Grayscale recently released an industry report for the first quarter of 2025. In addition to naming Ethereum’s performance lagging behind Solana, the report also pointed out that investors are increasingly paying attention to altcoins such as Sui and Ton. In addition, the top 20 currencies in Grayscale this time are also playing a big role, adding HYPE丶ENA丶VIRTUAL丶JUP丶JTO丶GRASS and other coins. The old DeFi protocol Maker, Stacks, UMA, TON, NEAR and CELO, which Korean lawmakers also want to listen to, have been removed.
Trump’s victory boosts fourth quarter
Grayscale said its good performance in the fourth quarter was largely due to Trump's victory in the US election. According to Grayscale’s Crypto Industry Market Index (CSMI), the total industry market value increased from US$1 trillion to US$3 trillion this quarter. Such a market share is roughly the same as the market capitalization of the global inflation-linked bond market and more than twice that of the U.S. high-yield bond market, but still significantly smaller than the global hedged bond market fund industry or the Japanese equity market.
Grayscale named ETH, SOL, SUI and OP as the leaders in the copycat competition
Then back to the competition of smart contract platforms, although Ethereum has experienced the Cancun upgrade and also passed the US stock ETF. However, the token performance still lags behind Solana, the third largest market capitalization company, high-performance public chain Sui, and TON, which is backed by Telegram.
One way smart contract platforms measure value is network fee income. Although other indicators such as TVL are also important, Grayscale believes that fee income is the focus for public chains. There is a positive correlation between smart contract platform fee income and market capitalization. The greater the network's ability to generate fee revenue, the greater its ability to deliver value to the network in the form of token destruction or staking rewards. This is also the reason why ETH, SOL, SUI and OP were named in the first quarter.
Source: Grayscale What to watch in Season 1? AI, Solana and DeFi
Looking forward to the first quarter of 2025, Grayscale will focus on tokens related to the following three key points:
The US election and its potential impact on industry regulation, especially in areas such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and staking;
continued breakthroughs in decentralized artificial intelligence technology and the use of blockchain by AI agents;
The growth of the Solana ecosystem.
Grayscale names six major currencies
Hyperliquid (HYPE): Hyperliquid is a Layer 1 blockchain focused on DeFi. Its main applications are decentralized exchanges for perpetual futures, and fully on-chain order books.
Ethena (ENA): The Ethena protocol issues a new stablecoin USDe, which is mainly profited by term arbitrage of Bitcoin and Ethereum collateral.
VIRTUAL: Virtual Protocol is a platform for creating AI agents on the Base chain. These AI agents mimic human decision-making and perform tasks autonomously. Users can create AI agents on the platform using VIRTUAL tokens and tokenize them.
Jupiter (JUP): Jupiter is the largest DEX aggregator on Solana and has the highest TVL on Solana. Grayscale Encounter As more retail investors enter the cryptocurrency market via Solana, and memecoin and AI proxy tokens flourish on Solana, Jupiter will be well-positioned.
Jito (JTO): Jito is a liquidity staking protocol on Solana that has seen significant growth in adoption over the past year and is stunning in its financials, with over $550 million in fee revenue in 2024.
Grass (GRASS): Grass is a decentralized data network that rewards users for sharing unused network bandwidth through Chrome extensions. This bandwidth is used to crawl online data, which is then sold to artificial intelligence companies and developers for training machine learning models, effectively crawling online data, and compensating users.
This article Grayscale’s 2025 first quarter market outlook is out! Added HYPE, ENA, VIRTUAL and a number of Solana protocols first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.
