Author: Donovan Choy, Blockworks; Compiled by: Whitewater, Golden Finance

Pendle exists because cryptocurrencies want to be speculated on.

In Pendle’s short history, the team has continually reiterated its yield trading offerings, using stablecoins and the infamous “DeFi 2.0” (Olympus DAO) narrative in the 2021 bull run, to liquidity staking tokens. coins, real-world assets on Arbitrum, and liquidity re-hypothecation during 2021.

It wasn’t until early 2024, when Pendle’s points exploded, that Pendle achieved impressive results, with its TVL soaring from millions of dollars to billions of dollars. Pendle’s Principle Tokens (PT) and Yield Token (YT) yield mechanisms remain an indispensable tool for anyone looking to execute any form of leverage points or fixed income.

Fluid is a perfect example of innovation. Fluid borrowed many of DeFi’s successful primitives, such as Uniswap v3’s centralized liquidity and Aave’s utilization curves, and then redesigned traditional AMM liquidity configurations from the ground up.

With its “smart debt” and “smart collateral” mechanisms, Fluid enables deep multi-million dollar DEX liquidity pools with technically $0 TVL. This capital efficiency is a clever combination of user debt from lending protocols and AMM liquidity pools.

Stablecoins are one of the hardest areas to compete in. This brings USDe to an impressive market capitalization of $6 billion in one year.

Previous stablecoins were built along the spectrum of centralization (USDT) and scalability (DAI). Instead, Ethena entered into an impressive series of business development agreements with CEX and designed USDe, a scalable stablecoin that leverages CEX-DEX funding rate arbitrage and provides yields to users.

To enable GPS technology to achieve centimeter-level accuracy, legacy companies have deployed thousands of real-time kinematic (RTK) networks, such as base stations and mobile stations, around the world.

GEODNET leverages crypto token incentives to scale RTK network deployments. According to November data, GEODNET has deployed at least 10,000 sites in 140/regions, surpassing the combined 5,000 sites of legacy providers Trimble and Hexagon.

It is worth noting that GEODNET has significant cost advantages.Deploying a base station with GEODNET costs approximately $700, which is 97% cheaper than the traditional cost of $25,000. If that's not innovation, I don't know what is.

Virtuals is the premier "pick and shovel" game in the recent AI agent craze.

This is an artificial intelligence agent platform where anyone can generate tokenized artificial intelligence agents. Similar to Pump.fun, the agent’s native token is tied to the DEX liquidity pool (Uniswap v2) once the $420,000 market cap criterion is met.

Virtuals is built on Base and has spawned at least 12,000 artificial intelligence agents since its inception, including the popular anime ship Luna, which runs 24/7 and can use the agents' respective Tips are paid in tokens.

Virtual’s innovation comes from the combination of many different parts, including the LLM model, crypto wallets, innovative value-added token economics, NFTs, and IPFS for data storage.