Author: Donovan Choy, Blockworks; Compiled by: Bai Shui, Jinse Finance

Pendle

The existence of Pendle is due to the speculative nature of cryptocurrency.

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

It wasn't until early 2024, with the token explosion of Pendle, that Pendle achieved remarkable success, with its TVL soaring from millions to billions of dollars. Pendle's Principle Tokens (PT) and Yield Token (YT) yield mechanisms remain indispensable tools for anyone looking to execute any form of leveraged point or fixed income.

Fluid

Fluid is a perfect example of innovation. Fluid draws on many successful primitives from DeFi, such as concentrated liquidity from Uniswap v3 and utilization curves from Aave, and then re-engineers 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 with 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 areas to compete in. This has led USDe to reach an impressive market capitalization of $6 billion within a year.

Previous stablecoins were built along a spectrum from centralization (USDT) to scalability (DAI). In contrast, Ethena has reached a series of impressive business development agreements with CEX and designed USDe, a scalable stablecoin that exploits CEX-DEX financing rate arbitrage and provides yields 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 leverages crypto token incentives to expand the deployment of the RTK network. According to November data, GEODNET has deployed at least 10,000 sites in 140 countries, exceeding the combined total of 5,000 sites from traditional providers Trimble and Hexagon.

Notably, GEODNET has significant cost advantages. Deploying a base station with 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 are the primary 'pick and shovel' game in the recent AI 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 cap is met, the native token of the agents will be bound to the DEX liquidity pool (Uniswap v2).

Virtuals is built on the foundation of Base and has spawned at least 12,000 AI agents since its inception, including the popular anime ship Luna, which runs 24/7 and allows tips to be paid using the agents' respective tokens.

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