Author: Anil Lulla, CEO of Delphi Digital; Translated by: Golden Finance xiaozou
People like to say that cryptocurrencies have no PMF (Product-Market Fit), but from my perspective, such a statement indicates that they are a group of cynics who have not taken the time to explore the various applications that developers around the world are constantly launching.
I want to highlight some of my favorite crypto applications that I used in 2024, hoping to inspire some of you to give these apps a try. These teams work hard to create useful products, and we can at least take the time to test their efforts.
Before we dive deeper into the discussion, I need to make some disclaimers and disclosures. I have personally engaged with these products and/or their tokens in various ways. I use * to indicate any project I have engaged with in any capacity. None of this constitutes financial advice—it’s simply a summary of my thoughts on the projects I have liked over the past year. The order in which the projects appear in this article does not indicate their importance.
1**、**HyperLiquid
To stand out, HyperliquidX has performed exceptionally well. Over the past month, you may have read thousands of tweets about it, so I’ll briefly share my thoughts. Everyone who regularly uses the product loves it without exception. In fact, I haven’t heard many complaints—so far, we can’t say that about many crypto applications.
I try not to use leverage frequently anymore, so I am not the target user for HyperLiquid. In fact, I first used this app when it was released to purchase HYPE* tokens. Soon, I saw the reason why its fans have been crazy about it for a whole year. Not only is the UI/UX quite CEX (centralized exchange) in style (yes, I know it only has four validators), but it is also encouraging to see how quickly the team responds to user criticism, concerns, and feedback on their Discord.
Since its establishment in 2023, HyperLiquid has built a fervent community with over 200,000 users and a cumulative trading volume of nearly $450 billion. The platform currently has open positions exceeding $2.5 billion. It is highly successful, currently holding over 60% of all USDC on Arbitrum.
Since the launch of HYPE, people’s interest in it has not only stemmed from its clean UI/UX as a trading platform. Although it is still in its early stages, it has already formed an impressive ecosystem. The project not only promises an exciting future but has also realized an ambitious vision.
2**、**Polymarket
Since entering the crypto space in 2017, prediction markets have been one use case that excites me, and I believed it would be the first to truly take off, like early projects such as Augur. Clearly, that has not been the case. Nearly seven years have passed, and thanks to Polymarket, prediction markets officially became mainstream in 2024. It played a perfect role on the night of the U.S. presidential election, announcing in advance what I believe to be the most significant election winner of our generation. To provide some background, Polymarket handled $3.6 billion in election bets and predicted Trump’s victory six hours ahead of the Associated Press.
It has created a new form of media and provided the world with other data points for people to refer to when informed about future situations by potentially biased information sources. Many have called for its abolition after the election, but to be honest, it has performed well. Below the highs of November but still above the levels of mid-October. I still often use it to see which markets are active, and it seems that the sports sector is beginning to gain more share on it.
Moreover, we should give praise where it is due. Fun.xyz has built a great checkout product for Polymarket that allows users to deposit any tokens on any chain, card, or CEX (such as Binance, Coinbase, etc.). Some of my ordinary friends are even using it, and they have no complaints. The crypto user experience is not as bad as everyone says!
3**、**Farcaster
To be honest, although I was a regular user of Warpcast in the first half of 2024, in the second half I only opened it once or twice a week at most. One thing I want to do in 2025 is to change this situation.
At the beginning of 2024, I attended the FarCon conference held in Los Angeles, where most of the people I spoke with were builders of Farcaster. This is indeed a bullish signal. Although it’s still early, many builders are focused on creating some very cool niche things, thus having the opportunity to attract the awe of communities that are focused and adventurous towards Farcaster. I think you will see a lot of strange things emerging around this social graph in 2025.
I also believe that Dan Romero and his team will continue to innovate rapidly. They focus on features that help core users expand their social graphs and reputations, which will create a great sandbox for builders to create new experiences. Features like channels, frameworks, and tip tokens (such as DEGEN) have already developed new ways to coordinate social interactions. Games like Clankermon and Stokefire have shown me some interesting and unique content.
Although it has decreased by 50% compared to its peak, it still performs well in user retention.
4**、**Ethena
At Delphi, we have high expectations for the launch of Ethena, but somehow it has exceeded our expectations. Over the past year, Ethena’s synthetic dollar USDe has grown to nearly 6 billion dollars. Among stablecoins, it is now second only to Tether and USDC.
What impressed me the most is that Ethena recently partnered with Blackrock to launch a new US dollar stablecoin, USDtb, supported by Blackrock’s BUIDL fund. Like USDC, USDtb is backed by cash and cash-equivalent reserve assets. In the short term, due to financing issues, the yield on USDe may remain high. However, Ethena can now flexibly adjust the treasury yield to supplement USDe. This effectively creates an APY “floor” around the treasury yield, enabling Ethena to further scale up.
Like most people, I am optimistic about the growth of stablecoins in 2025. The current market capitalization is around $200 billion, and I believe it is expected to exceed $300 billion, with a potential to reach over $400 billion next year. I think Ethena, with its smart products and continuous focus on integration, will play an important role in helping attract a large amount of capital on-chain. We have already seen other decentralized stablecoins or synthetic dollars being integrated into DeFi in various ways, and Ethena’s USDe seems to be the first to perform well in terms of integration with CEX (centralized exchanges) and TradFi. This helps them build a strong moat in the early stages while chasing the largest crypto market.
5**、**Gunzilla
As we all know, Delphi is passionate about the crypto gaming industry. Through our early work and investments in teams like Axie Infinity, Yield Guild, and Immutable, we have been working hard to help bring games to market and bring the masses into the crypto world. Gunzilla Games has achieved this - users have encountered no friction from crypto components.
Off the Grid, a battle royale game themed around cyberpunk, is the first crypto game released on PlayStation and Xbox, attracting over 12 million wallets and 230 million transactions. Players have streamed over 4 million hours of gameplay on platforms like Twitch, with the game having ranked in the top three live games twice. It utilizes Avalanche’s play-to-own mechanism, putting into action the widely discussed benefits of cryptocurrency in gaming: digital ownership can enhance player engagement.
I strongly recommend that you listen to the conversation between Piers Kicks and the founder of Gunzilla on the Delphi podcast last month. The team’s unparalleled attention to detail and commitment to providing what players truly want is evident. Currently, they are developing their own products as they work to become the infrastructure that enables more mainstream AAA games to launch in their ecosystem. I am really excited to see how Gunzilla continues to evolve and shape the future of crypto gaming.
6**、**Lighthouse
For many years, Delphi has invested in several portfolio trackers (Zapper, Debank) and wallet observers, and we believe these tools have the potential to become mainstream tools in the crypto world. Tools like these, along with Nansen, have become my main tools for managing my wallet and observing others. Until a few weeks ago, I was still manually using spreadsheets and other applications to track my total portfolio.
Will Price casually mentioned Lighthouse to me, and since then I have been captivated. It is by far the best and most comprehensive portfolio tracker I have used. EVM, Solana, Cosmos, Aptos, Sui, CEX, Hyperliquid, DyDx; they can track everything. During the few days I tried this app, I spoke with the team, and they are extremely focused on privacy protection.
Among all the applications I mentioned in this article, I guess this is a product that many people have just heard of. I am very impressed with it, and I think it is a wise attempt. I have been looking for such a product for several years, and I am glad to have finally found it. I have no financial ties with Lighthouse, although I did request the Lighthouse team to allow me to invest. I am just a user who is very satisfied with their product.
7**、**Pump.fun
This year, pump.fun has turned attention into liquidity. I don’t think this mechanism has received enough of the praise it deserves - it is a simple yet necessary solution with a strong and direct PMF (Product-Market Fit). It lowers the barriers to entry while promoting a fairer distribution, and its bonding mechanism mitigates the risk of rug pulls.
In one year, pump.fun has already garnered over $300 million in fees and helped issue more than 5 million tokens. While everyone in this field hopes the team will vertically expand by launching a DEX (Decentralized Exchange), they chose to horizontally grow by exploring new ways to attract attention. In my conversation, live streaming initially seemed like an unexpected direction. It ultimately spiraled out of control, but mainly because it was too successful.
Whether you like it or not, anything that can be financialized will inevitably be financialized. Pump.fun has the potential to create a social application around speculation, so it must be mentioned here. By the way, my investment in pump.fun was through a small angel investment, not through Delphi Ventures. Betting on the founders is an easy decision, but I am still shocked by their execution capabilities.
8**、**GOAT
My favorite crypto moment this year might be when the Crypto x AI field found a testing sandbox—Twitter and wallets. Our Delphi team has been outspoken about our excitement and curiosity regarding this cross-disciplinary area. Just as we were conducting our Crypto x AI research, GOAT was launched and captured all the attention in the crypto space.
Witnessing the Turing test become a reality is an incredible experience, as people on Crypto Twitter are questioning which bots are AI and which are real humans. No matter how early it may be, I believe that GOAT is one of the most important events of 2024, as it provides a tangible way to think about the interactive possibilities in this crucial intersection of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. Since then, we have witnessed a surge of these agents, seen teams innovate, stand out, and attract attention. The coolest part is the high interoperability of all these upgrades, maximizing the efforts of each developer through the ability to be applied to other agents. While some of these bots can be annoying, I truly believe that in 2025, these agents will flock together on the internet to bring truly interesting and even quirky things.
9**、VIRTUAL Ecosystem**
I don’t plan to write too much about Virtuals right now, as this is one of the new projects I’ve been researching. I just feel that this is a “pickaxe and shovel” strategy for AI agents. So far, they have released over 12,000 agents. Don’t get me wrong, most of the agents are still quite bad, sometimes at best just annoying responders. However, I expect to see exponential improvements in the coming months, making this project worth paying attention to.
Aixbt* is a particularly noteworthy account that deserves attention and observation. The data does not lie; it occupies a share of mind in the cryptocurrency space for good reason. It simply posts alpha on Twitter—but it is backed by years of research from 0rxbt, who has taken the time to gather a wealth of crypto data and curate an intelligent Crypto Twitter social graph, giving aixbt a “personality.” While many cryptocurrency celebrities often discuss the same projects in the echo chamber of Crypto Twitter, aixbt consistently presents fresh alpha, mainly consisting of projects I haven’t seen anywhere else.
10and11:MetaDAOand****MetaLeX
Few people know or remember this, but Delphi was one of the first companies to receive DAO rewards (Synthetix) in 2019. Since then, we have been active in dozens of governance processes and even helped design governance systems and projects for cryptocurrencies like Gitcoin. Initially, DAOs were the most exciting aspect of this field for me. However, as we faced the complexities of working with DAOs, my enthusiasm waned. Most DAOs were established to achieve some ambitious vision, but they spent all their time figuring out how to “DAO.” This year, two projects stood out for their practical approaches to addressing these challenges: MetaDAO and MetaLeX (despite both having Meta in their names, the two projects are unrelated).
MetaDAO has sparked many interesting discussions internally at Delphi (largely thanks to our META maxi mrink0). While some criticize Solana for a lack of innovation, MetaDAO is the world’s first project to deploy futarchy. I have to mention it here because it is one of the coolest on-chain experiments I have seen in 2024.
Unlike traditional voting methods, MetaDAO uses the market to predict and determine the best outcomes for the DAO. It’s interesting to see different protocols integrating it into their decision-making processes. For example, Drift utilizes MetaDAO for market-based token listings on its exchange. As we move into 2025, I am closely watching MetaDAO, hoping it can enhance voter participation in cryptocurrency and improve the diversity of voters.
On the other hand, MetaLeX is a concept that Lex node and Delphi Labs have been refining for years. In 2024, it finally went live, building a future where DAOs can focus on their missions without getting bogged down by governance challenges. Through BORGs, MetaLeX enables DAOs to connect with the real world while maintaining their crypto native essence.
This is the culmination of Gabe’s experience accumulated over the years from the traditional world and the crypto world. He has been the technical director at Delphi Labs for many years, and to be honest, I have a lot of respect for him. For Delphi Labs, making this concept a reality is a no-brainer, as there is no one else in the world who can build it the right way. MetaLeX fills the legal gaps with code and fills the code gaps with law. Their BORGs can mutually execute multi-party trust commitments and reduce the trust assumptions on all counterparties.
MetaLeX has already helped teams like Lido, Curve, and ZKSync transition to BORGs. They have been developing a comprehensive set of tools for minimizing trust governance, and I believe that by 2025, we will begin to see the impact of their work on integrating their DAOs.
12**、**Sandwich
This is a product created by one of my friends. Sandwich is a private placement trading tool used for executing CEX orders (as well as HyperLiquid orders). It allows you to access institutional-level algorithms, which helps save costs, reduce slippage, and enables you to access multiple tools and trade across various exchanges through a unified user interface.
Considering that I primarily buy and hold tokens and do not frequently use leverage, I am not the target user in this regard. That said, every trader friend who sees it has become a super user. The Mac application is about to be launched, but if you have a desktop, I encourage you to give it a try.
13**、**9dcc
I think what Gmoney and 9dcc are doing is the coolest thing in the crypto space right now. He has successfully combined his passion and carved his own path, providing another mainstream attempt for cryptocurrency.
Essentially, cryptocurrency is a very powerful coordination tool. Utilizing it to gamify universally present elements such as fashion and interpersonal interactions is a brilliant move—surprisingly, this remains a largely unexplored area. Gmoney continues to delve deep into this field, enabling him to connect cutting-edge on-chain ideas and bring them into the real world.
14**、**DeBridge
Over the years, I have tried many bridging tools, but DeBridge is the one I have used the most this year. Not only is the experience seamless, but their team has also been one of the fastest in integrating new chains. No matter where your assets are or where you want them to go, the experience is the same.
They leverage cross-chain intents to connect DeFi in real-time, making the bridging experience feel almost magical. According to deAlex, they have settled over 4 million intents, with a trading volume exceeding 6 billion dollars.
This is the first bridge I recommend to my ordinary friends that doesn’t require answering any questions about how to use it. Just this alone is impressive, and for that, I thank the team’s efforts.
15and16:Echoand****Legion
2024 is the year of the ICO comeback. I am a loyal fan of the approach Cobie has taken with Echo - it seems to resonate very well with Crypto Twitter users and has a product-market fit. Supporting the people you trust to bring interesting deal flow directly to you is a win-win situation. Echo has already facilitated over 150 transactions and raised over $55 million for projects from nearly 6,000 users.
On the other hand, Legion adopts a more bottom-up approach by handing project tokens to more consistent community members. They developed a Legion Score, which currently includes three main variables: ( on-chain activity, ) social influence, and ( development experience. This score will change over time, allowing projects to better understand who they are letting into their capital structure.
Legion is a project that has been incubated by our Delphi Labs for more than a year, and just a month ago, its platform saw its first batch of transactions. The numbers speak for themselves: over $5 million raised, with nearly 100,000 users already registered for Legion Score.
I believe that by 2025, we will see more projects utilizing such platforms to help distribute tokens. The timing of the new U.S. government coming into power couldn’t be better. I strongly recommend everyone to register on both of these platforms and check them weekly. While these platforms strive to curate high-quality projects for their members, there may be many attractive opportunities.
17**、**Kaito
In 2024, Kaito has quickly become a very powerful tool for cryptocurrency users. In a way, Kaito and Delphi Research aim to solve a similar problem: helping crypto members cut through all the noise in the crypto world to find alpha and valuable insights. To this end, our research team spends hundreds of hours conducting research, then condensing all the necessary and relevant information into about 30 minutes of reading content, focusing on areas where we believe alpha will emerge. In this process, our analysts take the time to think through and filter out most of the noise, only analyzing the understandings and conclusions that are important for any specific protocol or niche. Where Kaito excels is in using its smart algorithms to help sift through all the noise on CryptoTwitter to uncover nuggets of gold. In fact, when I search for a specific project or token, it helps me skip over so much noise, which truly amazes me.
I can see that it is a very useful and necessary tool for all traders. However, I have been using it to find talent. Typically, in any specific field, some of the most outspoken people become potential hires for our Delphi team. In fact, we just sent an offer to a talent discovered by me through Kaito, and they will be joining our team in January.
I believe Kaito has the potential to serve many different user groups through a product, as there are many cryptocurrencies that continue to be active on Twitter.
18**、**Grass
Grass allows users to earn rewards by sharing excess internet bandwidth with the rest of the network. This is a simple plugin that I have been running in the background for most of 2024. Our venture capital team has invested heavily in various Crypto x AI projects, but Grass may be the one I am personally most excited about (at least among the projects I can publicly discuss right now).
Data is the next frontier in model development. We have seen AI labs attempting to collaborate with platforms like Reddit or StackOverflow to gain API key access to their data. Grass provides an API key for the entire internet.
It can efficiently and at scale achieve this. They already have 2.5 million nodes on the supply side, providing unfiltered data for training and AI responses. There will also be new ways to join the network, such as people being able to plug in mobile and hardware devices into their WiFi routers. According to research by 0xdrej, the current demand for joining the network is already in the nine-digit range.
The Grass project is already helping traditional AI professionals take the Crypto X AI crossover field seriously, and I am optimistic about their development prospects in 2025.
19**、**Ostium
Since our team collaborated with Kain and the SNX family in 2019, we are excited to bring traditional assets to the on-chain world. Ostium seems to be fulfilling that promise.
Kaledora has made it clear that she is keen on making Ostium an all-encompassing marketplace. Currently, Ostium offers users long-term or short-term perpetual trading in forex, commodities, cryptocurrencies, and stock indices. So far, they have completed over $166 million in trades. What’s cool is that when the trading volume of certain trading pairs surges. For example, the USD/JPY trading pair has seen a trading volume of $21 million since its inception, with most of it occurring during the Japanese bank interest rate decision period (not sure if you remember the 72-hour short-term bear market).
They have launched some streamlined structured products based on Polymarket. For example, once the Polymarket odds for Trump winning on election night reach a certain percentage, you can let Ostium go long on Bitcoin by 10 times. You can set it up this way, and while everyone else in the world stays up to see what happens, you go to sleep and wake up very happily (and well-rested).
With the new U.S. government no longer opposing cryptocurrencies, I believe it will allow Ostium to launch some things on-chain that we couldn’t have imagined in the past four years. (As I publish this article, Ostium has actually launched SPX Perps!)
20**、**Moonwalk Fitness
Moonwalk Fitness leverages the coordination capabilities of cryptocurrency to create a powerful accountability tool for fitness.
Currently, the main purpose of the first version of Moonwalk is to incentivize people to walk daily. You can create a group, set a daily step goal, and deposit USDC/SOL/BONK tokens. As long as you meet your set goal, at the very least, you will get your money back. If others do not reach their goals, their money will be distributed to the winners. This is a simple yet powerful tool to encourage good behavior, and I am excited to see what its next iteration will look like. You can see that this concept is not only applicable to step incentives: setting goals for daily sleep time, water intake, etc. Regarding rewards, I am curious about which projects sponsor competitions to help different people enter this field.
Although it is still early days, they already have nearly 100,000 registered users; they have locked in over 500,000 people to take responsibility. They will soon release a mobile app, and I have been pestering the team about it for quite some time. This could be the first crypto app that my parents use every week.
Alright, this is my list of favorite projects for 2024. These are just a few products that I like, and I want to thank their teams for their hard work. Unfortunately, I clearly cannot exhaustively list all the teams that I think have done well in 2024. Other projects that quickly come to mind include wallets like Morpho, Jito, Cowswap, Jupiter, Pendle, and Phantom/Rabby.
I am very curious—what is your favorite project in 2024?
