Author: DeFi Warhol
Compiled by: Tim, PANews
Bangers
Tokenization: The scale of RWA continues to hit new highs (approximately $200 billion), with an increasing number of stocks and commodities being tokenized. As mainstream funds and custodial institutions continue to expand across major trading platforms, this is no longer just a conceptual idea.
Stablecoins: As a market with a market cap of $310 billion, stablecoins are gradually becoming the infrastructure for foreign exchange, payments, credit cards, and digital banking distribution, serving as the best bridge from the crypto world to real-world applications.
Prediction Markets: Trading volume and user numbers in prediction markets are repeatedly reaching new highs. With the integration of mainstream crypto applications and traditional financial institutions, their adoption is accelerating.
Perpetual Contracts: Perpetual contracts still dominate crypto market trading volume, with derivatives trading far exceeding spot trading. The monthly trading volume of on-chain perpetual contract platforms has matched that of centralized exchanges, surpassing $1 trillion.
Top Tier
BTCFi: Bitcoin is transforming into productive capital, with billions of BTC being used for staking, yield generation, and collateral. Babylon and Lombard hold a significant share of the staking TVL for BTC.
Privacy: As more traditional financial capital moves on-chain, selective disclosure becomes crucial. Institutions require compliant-friendly privacy solutions for payments, identity verification, and corporate fund flows.
AI: AI and crypto technologies continue to evolve, becoming essential tools for processing data, powering intelligent agents, and enabling verifiable computation. The potential is immense, and the scale of this industry cannot be ignored.
DeFi: DeFi is shifting towards consumer applications. Coinbase currently offers in-app DEX trading and USDC lending via Morpho. DeFi TVL has reached an all-time high, and new consumer applications are emerging rapidly.
Elite
Chain Abstraction: Smart accounts, intents, and embedded wallets reduce user friction, making blockchain invisible. Significant improvements in user experience are critical for adoption, although development is relatively slow.
InfoFi: Despite recent market fears, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), InfoFi remains a refinery for data markets, incentivized activities, and trading signals. Major breakthroughs in InfoFi are imminent. Is InfoFi 2.0 on the horizon?
Bots: The vision is grander than the actual progress. The development speed of hardware and deployment cannot match that of cryptocurrency, making this more of an early-stage infrastructure phase.
ZK: It is undoubtedly a core technology, but it is complex as an investment. Most value will accumulate in ecosystems that can apply ZK technology at scale, rather than as a standalone concept.
Software Infrastructure: Demand remains stable (e.g., RPC, indexing, interoperability, data availability), but competition is super fierce. Nevertheless, this field may still yield high-quality projects.
NPC
Staking and Restaking: Restaking works, but yields continue to compress, slashing risks are real, and complex operations deter ordinary investors. The narrative in this track has been overheated from the start.
DePIN: In its ideal state, DePIN should integrate and cooperate with the real world, but many projects still struggle to achieve this. Regulatory pressure and a lack of sustainable business models are hindering its development.
L1 & L2: Rollups have become the mainstream scaling solution, but the momentum for new public chains is weak. Most value is now shifting towards applications, liquidity, and ecosystem distribution, rather than just another underlying protocol.
SocialFi: Although there are occasional peaks in user activity, user retention and lasting product-market fit have not been achieved and are likely to remain elusive in the short term.
Flops
GameFi: The Play-to-Earn model has fundamental flaws. Although some gaming chains are still operational, most GameFi projects are just reskinned DeFi with extra steps and a worse user experience.
NFT: We have witnessed multiple attempts at an NFT market recovery, but market reactions have shown that without breaking through the limitations of JPEGs and profile pictures to create new use cases, NFTs will remain stuck in their current predicament. Even attempts at integration in gaming have so far failed to achieve a breakthrough.
Meme Coins: Although the meme coin super cycle was lively, liquidity is shifting towards serious projects, and their market dominance continues to decline. Retail investors are tired of being repeatedly harvested in the game of chasing the next 100x myth.
Modular Blockchains: Important architecture, poor narrative. Users don't care, and investors are only interested in whether there is a clear, sustainable profit mechanism—something most modular projects currently lack.
