Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )
Author: Hao Fangzhou
In previous years, the year-end inventory was comprehensive and comprehensive, listing many sections, and unfolding one by one along data, events, trends, and trends. Taking into account objectivity and neutrality, some of the authors ideas were buried. In addition, in daily work, I am obsessed with short-term hot spots and rarely have the opportunity to think about the industry over a long period of time. This year, I simply changed my thinking - directly extracting the most important people, things, and things in the Web3 field in 2024 from my subjective impressions. Those that are not good will be left aside, and those that are deeply memorable will be touched upon; then use condensed observations and expressions to string together an overview, just as a way to organize my mind and refine my cognition. If it can resonate or provide reference for readers and friends, I would be grateful.
Let’s start with this picture.
2024 Crypto Market Structure
From the perspective of asset fluctuations, the biggest highlights in 2024 are BTC and Meme coins; in the middle, there are indeed some new and old projects in which I have invested personal feelings, but to be honest, they are tasteless and it is a pity to abandon them, so I will get rid of them in 2025.
BTC: New highs, new cycles, new attributes, new narratives
In 2024, the US election and encryption policy will leverage each other. Trumps rule of listing Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset of the United States will elevate Bitcoin to the only resource in the new international financial cold war, pushing traditional financial institutions that were once hesitant and hesitant to advance into encryption.
The entry of old money has been one of the narratives of BTC price increases for many years, or at least one of the Achilles heel of the solid consensus. This years overwhelming good news has not only injected confidence into the value of BTC, but also set the ceiling for future gains and growth rates.
With the increase in institutional holdings, the expansion of CeFi product lines such as ETFs, and the trend of Macrostrategys stock-to-coin linkage gameplay, BTCs connection with traditional financial markets such as US stocks, US bonds, and the US dollar index has increased, and its asset attributes will irreversibly shift toward the digital universe version of gold and become less punk. Combined with the fact that the coin price has entered the upper vacuum zone, profit expectations have become elusive, and the estimation of demand saturation, past cycle theories, and pricing models will all become invalid.
I assert that this bull market is the last big slope cycle of BTC. After that, its explosiveness, volatility, and retracement will not be better than before.
So is Crypto investing no longer sexy? No, Alpha is just pulling out of BTC.
Policy coins and business coins: Which mainstream copycats can take on the overflow?
If BTCs price trend is close to that of gold in the middle and late stages, then ETH is more like an infrastructure technology stock with a fundamental stability like that of Old X. (Ethereum itself talks less about price and more about value, which makes it very much like a technology stock, right?)
2024 is also a big year for crypto ETFs. The policy winds first blow to BTC and ETH, and the interest of institutions is understood: the product technology security and stability must be proven for a long time; there must be business fundamentals to rely on, and it is applicable to traditional benchmarking rules and valuation methods; the trading volume is small but large, the positions are widely distributed, and the chip structure and cost are clear... XRP, SOL, DeFi leaders and other old-fashioned currency circles are on standby.
Since the water source is above, considering the long-term and prudent supervision and the slowdown of institutional productization, the growth rate of this type of target is also average. Feedback to investors perception, although the old projects tried their best to save their reputation and announced the good news of progress, the old highs were too high, and the historical burdens and vehicles were heavy, so it was not like the past good years, and the cottage season with a comprehensive and violent rise and the increase of mainstream coins attracted attention.
What about the new projects that are launching coins to take advantage of this bull market?
New structural opportunities: BTCFi, regional regulatory dividends
This year, judging from the price alone, it is true that the copycats have not kept up. Fortunately, price and value have always proved each other. The price performance of BTC and the new Meme kings has made Mass Adoption a natural result. The issuance volume and the number of active wallets of USDT have both reached new highs, and old money and new leeks have rushed into the market.
When the pace (investment decision-making speed) is too fast, a mismatch occurs between capital (price) and cognition (value), and when a crack (time difference in value return) appears, light (structural opportunities) will shine in.
This section will first discuss two issues from the perspective of the industry and practitioners (the last section will discuss the big opportunities for investors from the external and internal perspectives) :
1. BTCFi in a broad sense is divided into CeFi direction - represented by MSTR, Coinbase, BitDeer, ETF, and native direction - Rune, ORDI and other assets, L2, side chain, lightning channel and other expansions, and then pledge, lending and other DeFi.
The former can be said to have performed brilliantly; I am also very sorry that the latter did not take advantage of the momentum across the board.
The Bitcoin ecosystem originally combined the strongest benefits of the mainnet tokens and inherited the development experience of past predecessors, but it stepped on the head of a giant and even fell off the bench. You said that the assets of the Chinese and Western agreements would not take over each other, you said that the bet of seppuku with a market value of 1 billion was not enough, you said that exchanges and investment institutions have made in-depth layouts, and take-off is in the future...
I said that the basic problem of product-market mismatch has not been solved: BTC has entered the era of big players, and big funds have their own safety margins and process standards. This is the current situation on the demand side; the developer-style on-chain operations in the BTC native world, using small liquidity pools to carry large institutional funds, exchanging precious pie in exchange for high-potential derivative assets, and entrusting security to pirated VMs, this is a supply-side fantasy.
BTC ecosystem projects do not need to rush to copy the gameplay of other ecosystems in the golden age of airdrops. They should recognize their audiences, switch the object of storytelling, take care of the needs of institutions, and have the opportunity to share the cake with BTC CeFi.
2. Clarification of supervision , strategic reserve of BTC, expansion of original financial channels to set up crypto categories, advance payment of policy promises during the election... These pioneer actions of the United States were quickly followed and imitated. Russian lawmakers followed suit with relevant proposals, South Korea postponed the collection of virtual asset taxes, and Hong Kong, China, made frequent statements and frequent actions in the direction of exchange licenses and stablecoins... It can be seen that no one wants to be ridiculed by both sides like the German government, the protagonist of the mid-year sell-off.
The attitude towards the crypto industry lies in the level of morality - the foresight and mind of policymakers; the level of law - led by large traditional financial institutions and technology companies; the level of technology - through RWA and CeFi products; the level of tools - specific cryptocurrency derivatives such as stablecoins, ETPs, and indices.
The latter three all have opportunities that can be tailored to practitioners from different backgrounds.
Biggest Alpha: Meme, New Token Distribution Mechanism
Next, I will change direction and talk about the annual representative of “from the bottom up” - Meme.
Nothingness? Abstract? On the edge? Second creation? Meme is simply hitting the spiritual core of New Money (which I call the money of the future) in the face. Most of the fun and excitement of Web3 this year was brought by Meme.
Meme has the foundation of flexibly tradable attention economy, which also makes people follow the operating memory of buy new, not old. Funds are quickly transferred with attention, the consensus of old projects is easy to disperse, and new projects are increasingly short-lived. This is the inevitable result of the lowering of the threshold for asset issuance. Just as Tik Tok has lowered the threshold for content creation, the massive content has diluted the quality rate and increased the screening and retention of high-quality content.
In the early days of Meme, the high-multiple wealth effect created an illusion for both buyers and sellers. Investors with observation bias and coin issuers who were eager to make a move secretly thought, “Can I win, too?”
Unfortunately, in the high-speed era, the window left for novices (retail investors) is short. With the bilateral specialization of Meme, the success-failure ratio of investors and issuers will soon return to the average line, and the volume tools, volume narratives, and volume cognition levels are not equal and transparent. When the tired and red-eyed gamblers force the casinos, Meme will usher in a turning point at the end of the adverse selection in the economic sense.
What’s interesting is that “posting a meme” is attracting “serious projects” and “serious entrepreneurs” around me to join the industry.
Here’s a side story: British singer Lily Allen, whose Spotify listener count was nearly 8 million last month, joined Onlyfans in October and shared photos of her feet for her 1,000 fans. “The music platform is severely exploitative. Selling feet can make more money than streaming. The entire music industry needs to reflect on this... Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
Should the Web3 industry also reflect on itself? Or should it embrace the empty “Why is it serious”?
Perhaps , the rise of Meme does not need to be forcibly attached to and upgraded to culture. Simply talking about emotions can also explain something. Do you still remember that the market sentiment before Meme was highly concentrated on airdrops? In the first half of the year, there were a lot of discussions in the circle about VC coins and the controversy of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the underwater unlocking of secret cabins by institutions and KOLs, the feeling of powerlessness of being PUA-ed, and dissatisfaction with the distribution of tokens. The rise of Meme and the more popular form of token distribution have hit the collective emotions of those who have not benefited. The iteration of the token distribution mechanism is also one of the main lines of the evolution of the currency circle.
Get inspiration and reflection from such Alpha. Exposing a problem is always the first step to solving it, and value dilution is also a prelude to value discovery.
2024 Three products that amazed me
We have talked enough about vertical fields, so let’s relax in this section and review three products that surprised me: Polymarket, Macrostrategy, and pump.fun, which correspond to the business, BTCFi, and Meme categories mentioned above, as well as the small, medium, and large opportunities in venture capital this year.
Polymarket: The picture is right, the wind is coming
Star of the Ethereum system and V value standard (creating meaningful applications);
It’s hard to believe that the 128 million wallets holding Ethereum don’t have financial needs as their primary need;
Friends who understand gambling know how real the demand is;
Compared with writing a logically coherent investment memo, guessing a coin and answering multiple-choice questions are much easier.
Just in time for the Olympics and the US election...
The above combination is hard to go out of the circle.
Macrostrategy: CeFi leader with extraordinary strategies
I used to think that the only ones who could cause a nuclear explosion-level industry disaster were the three gods in ancient Greece who were in charge of public chains, exchanges, and stablecoins: Ethereum, Binance, and USDT. This year, congratulations to BTC for having a heavyweight guest.
Given that BTC holdings tend to be concentrated in the future and whale entities are exposed to similar market risks (US dollar economy), in 2025, I will gradually reduce my BTC holdings and closely observe the precursor indicators of the collapse of the Macrostrategy model.
pump.fun: Demand-driven, continuous revenue
Meme×infrastructure tools, is there a future? pump.fun tells you with over $100 million in monthly revenue.
pump.fun, the TikTok of the crypto world, supports the issuance of assets and stories, has businesses, products, sustained protocol revenue capabilities, referenceable valuation standards, and cleverly leverages Solana’s advantages. How can it lose?
I will post the picture at the beginning of this article again.
Looking back at this year, on one end of the barbell, innovative assets are maturing, driven by native supporting infrastructure . Before it completely becomes a game for robots, I still have the opportunity to participate; on the other end, core assets are becoming mainstream, driven by external policy support and traditional institutional allocations . I will move BTC to surrounding spillover sectors when the time comes.
In terms of assets, the direct beneficiaries are BTC and Meme; in terms of model innovation, the first prize goes to Macrostrategy and pump.fun.
In addition, my favorite Ethena, Pendle, Jupiter, Hyperliquid, OKX Web3 Wallet, etc. also had outstanding performances this year. In order to prevent saying everything as if saying nothing, I will not expand on them in this article.
2025, cherish the short good years
In the current development of science and technology and finance, big innovations are usually A standing on the shoulders of B, while small innovations are the permutations and combinations of A×B, B×C, etc. Such mix-ups and exhaustive enumerations are very suitable for AIs associative ability. This year and next year will be big years for AI, and Web3 innovation and investment may also be combined with the theme.
Looking ahead to 2025, the biggest externalities will probably fall on the tools and services that AI infiltrates into every aspect of Web3 ; the biggest endogenous surprise may be MemeFi ; as for those homogeneous altcoins at the mid-level (such as copying and pasting the same business model at different underlying layers with little difference), I really lack imagination, and maybe they will be favored by traditional funds and grow together with CeFi.
My boss reminds me from time to time: feeling repetitive is a kind of arrogant fatigue, and it is also a loss of sensitivity. I think it may depend on how we choose to look at the spiraling industry - when I put myself in the perspective of Lao Deng and look down, I see these concentric circles, which are finally dust under the wheel of history; if I put myself on the side, wow, the industry is accumulating users (leeks) and improving technology (applications)!
I am very proud that Crypto is still the fastest growing industry, bar none. No matter how you look at it, what is more important is to do it. I am so happy to be involved in it and ride the wave.
At the end of writing, I set a New Years resolution for myself: clean out outdated experience, update investment methods, establish a learning system for new assets, change positions and concentrate my firepower, and strive to upgrade my pile of SB money wallets to Smart Money addresses.
Related Reading
Odaily Planet Daily released the FAT trend list in September, which includes the Top Ten Turning Point Events of the Year and Top Ten Trend Narratives of the Year .
