By Xave Meegan, Founder of Frachtis
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
During the Token 2049 conference, Frachtis founder Xave Meegan communicated with several VCs and project founders, and published an article on the X platform to summarize it. He pointed out 11 areas that he believed were worthy of attention, including DeSci and AI.
Desci
After talking to the founder of HairDAO, I have a better understanding of DeSci. Cryptocurrency is very suitable for solving deep-rooted scientific problems in academia and government funding. Now I am studying DeSci's business model and finding out which science people care about is underfunded. At some point, there may be an L1 winner that may dominate the category.
Dating
AI agent dating is starting to develop outside of crypto. It is foreseeable that some kind of dating app targeting crypto native users will emerge, perhaps using a bounty model, where someone offers a bounty to someone else (or an agent) for a tailored profile. The best match will receive a bounty set by the bounty owner.
Publicity
With the recent shift in stance on consumer privacy, there is now an opportunity to build applications that actually “invade” consumer privacy to some degree. Other users can see other accounts more easily than ever before/be informed of other accounts’ actions more easily than ever before. Users want to be alerted and prefer a convenient/targeted experience over a private/anonymous one. Privacy tools are still needed in institutional DeFi though and are an area of opportunity over the next 12 months.
AI
Crypto x AI is an interesting space right now, with closed source models improving over time and open source models at risk of becoming closed source (as the marketing effect of open source wears off). It is still early days in understanding how decentralized technologies can best address consumer (and enterprise) needs. Crypto tools can be used to solve some interesting problems in the AI RAG space, such as privacy.
app
It is undeniable that we are entering the age of applications. Most infrastructure entrepreneurs are now developing applications. AI makes it easier than ever for anyone to create applications. Now there are excellent infrastructure and blockchains that are growing rapidly (Solana, Base, Telegram, etc.). The applications that perform best in this cycle will be released on the infrastructure and have the best distribution channels. In particular, popular social applications have a great chance of being released in any ecosystem with promotion functions. We have already seen early signs of the development of social applications, such as pump.fun and Farcaster.
CRDTs
One interesting technology used in social that will continue to innovate is CRDTs (Note: Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, a data structure that can be replicated on multiple computers in a network, the copies can be updated independently and in parallel, without the need for coordination between copies, and guaranteeing that no conflicts will occur). Farcaster is one of the first companies to use the protocol in interesting ways, and others will follow and innovate the technology. CRDTs simply eliminate the need for consensus, ensuring that data is eventually consistent and conflict-free. As social protocols become more popular and require faster/cheaper storage, CRDTs and/or alternative technologies may become an interesting area for experimentation.
Telegram Mini App
Most app developers will want to build a Telegram Mini App to complement their web app. In the next 12-24 months, all web apps on any blockchain will also have a TG Mini App, because it is much easier to distribute apps there. There is an opportunity now to build the infrastructure for this, making it easier for developers to launch TG Mini Apps.
Telegram Middleware
Likewise, if all web apps eventually build TG Mini App versions, there will likely be a ton of opportunities to build other middleware that developers can use to enhance their apps. Telegram is intentionally opening up its technology to other third parties to build tools on top of it. This opportunity is somewhat similar to what happened when Facebook released the Facebook Platform, which provided a framework for developers to easily create apps (resulting in 100s of apps being created every day). Only this time it’s happening on Telegram, and the framework that developers are building apps on is likely to be created by a third party. It’s expected that when the decentralized Telegram Platform stack matures (thanks to AI), there will be far more than 100 apps coming online every day.
User Experience
As more and more applications come online, crypto needs to quickly address its user experience issues. It’s great to see teams like Infinex making significant progress in this direction. More teams should follow in the future. Using Face ID to guide users is a good way to get more people into this space. There may be an interesting intersection between the new UX frontend and TG Mini App. There will be some winners in the UX/guidance category targeting different markets.
robot
It’s still early days for the intersection of crypto and robotics, but some teams are working on it. Some projects are coming online to encourage robots to upload data for learning, but the winner of this category in crypto will need to do more for companies outside of crypto to stand out. Not many people at the conference explored this category in depth.
intellectual property
There wasn't much talk at the conference about Story Protocol's huge funding round, but they have a big presence in Korea. Story has the potential to develop similarly to other popular blockchains like Solana and Telegram. It's still early, but as the IPFi market develops, expect some interesting applications and protocols to emerge in the next 12 months.
Related reading: Vitalik 2049 speech full text: The crypto industry is no longer in its early stages, Ethereum needs to meet the needs of mainstream adoption
