Delphi CEO: My 20 Favorite Crypto Projects for 2024

Original article by Anil Lulla, Founding Partner and CEO of Delphi Digital

原文翻訳: ルフィ、フォーサイトニュース

People often say that 暗号 projects don’t have PMF (product-market fit), but in my opinion, this just shows that they are cynical and don’t take the time to explore the applications that developers around the world are constantly launching.

I wanted to highlight some of my favorite crypto apps that I’ve used this year and hopefully inspire some of you to try some of them out. These teams work hard to create useful products, and the least we can do is spend time testing the fruits of their efforts.

Before I dive in, a few disclaimers and disclosures. I have exposure to some of these tokens, either through Delphi Ventures, angel investments, or just personal purchases, and I’ll mark them with an *. This is not financial advice, just my thoughts on projects I’ve liked this year.

HyperLiquid

Hyperliquid is awesome. Youve probably read 1,000 tweets about it in the past month, so Ill just keep it short with my thoughts. Anyone who uses Hyperliquid regularly loves it, and Ive rarely heard complaints, which is very different from most apps.

I generally avoid using leverage, so I’m not Hyperliquid’s target user. In fact, I used the app to buy HYPE* for the first time when it launched. Immediately, I saw what its fans have been buzzing about for a year now. Not only is the UI/UX very CEX-like (I know it only has four validators right now), it’s also inspiring to see how quickly the team responded to criticism, concerns, and feedback from users in their discord.

Since its founding in 2023, HyperLiquid has amassed a cult-like community with over 200,000 users and nearly $450 billion in cumulative trading volume. The platform currently has over $2.5 billion in open interest. It has been so successful that it currently accounts for over 60% of all USDC trading volume on Arbitrum. The hype that HYPE has generated since its launch is not just because of its simple UI/UX as a perpetual contract exchange. It has promised to launch its own L1, and although it is still in its early stages, an ecosystem has already formed around it that cannot be ignored.

ポリマーケット

Prediction markets have been a use case that I’ve been excited about since I got into crypto in 2017, and I thought it would be the first use case to really take off. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. It took nearly 7 years, but 2024 is officially the year prediction markets went mainstream thanks to the success of Polymarket. It worked perfectly on election night and predicted the winner of what I believe is the most important election of our generation in advance. In the background, Polymarket processed $3.6 billion in election bets and announced Trump’s victory six hours before the Associated Press did.

Polymarket has created a new form of media and provides the world with a valuable data source for predictions about future events. Many people thought that Polymarket would fade away after the election, but in fact, it has been performing quite well, coming off its November highs but still above mid-October levels. I still visit it regularly to see which markets are active, and it seems that the sports markets have gained a good share.

Additionally, Fun.xyz built a great Checkout product for Polymarket that enables users to deposit using tokens on any chain or CEX (Binance, Coinbase, etc.). Friends of mine outside the industry have even used it and have no complaints. Crypto UX isn’t as bad as everyone says!

ファーキャスター

To be honest, while I used Warpcast every day for the first half of this year, I’ve only checked it once or twice a week at most since then. One thing I’d like to do in 2025 is change that.

I attended FarCon in LA earlier this year, and most of the people I spoke to there were Farcaster builders. This is a very optimistic sign. While it’s still early, many builders are focused on creating cool/niche stuff that has the potential to wow Farcaster’s dedicated and adventurous community. I think we’ll also see a lot of weird toys built around this social graph in 2025.

I also believe Dan Romero and the Farcaster team will continue to innovate at a rapid pace. Their focus on purposeful features that help empower core users and enable them to expand their social graph and reputation will provide a great sandbox for developers to create new experiences. Features like channels, frames, and DEGEN tipping are already exploring new ways to coordinate social interactions. Games like Clankermon and Stokefire show me some interesting and unique early signs. While they are down about 50% from their peak, they are still doing a good job retaining users overall.

Ethena*

Delphi had high hopes for Ethena, but it still exceeded our expectations. Ethena’s synthetic dollar USDe has grown to nearly $6 billion in the past year, becoming the second largest stablecoin after Tether and USDC.

I was particularly impressed by Ethena’s recent partnership with BlackRock to launch USDtb, a new USD stablecoin backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund. Like USDC, USDtb is backed by cash and cash equivalent reserve assets. In the short term, USDe yields are likely to remain high due to funding rates. However, Ethena now has the flexibility to redirect Treasury yields as a supplement. This effectively sets an APY “floor” around Treasury rates, allowing Ethena to scale further.

Like most people, I am bullish on the growth of stablecoins in 2025. The current value of stablecoins is about $200 billion, and I feel it will break $300 billion, with a good chance of reaching over $400 billion next year. I think Ethena will play an important role in attracting a lot of on-chain capital with its clever product and continued focus on product integration. We have seen other decentralized stablecoins or synthetic dollars integrated into DeFi in various ways, and Ethenas USDe seems to be the first to make progress with CEX and TradFi integration. This helped them build a strong moat early on.

Gunzilla*

Delphi’s passion for the crypto gaming space is well known. Through early partnerships and investments with teams like Axie Infinity, Yield Guild, and Immutable, we have been looking to bring games to market that expose crypto to the masses. Gunzilla Games does this without any friction for users due to its crypto component.

Off the Grid, a cyberpunk-themed battle royale game, was the first crypto game to launch on Playstation and Xbox, and has attracted over 12 million wallets and 230 million transactions. Players have streamed over 4 million hours of gameplay on platforms like Twitch, and the game has twice been in the top three live games. It uses Avalanche to implement its own game mechanics, putting into practice the much-talked-about benefits of cryptocurrency for gaming: digital ownership increases player engagement.

I highly recommend listening to a conversation Piers Kicks had with the founders of Gunzilla on the Delphi Podcast last month. The team’s unparalleled attention to detail and commitment to delivering what players really want is evident. They are currently in internal testing of their product, working towards becoming the infrastructure for more mainstream AAA games. I’m really excited to see how Gunzilla continues to grow and shape the future of crypto gaming.

Lighthouse.One

Over the years, Delphi has invested in multiple portfolio trackers (Zapper, Debank) and wallet watchers that we think have the potential to be on the front page of the crypto space. They, along with Nansen, have become my primary tools for managing my wallet and monitoring other wallets. That being said, I still do portfolio tracking manually using spreadsheets and other applications… until a few weeks ago.

Will Price casually mentioned Lighthouse.One in conversation with me and Ive been hooked ever since. This is by far the best full portfolio tracker Ive ever used. EVM, Solana, Cosmos, Aptos, Sui, CEXs, Hyperliquid, dYdX; it does it all. Within a few days of trying the app, I spoke with the Lighthouse.One team and their focus on privacy is second to none.

Of the apps I mentioned in this post, Im guessing its the first time many people are hearing about it. I was very impressed with it and how effortless it was to try. Ive been looking for a product like this for years and Im glad I finally found it. Although I begged the team to let me invest, I currently have no financial interest in Lighthouse. Im just a very happy user of their product.

Pump.Fun*

This year, Pump.Fun successfully turned attention into liquidity. I don’t think this mechanism gets enough praise, it’s a simple but necessary solution with a strong and immediate PMF. It lowers the barrier to entry while promoting a fairer issuance, and its bonding mechanism mitigates rug pulls.

In one year, Pump.Fun earned over $300 million in fee revenue and helped issue over 5 million tokens. While everyone expected the team to expand vertically by launching a DEX, they chose to grow horizontally by exploring new ways to attract attention. The live streaming feature seemed like an unexpected direction to me. It eventually got out of hand, but mostly because it was so successful. It was really cool, and I really think this feature needs better review.

Like it or not, everything that can be financialized will inevitably be financialized. Pump.Fun has the potential to build the go-to social app around speculation, so it can’t be ignored. By the way, I made an angel investment in Pump.Fun, not through Delphi Ventures. It was an easy decision to bet on the founders, and I’m still shocked by their performance this year.

Truth Terminal and GOAT*

Probably one of my most exciting moments in crypto this year was when the Crypto x AI space found a sandbox to try out: Twitter and wallets. The Delphi team has been very vocal about our excitement and curiosity about this intersection. We were in the midst of Crypto x AI research when GOAT launched and captured all the attention in the crypto space.

Watching the Turing Test unfold live was an incredible experience as people on Crypto Twitter (CT) questioned which bots were AI and which were human. Although it’s still early days, I think GOAT is one of the most important things to happen this year because it helps provide a tangible way to think about how this important intersection of Crypto x AI interacts with each other. Since then, we’ve witnessed a surge in AI agents and seen teams continue to innovate to stand out and attract attention. The coolest thing is the interoperability of these upgrades, where each developer’s efforts can be maximized by applying to everyone else’s agents. While some of these bots are annoying, I believe that the influx of these agents will lead to truly interesting and peculiar internet spaces over the next year.

バーチャル

I won’t be writing too much about Virtuals right now, as it’s one of the newer projects I’ve been working on. I just find it interesting as a pick and shovel for AI agents. So far, over 12,000 agents have been launched on Virtuals. Don’t get me wrong, most of these agents are still terrible and sometimes annoying responders at best. However, I expect to see a big improvement in the coming months.

aixbt* is a particularly compelling account to follow. The numbers don’t lie, it dominates the crypto space, it simply tweets alpha, but it’s backed by years of work from rxbt, who have taken the time to aggregate a ton of crypto data and curate an intelligent CT social graph, which gives aixbt its “personality”. While many crypto KOLs often talk about the same projects in the CT echo chamber, aixbt consistently showcases fresh alpha and stands out in my feed. This is a project I want to follow more closely.

MetaDAO and MetaLeX*

Few people know that Delphi was one of the first companies to receive compensation from a DAO (Synthetix) in 2019. Since then, we have been active in dozens of governance processes and even helped design governance systems and projects in the crypto space, such as Gitcoin. Initially, DAOs were one of the most exciting aspects of the space for me. However, my enthusiasm waned as we dealt with the complexity of working with them. Most DAOs are formed to achieve some ambitious vision, but then spend all their time figuring out how to DAO. This year, two projects stood out for their practical approaches to solving these challenges: MetaDAO and MetaLeX (despite being called Meta, the two projects are not related).

MetaDAO has sparked a lot of interesting discussion in Delphi (thanks in large part to the META enthusiasts

mrink 0). While some have criticized Solana for its lack of innovation, MetaDAO is the world’s first futuristic project. I had to mention it here because it’s one of the coolest on-chain experiments I’ve seen this year.

Instead of traditional voting, MetaDAO uses markets to predict and decide the best outcome for the DAO. It will be interesting to see different protocols integrate this into their decision-making process. For example, Drift leverages MetaDAO for market-based token listings on its exchange. I am watching MetaDAO closely as we head towards 2025, hoping it can increase crypto voter engagement and improve voter diversity.

MetaLeX, on the other hand, is a concept that lex_node and Delphi Labs have been refining for years. This year, it finally went live, moving towards a future where DAOs can focus on their mission without getting bogged down in governance challenges. Through BORG, MetaLeX enables DAOs to connect with the real world while remaining crypto-native.

This is the culmination of Gabes years of experience working in both traditional and crypto law. He was the General Counsel at Delphi Labs for many years, and to be honest, I have great respect for him. Delphi Labs had no hesitation in helping to make this happen because no one else in the world could build it the right way. MetaLeX uses law to fill in code gaps and code to fill in legal gaps. Their BORG can enforce mutual, multilateral trusted commitments and reduce trust assumptions for all counterparties.

MetaLeX has already helped teams like Lido, Curve, and ZKSync transition to BORG. They have been developing a comprehensive set of tools to enable trust-minimized governance. I think by 2025 we will start to see the impact of their work on DAOs integrating these tools.

Sandwich

This is a product launched by a friend of mine. Sandwich is a private trading tool for CEX order execution (along with HyperLiquid). It gives you access to insto level algorithms, which helps save fees and slippage, and enables you to access multiple instruments and multiple exchanges from a unified UI.

Given that I mostly buy and hold and don’t use leverage often, I’m not the target user for this product. That being said, every trader friend who has seen it has become a power user. A Mac app is coming soon, so if you have a desktop, give it a try.

9 dcc

I think gmoney is working on one of the coolest things in crypto 9 dcc. He has managed to combine his passions and carve out his own path to give crypto another outlet, which is to enter the mainstream.

Cryptocurrency is, by its very nature, an incredibly powerful coordination tool. Using it to gamify something as universal as fashion and face-to-face human interaction is genius, and surprisingly, it’s still an underexplored avenue. gmoney is still obsessed with it, so he can connect the dots between the cutting-edge on-chain ideas that are happening and transition them into the real world.

My personal favorite piece so far is the Guano Hat (IYKYK), but I’ve seen the beginnings of what’s to come. I have no doubt that 9dcc will gain some recognition outside of the crypto world by 2025.

DeBridge

Ive tried many cross-chain bridges over the years, but DeBridge is the one Ive used the most this year. Not only is the experience seamless, but its team is consistently one of the fastest to integrate new chains. No matter where your assets are or where you want them to go, you can use DeBridge.

They use cross-chain intent to connect DeFi in real time, making the cross-chain experience almost completely hidden. DeBridge co-founder deAlex said that they have processed more than 4 million intents and more than $6 billion in transaction volume. This is the first cross-chain bridge that I can recommend to ordinary friends without any questions. This alone is impressive, and for this, I am grateful for the work of the team.

Echo and Legion*

2024 is the year that ICOs return. I really like the approach taken by Cobie’s Echo. It seems to have perfect product-market fit with the crypto Twitter audience. Being able to support people you trust and have them curate and bring interesting deal flows directly to you is a win-win. Echo has helped facilitate over 150 deals and raised over $55 million for projects from nearly 6,000 users.

Legion, on the other hand, takes a bottom-up approach to get project tokens into the hands of more aligned community members. They developed the Legion Score, which currently considers three aspects of the score: (1) on-chain activity, (2) social influence, and (3) development experience. The score will continue to evolve over time, allowing projects to better understand who they let into their equity structure table.

Legion is a Delphi Labs incubator project that we have been working on for over a year, and the first transaction was launched on its platform just a month ago. The numbers speak for themselves: over $5 million raised, and nearly 100,000 users have registered for Legion Score.

I think we will see more projects utilizing platforms like this to help launch tokens in 2025. The timing couldn’t be better with a new administration taking office. Both of these platforms are ones I highly recommend everyone sign up for and check in on weekly. There will likely be a lot of attractive opportunities on these platforms as these platforms do their best to curate high-quality projects for their members.

Kaito

Kaito has quickly become a powerful tool that crypto users love this year. In a way, Kaito and Delphi Research aim to solve similar problems: helping users ignore the noise in the market to find alpha and valuable insights. Our research team does this by spending hundreds of hours on research and then condensing all the necessary and relevant information into about 30 minutes of reading. In the process, our analysts take the time to think and sift through most of the noise to simply analyze the important things to understand and summarize for any particular protocol or industry.

What Kaito does well is that it uses clever algorithms to help dig out the gems from all the noise on crypto Twitter. I was impressed by how much it helped me skip over the noise when searching for specific projects or stock symbols.

I understand how useful and essential it is for all traders. However, I also use it to find talent. Often, some of the most articulate people in any given field become potential candidates for our hiring. In fact, we just made an offer to someone I found through Kaito, and he will be joining our team in January. I think Kaito has the potential to serve many different user groups with one product.

Grass*

Grass allows users to earn rewards for sharing their excess internet bandwidth with the rest of the network. It’s a simple plugin that I’ve had running in the background for most of this year. Our Ventures team has invested in a ton of Crypto x AI projects, but Grass is probably the one I’m personally most excited about (at least among the deals I can talk about publicly at this point).

Data is the next frontier in model development. We’ve seen AI labs try to make deals with platforms like Reddit or StackOverflow to get API key access to their data. Grass provides API keys for the entire internet. It can do this efficiently and at scale. They already have 2.5 million nodes on the supply side providing uncensored data for training and answers in AI responses. There will also be new ways to join the network in the future, such as mobile and hardware plugins that people can order and plug into their WiFi routers.

Grass co-founder Andrej said that the networks inbound demand has reached 9 figures. Grass is a project that has helped traditional AI people take the intersection of Crypto x AI seriously, and I am confident in their 2025.

Ostium

We have been excited about making traditional assets accessible to the on-chain world since our team started working with Kain and SNX in 2019. Ostium appears to be delivering on that promise.

Ostiums Kaledora has made it clear that she is keen on making Ostium a one-size-fits-all 市場. Currently, they offer users long or short perpetual contracts on forex, commodities, cryptocurrencies, and stock indices. They have done over $166 million in volume to date. Its cool that certain currency pairs have seen spikes in volume. For example, USD/JPY has seen $21 million in volume since inception – most of which happened around the BoJ rate decision (if you remember that 72-hour bear market).

They have launched some neat structured products on Polymarket. For example, you can have Ostium 10x long BTC once Polymarket predicts that Trumps chances of winning reach a certain percentage on election night. You can set it up so that you can go to bed while the rest of the world stays up waiting for whats going to happen, and wake up without missing out on the yield opportunity. With the new government no longer opposed to crypto, I have a hunch that this will allow Ostium to launch some things on-chain that we couldnt imagine in the past four years.

Moonwalk Fitness*

Moonwalk Fitness uses the coordination power of cryptocurrency to create a powerful accountability tool for fitness.

Currently, the first version of Moonwalk is focused on incentivizing daily steps. You can create a group, set a daily step goal, and deposit USDC/SOL/BONK. As long as you meet the set goal, you can at least get your money back. If others in the competition dont meet the goal, their money will be divided among the winners. This is a simple but powerful tool to incentivize good behavior, and Im excited to see its next iteration. The concept can be applied far beyond running, but can also be: weightlifting goals, daily sleep hours, water intake, etc.

It’s still early days, but they’ve already signed up nearly 100,000 users. They’ll be launching a mobile app soon, which will probably be the first crypto app my parents will be able to use on a weekly basis.

要約する

That’s my list. These are just the products I like and whose teams I want to thank for all the hard work they put in. Unfortunately, I obviously can’t list all the teams that I think did a great job this year. Some others that quickly come to mind are Morpho, Jito, Cowswap, Jupiter, Pendle, and Phantom/Rabby wallets.

This article is sourced from the internet: Delphi CEO: My 20 Favorite Crypto Projects for 2024

Related: Airdrop Weekly Report | Users who claim ME tokens must set up a collection address before December 8; KIP Protocol will

Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina ) Author: Golem ( @web3_golem ) Odaily Planet Daily has reviewed the airdrop projects that can be claimed from December 2 to December 8, and also compiled important airdrop information. For detailed information, please see the text. MagicEden Project and air investment qualification introduction Magic Eden is a cross-chain NFT market, and the project opened airdrop inquiries on December 4. Previously, Magic Eden released the ME token economics, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens, of which 12.5% (125 million tokens) will be immediately unlocked and provided to eligible Magic Eden users for airdrops. The ME token is designed to reward users who provide economic power to the chain through SOL, BTC, and EVM wallets. The ME airdrop share will be judged…