Author: defioasis

Note: This article is for information sharing only and does not endorse any projects. It has no financial ties with the projects mentioned.

On December 7th, the renowned crypto venture capital firm a16z announced a list of trends for the crypto industry in 2024 that they are excited about. These trends include entering a new era of decentralization, resetting the UX of the future, the rise of the modular tech stack, AI + blockchains come together, Play to earn becomes play and earn, “When AI becomes the gamemaker, crypto offers guarantees”, “Formal verification becomes less, well, formal”, NFTs become ubiquitous brand assets, and SNARKs go mainstream.

This article will focus on the nine major areas listed by a16z, prioritizing projects invested in by a16z. The selection will be based on a multi-dimensional consideration of the current status of the projects, their financing situation, and personal understanding.

Entering a new era of decentralization

Combining the “living laboratory” of Web3 over the past few years, more practical applications of decentralization have begun to emerge. These include decentralized models that can adapt to applications with richer features, and DAOs adopting Machiavellian principles to design more effective decentralized governance models.

PartyDAO

Party allows users to create on-chain groups on the Ethereum network. Within these groups, members can initiate crowdfunding, on-chain voting and authorization, and use the group as an individual address to execute Ethereum transactions, even playing on-chain games collectively. According to official data, there are currently over 9,000 groups created on Party, involving 55,000 wallets, and facilitating over 10,000 ETH in transaction volume. Party itself operates in a decentralized manner as a DAO, known as PartyDAO.

PartyDAO completed a financing round of $16.4 million led by a16z on June 10, 2022, with participation from investors including Dragonfly and Uniswap Ventures.

Fingerprints DAO

Fingerprints is a community and platform focused on digital art, featuring a shared treasury and a collection of highly prized NFTs curated by its community committee. Fingerprints operates as a DAO, where any user can join and become a member by acquiring 5,000 PRINTS Tokens or 1 Voxelglyph NFT. Members gain economic exposure to the collection, meaning they benefit if the value of the collected items increases. They also gain access to forefront blockchain artists, collectors, and curators, and can participate in governance through proposals and voting. FingerprintsDAO made an appearance with its work “Terra0” at the 2022 Dubai Art Exhibition and collaborated with the German car manufacturer Mercedes-Benz in June this year to launch the Maschine NFT.

Fingerprints completed a funding round in September 2021 with participation from a16z, though the amount and valuation were not disclosed. The current market cap of PRINTS is $9.1 million, but trading is sparse.

Resetting the UX of the future

Developers are actively building front-end UX that can reshape crypto applications, such as simplifying the passkeys for user login to applications, programmable and easy-to-manage smart accounts, embedded wallets, multi-party computation (MPC), and advanced RPC endpoints.

Dynamic Labs

Dynamic is a multi-chain authentication and authorization platform with features including embedded wallets, Crypto-Native logins, profiles, multi-chain wallets, and authorization and authentication. Additionally, Dynamic offers a customizable turnkey service that can place crypto wallet technology in the background for novice users or in the foreground for Web3-native users.

Dynamic Labs completed a financing round of $13.5 million led by a16z and Founders Fund on December 13 this year, bringing its total funding to $21 million.

Pimlico

Pimlico is an infrastructure platform for building ERC-4337 smart accounts, providing developers with functionalities like validators, paymasters, and ERC-20 payments. In November this year, Pimlico became the first platform to integrate ERC-4337 smart accounts with the multisig contract Safe, acting as a Bundle in the Safe ecosystem. Pimlico is now one of the largest bundlers in the ERC-4337 account abstraction, packaging and processing user operations.

On November 7 this year, Pimlico completed a seed funding round of $4.2 million led by a16z, bringing its total funding to $5.8 million.

The rise of the modular tech stack

The greatest advantage of open-source modular technology stacks lies in unleashing permissionless innovation, allowing participants to specialize, and stimulating more competition.

Stackr Labs

Stackr is a modular rollup SDK that introduces micro-rollups, allowing the development, optimization, and maintenance of various functions in dApps as independent state machines. Stackr Labs is also developing pre-built state machines and bridge modules to facilitate easier interactions among micro-rollups in different language environments. Some examples and applications include games, databases and cloud services, oracles and real-world data, off-chain multi-node networks, and social algorithms.

Stackr Labs completed a seed funding round of $5.5 million led by Archetype on November 9 this year, with participation from a16z CCS. The project was also shortlisted for the a16z Crypto Startup School 2023 in May this year.

Celestia

Celestia is a modular blockchain introducing a new function for data availability sampling, committed to achieving breakthroughs in scalability, flexibility, and interoperability. Celestia’s mainnet was launched on October 31st, enabling rollups and other modular public chains to use Celestia for data availability and consensus. Celestia’s data availability layer has already integrated with systems like Arbitrum Orbit and Polygon CDK.

Celestia Labs completed a funding round of $55 million on October 20, 2022, led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital, with participants including Coinbase Ventures and Jump Crypto. The total funding to date has reached $56.5 million. Currently, the market cap of Celestia TIA is $2 billion.

AI + blockchains come together

Decentralized open-source cryptographic networks will democratize AI innovation and make it safer for users.

Gensyn

Gensyn network is a machine learning computation protocol that claims to unite the world’s computing resources into a global supercluster, accessible to anyone at any time. Gensyn aims to reduce costs and achieve trustless free access by using blockchain to decentralize computing resources and token transactions for processing cycles.

Gensyn completed a $43 million Series A funding round led by a16z on June 12 this year, bringing its total funding to $49.5 million.

Fetch.ai

At the core of Fetch.ai is a decentralized autonomous AI agent network, providing infrastructure for building intelligent, funded services. Fetch.ai offers a smart wallet serving as a machine learning platform and an AI agent-based trading tool, which is integrated with OpenAI’s GPT API; it can also act as an off-chain layer for L1 networks.

Fetch.ai completed a $40 million financing by DWF Labs on March 29 this year. On April 27, it received a $10 million support commitment from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitget and was listed on Launchpad. Currently, the market cap of Fetch.ai FET is $650 million.

(Sponsored by NEXO. Sponsorship does not represent the views of WuBlockchain and does not constitute financial advice from WuBlockchain. Readers are requested to strictly abide by local laws and regulations.)

Play to earn becomes play and earn

The industry truly needs games that are both engaging and allow players to derive more value. Play-to-Earn (P2E) is transitioning to Play-and-Earn, establishing a significant distinction between gaming and “work.”

EthXY

EthXY is a one-click poker MMORPG game based on Telegram, featuring PvP and poker battle mechanics. The game operates on-chain on the Base network, allowing players to earn loot through various incentive structures. According to official data, EthXY attracted 1,060 ETH (over $2 million) in bets and over 30,000 player matches within the first two weeks of its launch. In the recent 24 hours, it executed over 3,000 battles.

EthXY completed a $1.6 million pre-seed funding round on November 15 this year, with participation from the a16z CSS23 accelerator program. Currently, the market value of its game token SEXY is approximately $6.5 million.

Proof of Play

Proof of Play is a blockchain gaming startup focused on creating enjoyable all-chain games. They have already launched the Beta version of their first on-chain role-playing game, Pirate Nation, featuring competitions, PvE, PvP, as well as customizable characters and islands. The character Pirate NFTs are based on Ethereum, while the game is built on Arbitrum Nova.

Proof of Play completed a $33 million seed funding round on September 21 this year, co-led by Greenoaks and a16z.

When AI becomes the gamemaker, crypto offers guarantees

AI generates legends, terrains, narratives, and logic for games, while Crypto provides the ability to understand, diagnose, and penalize when AI encounters issues.

Pahdo Labs

Pahdo Labs is a game studio developing the anime-style action role-playing game Halcyon Zero and launching a UGC platform. Pahdo Labs democratizes anime game creation, allowing players to create unique anime-style mods and worlds using generative AI tools.

Pahdo Labs completed a $15 million financing round led by a16z on September 12 this year, bringing its total funding to $17.5 million.

CCP Games

CCP Games is an independent game developer established in 1997, known for launching the award-winning sci-fi space epic massively multiplayer online game (MMO) EVE Online in May 2003. CCP Games is currently developing a new AAA-grade blockchain game set in the EVE Online universe. This game utilizes smart contracts and blockchain technology to create novel relationships between the virtual world and its players.

EVE Online has a player-operated organization called Neural Nexus, which has appointed ChatGPT as its new leader, granting decision-making authority to GPT-4. This move aims to enjoy long-term development and reduce dependence on a single leader.

CCP Games completed a $40 million funding round led by a16z on March 21 this year.

Formal verification becomes less, well, formal

In software development, especially in smart contract development, there is a need for more accessible formal verification methods to minimize the occurrence of security incidents.

Buildspace

Buildspace is a crypto developer community that offers training courses for Web3 developers through live sessions and provides a platform for Web3 developers to interact. Its current courses include Solidity, Ethereum NFTs, and Solana Web3 App development. In July of this year, Buildspace also opened its first campus in Francisco, where students can freely build anything they want.

Buildspace completed a $10 million funding round led by a16z on November 18, 2022, with participation from Y Combinator and Solana Ventures.

Convex

Convex is a global state management platform for full-stack TypeScript and Web3 developers. As a developer, you can interact with its shared state using JavaScript or TypeScript functions and bind that state to reactive applications.

Convex completed a $26 million Series A funding round led by a16z on July 4, 2022, with general partner Martin Casado also joining Convex’s board of directors.

NFTs become ubiquitous brand assets

More and more well-known brands have brought digital assets into the mainstream consumer market through NFTs. With hosted wallets and low transaction costs on Layer 2 (L2) networks, conditions are being created for the widespread adoption of NFTs as digital brand assets for broader companies and communities.

Sound.xyz

Sound.xyz is a music NFT platform aiming to become the new home of internet music discovery, open to all artists. Sound is also creating a platform to fix the music streaming economy, allowing artists to profit from their music while maintaining full control and retaining 100% of the publishing rights. According to official data, Sound has generated over $5.5 million in revenue for a curated group of creators in less than a year since its launch.

Sound.xyz completed a $20 million funding round led by a16z on July 12 this year, bringing its total funding to $25 million.

Ready Player Me

Ready Player Me is a metaverse identity platform where users can establish virtual identities in the metaverse through NFTs, and developers can integrate this platform into their own applications. The platform has stated that over 3,000 partners, including VRChat, Somebody Space, and Nike’s NFT studio RTFKT, have integrated the Ready Player Me platform.

Ready Player Me completed a $56 million Series B funding round led by a16z on August 23, 2022, bringing its total funding to $69 million.

SNARKs go mainstream

SNARKs (Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge) allow a cryptographic receipt of a computational workload to be calculated by an untrusted “prover” in a way that cannot be forged.

zkSync

zkSync is an L2 protocol based on the ZK rollup architecture. All funds are held by a smart contract on the main chain, while computation and storage occur off-chain. Validators package transactions in a single block and submit a cryptographic commitment (root hash) to a smart contract on the Ethereum mainnet, along with a cryptographic proof (a SNARK), demonstrating that this new state is indeed the result of correct transactions applied to the old state.

The development team behind zkSync, Matter Labs, completed a $200 million Series C funding round on November 16, 2022, co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly, with participation from a16z, among others. The total funding for zkSync/Matter Labs now stands at $258 million.

Manta Pacific

Manta Pacific is an L2 network powered by Manta Network and driven by zk-SNARKs, offering programmable ZK and ZK applications developed using Solidity. Additionally, Manta Pacific launched Universal Circuits 2.0, enhancing the developer experience in deploying EVM-native ZK applications and offering ZK as a service. Manta Pacific also recently introduced New Paradigm, bringing yield tokens and composability to L2.

The developer behind Manta Pacific, p0x labs, completed a $25 million funding round on July 19 this year, led by Polychain Capital and Qiming Venture Partners, bringing the total funding to $31.6 million.

Reference: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/a-few-of-the-things-were-excited-about-in-crypto-2024/#section--2

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