Author: WOO

Crypto market on December 10 Ushered in a crash, with Bitcoin falling by 5%. Excluding Bitcoin and Ethereum altcoins (Total 3), they faced a more serious decline, as high as 14%.

WOO Strong resilience, Bitcoin rebounded to $100,000, and Ethereum once again challenged the $4,000 mark.

At the same time, the counterfeit season that we are most concerned about can be judged by BTC.D. When the market fell on 12/10, BTC.D rose to 58%, and after the decline was restored, BTC.D also dropped to 56%. It can be judged that the altcoin season is still established and continuing.

The logic of the rise of altcoins is: when external funds enter the crypto market, such as untouched investors, traditional financial institutions, Web 2 companies, pension funds Wait, the first choice must be Bitcoin, and then some funds will flow into the altcoin sector with lower market capitalization.

In addition to the recent popularity of the AI ​​Agent track, which continues to grow, other sectors including Meme, DeFi, RWA, and L1/2 are also showing strong performance in currency prices. With the rising power, altcoins as a whole seem to have a bright future.

However, some tracks seem to have been forgotten by the market. Other sectors have risen sharply, but BTC ecological related, NFT and GameFi are indifferent. Do these tracks have a future? ? What are the recent developments? Let WOO X Research show you.

Reference: coingecko

BTC ecology generally refers to BTCFi and related protocols and assets such as inscriptions and runes. The core narrative point is:

Liberating Bitcoin Liquidity: DeFi MarketThe market is dominated by Ethereum, and Bitcoin is mostly idle and does not pursue capital efficiency. Compared with ecological applications, transaction speed and other needs, the Bitcoin ecosystem has far greater security requirements than other public chains. Therefore, the user profile of Bitcoin is different from other Public chains are different. Most of them are institutions and large investors with higher requirements for security. They hold huge amounts of Bitcoin, so they focus on long-term, stable and deterministic passive income.

During the period from April to July this year, the protocol that triggered the Bitcoin staking craze was Merlin Chain, with the highest total locked position of the protocol reaching US$2.64 billion. In addition to Bitcoin, it also supports header inscriptions and NFT projects, such as ORDI, RATS, etc. However, after the Merlin currency was issued, the currency price was not as good as expected, and there were many controversies at the time. Currently, the TVL of the entire chain has dropped sharply, and the market has no longer paid attention to it. It has been shown that the EVM cross-chain mapping technology has been falsified.

Reference: DefiLlama

The relevant agreement that can be expected at present is the Bitcoin re-pledge agreement Babylon, which has completed three rounds of public financing with a total of 96 million US dollars. The current TVL is 5 billion US dollars, ranking first in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Ranked 12th in overall agreement. It can be seen that the market still expects the "Bitcoin interest-earning" model to operate successfully. The focus of observation is whether Babylon can safely and continuously generate income after officially earning interest, further boosting TVL, and thus driving the overall ecological explosion.

Bitcoin native meme assets: The emergence of Bitcoin inscriptions in May 2023, due to its own technical characteristics, makes asset issuance open and transparent. At that time, the market deeply hated VC Coin, Inscription Assets has undoubtedly launched a "grassroots" revolution from the bottom up, allowing retail investors to trade in a fair environment. Whether asset prices can maintain momentum depends on the consensus and cohesion of the community, which is a natural meme currency issuance. land. Among them, ORDI, SATS, RATS and other inscribed assets have increased by thousands or hundreds of times.

However, inscriptions have also been criticized, with accusations of wasting Bitcoin block space and creating garbage on the chain. Runes can be regarded as the evolution of inscriptions. version, allowing for more efficient transfers, bundling multiple token transfers in a single transaction, and setting multiple transfer destinations (BRC-20 can only transfer one token at a time), alleviating the problems caused by using tokens such as BRC-20 Bitcoin UT caused by currency standardsXO expansion, network congestion and other issues.

In addition to being Bitcoin ecological assets, inscriptions and runes are also classified as meme currency tracks, but the meme currency track iterates very quickly , the current mainstream narrative is meme coins that work with AI Agents, and the trend of inscriptions and runes is no longer there. In addition, the leading exchanges have canceled support for the inscription asset format, which also means that it is very difficult for related assets to be brought back to life.

Reference: Magical Eden

In 2021, driven by the concept of DeFi Summer and the Metaverse, GameFi, which combines finance with blockchain games, has become a major narrative in the industry and attracted a large number of Traditional game companies develop GameFi games. Until 2024, Web3 practitioners still pin their hopes for Massive Adoption on games. This is the biggest narrative in the game track, and it is also the biggest consensus that VCs and traditional game companies are always willing to invest in this field. Secondly, surrounding Massive Adoption is the blockchain technology behind chain games, which can give players the right to confirm their assets. This is also the main driving force for the continuation of the X to Earn model in most chain games.

But until 2024, Web 3 Gaming has still not solved the death spiral caused by the token economic model being too Ponzi. When the space for profit-seeking becomes smaller, for users In terms of gaming incentives, this can also be seen from the following data:

The growth rate of transaction volume is negative: compared with 2021 and 2022 In comparison, the daily transaction volume of chain games this year has also dropped to Between $20-30 million, the growth rate is negative.

Reference: Footprint

Number of daily transactions: The number of daily transactions in chain games this year has also dropped significantly compared with two years ago. Previously, the average number was between 20-30 million, and now it is less than 10 million.

Reference: Footprint

Web 3 Gaming’s current situation is: old problems cannot be solved, and the overall sector usage is poor. If this situation remains, even if the crazy copycat season comes, it will be difficult to gain the favor of investors.

The current key project that Web 3 Gaming can focus on is Xterio, which is developed by Web. 2 Well-known game company FunPlus Incubation investment, the currency will be issued in the near future, this project is a game infrastructure platform, emphasizing the use of AI technology in the platform, and wants to be linked to AI in the narrative. If you are looking forward to the possible resurrection of Web 3 Gaming, you can first refer to Xterio's currency issuance. The subsequent trend.

In fact, NFT has appeared as early as 2017, but it will not fully explode until 2021, except because of ERC-721. The release of standards has improved the infrastructure, and the market has also realized that NFTs are unique compared to homogeneous tokens and can be used in fields such as personal digital identity and artwork. However, the main reason for the initial push is the celebrity effect. < /p>

At that time, NBA Top Shot was launched in the form of NFT, allowing players to collect the highlights of NBA stars on the court, which attracted the active participation of many crypto enthusiasts and fans. Participate in which famous star LeBron James A slam dunk in the 2020 finals, with a transaction volume of US$230,000

Blue-chip NFT projects such as BAYC, Azuki, Doodles, and Pudgy Penguins then appeared to kick off 2021. NFT Summer

Due to NFT The characteristics of low liquidity and scarcity in the total number make it easy to increase the price and have a wealth effect in the bull market. There are many myths about free mint and wealth freedom. However, with the advent of the bear market in 2022, liquidity has withdrawn from the currency circle, and NFT Compared with general currencies, liquidity is scarcer, so capital flight is obvious, and the overall liquidity of NFT is withdrawn.

You can also see the overall transaction of Opensea from the figure below. The number of pens is There will be a significant slowdown in 2022. In addition to the lagging competitiveness of Opensea's own products, the main reason is still that the NFT market is not favored.

Reference: Dune

So is there still hope for NFT? What are the recent narratives and actions?

Opensea is about to launch new products

Magic Eden issuance of coins

Pudgy Penguins issuance of coins

You can see that recent NFT actions have been frequent, whether it is a platform or a blue-chip project, whether it is Ethereum Or blue chip NFT on Solana chain Projects have obvious signs of recovery in currency prices. Is the NFT market really coming back?

< em>Reference: Magic Eden

In addition to observing whether the price trend of the leading NFT is growing steadily, you can also pay more attention to the use cases of combining NFT with AI. For example, Zerebro, the well-known AI Agent on the Solana chain, previously created 299 images on Polygon, and founder Jeffy also launched Zerebro 5,500 NFTs, and holders can become core members of the community.

The above is just a basic case of the cooperation between AI Agent and NFT. The currency circle has always been characterized by speculating on the new rather than the old. NFT is expected to pick up again with the help of AI Agent .