta ranks first among all games on DappRadar, and Xterio Chain's 7-day UAW ranking remains in the top four, with high community user engagement.
(Age of Dino) Continuing popularity: AOD ranks in the top ten of DappRadar's UAW ranking, with over 800,000 cumulative players, continuously updating versions, gameplay, and adding new heroes.
(Palio) Beta is about to launch
Palio announced a preview of the Beta version for PC and mobile platforms, with AI-driven construction and trading gameplay attracting significant attention, and the first tweet reached 122,000 views.Global Community Interaction
Michael's AI vision tweet received 536,000 views, and his autobiographical article (The Unreasonables) had over 1,200 interactions; several KOLs with over 400,000 followers promoted it, accumulating over 20,000 interactions.
