Author Anil Lulla, CEO of Delphi Digital; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

People like to say that cryptocurrencies do not have PMF (product market fit), but from my perspective, saying so shows that they are a cynical bunch who don't take the time to explore the various apps that developers around the world are constantly putting out.

I want to highlight some of my favorite crypto apps I’ve used in 2024, hoping to inspire some of you to give them a try . These teams work hard to create useful products, and we can at least take the time to test their efforts.

Before we dive in, some disclaimers and disclosures. I have personal experience with these products and/or their tokens in various ways. I use * to indicate any project that I have been exposed to in one way or another. None of this constitutes financial advice—just a summary of my thoughts on projects I enjoyed during the year. The order in which the projects appear in this article does not represent the priority of the projects.

1. HyperLiquid

In order to stand out, HyperliquidX performed very well. You've probably read a thousand tweets about it in the past month, so I'll briefly touch on my thoughts. All the people who use this product regularly fall in love with it without exception. In fact, I haven't heard a lot of complaining - so far, we can't say that about many encryption applications.

I try not to use leverage very often, so I'm not HyperLiquid's target user. In fact, the first time I used the app was when I purchased HYPE* tokens when it launched. Quickly, I saw the reason why its fans have been raving about it all year long. Not only is the UI/UX quite CEX (centralized exchange) style (yes, I know it only has four validators), but seeing how quickly the team responds to user criticism, concerns, and feedback in their discord is... How fast it is is even more exciting.

Since its establishment in 2023, HyperLiquid has accumulated a fanatical community with more than 200,000 users and a cumulative transaction volume of nearly 450 billion US dollars. The platform currently has over $2.5 billion in open positions. It has been very successful and currently accounts for over 60% of all USDC in Arbitrumshare.

Since the launch of HYPE, people have been interested in it and not just because of its clean UI/UX as a trading platform. Although it is still in its early stages, it has already formed an impressive ecosystem. The project not only promises an exciting future, but has already delivered on an ambitious vision.

2. Polymarket

Prediction markets have been a use case that I've been excited about since entering the crypto space in 2017, and I think this will be the first to really take off. Use cases, such as early projects like Augur. Apparently, this is not the case. Nearly 7 years later, prediction markets are officially mainstream in 2024, thanks to Polymarket. It worked perfectly on election night in the United States, announcing in advance the winner of what I believe is the most important election of our generation. To add some context here, Polymarket processed $3.6 billion in election bets and predicted Trump’s victory six hours ahead of the AP.

It single-handedly created a new form of media and provided the world with additional data points for people to use when being informed by other potentially biased sources. Reference for future situations. A lot of people called for it to be scrapped after the election, but let's be honest, it's been doing pretty well. That's below November's highs but still above mid-October levels. I still use it regularly to see which markets are active, and it seems like the sports sector is starting to gain more and more share on it.

In addition, we should give praise where appropriate. Fun.xyz has built a great checkout product for Polymarket that allows users to deposit any coin on any chain, card or CEX (Binance, Coinbase, etc.). Some of my regular friends are even using it and have no complaints about it. Crypto user experience is not as bad as everyone says!

3. Farcaster

To be honest, although I was a daily user of Warpcast in the first half of 2024, in the second half of the year I only opened it once or twice a week at most. Entering 2025, one thing I want to do is change this situation.

In early 2024, I attended FarCon in Los Angeles, and most of the people I talked to there were Farcaster builders. This is indeed a bullish sign. Even though it’s early days, many builders are focusing on creating some really cool niche stuff.West, giving Farcaster the opportunity to attract the attention of a dedicated and adventurous community. I think you're going to see a lot of weird stuff happening around this social graph in 2025.

I also believe that Dan Romero and his team will continue to innovate rapidly. Their focus on features that help core users grow their social graphs and reputations will create a great sandbox for builders to create new experiences. Features such as channels, frameworks, and tipping tokens (such as DEGEN) have developed new ways to orchestrate social interactions. Games like Clankermon and Stokefire introduced me to some interesting and unique content.

Although it is down 50% from its peak, it still performs well in terms of user retention.

4. Ethena

At Delphi, we had high expectations for the release of Ethena, but somehow it exceeded our expectations. Over the past year, Ethena’s synthetic U.S. dollar USDe has grown to nearly $6 billion. Among stablecoins, it is now second only to Tether and USDC.

I am particularly impressed that Ethena recently partnered with Blackrock to launch a new US dollar stablecoin USDtb, powered by Blackrock Supported by the BUIDL Fund. Like USDC, USDtb is backed by reserve assets of cash and cash equivalents. In the short term, USDe's yield is likely to remain high due to financing issues. However, Ethena now has the flexibility to adjust vault yields to replenish USDe. This effectively creates an APY “floor” around the Treasury bill rate, allowing Ethena to scale even further.

Like most people, I am optimistic about the growth of stablecoins in 2025. The current market value is about US$200 billion, and I think it is expected to exceed US$300 billion, and it is expected to reach more than US$400 billion next year. I think Ethena, with its smart product and continued focus on integration, will play an important role in helping attract significant capital on the chain. We’ve seen other decentralized stablecoins or synthetic USD being incorporated into DeFi in various ways, and Ethena’s USDe seems to be the first to do a decent job integrating with CEX (centralized exchanges) and TradFi. This helps them build a strong moat early on while chasing the largest crypto markets.

5. Gunzilla

It’s no secret that Delphi is passionate about the crypto gaming industry. Through our early work and investing in teams like Axie Infinity, Yield Guild, and Immutable, we’ve been working hard to help bring games to market and bring the masses into the crypto world. Gunzilla Games has done this - users don't experience any friction from the encryption component

A cyberpunk-themed battle royale. Killing GameOff the Grid, the first crypto game to launch on Playstation and Xbox, has attracted more than 12 million wallets and 230 million transactions, with players streaming the game for more than 4 million hours on platforms such as Twitch twice. Ranked among the top three live-streaming games. It uses Avalanche's play-to-own mechanism to put into action the widely talked about benefits of cryptocurrency: digital ownership can increase player stickiness.

I highly recommend you listen to Piers Kicks’ conversation with Gunzilla’s founders on the Delphi Podcast last month. The team’s unparalleled attention to detail and commitment to delivering what players really want is evident. Currently, they are developing their own product as they work to become the infrastructure for more mainstream AAA games to be released in their ecosystem. I'm really excited to get a glimpse of how Gunzilla continues to grow and shape the future of crypto gaming.

6. Lighthouse

Delphi has invested in several portfolio trackers (Zapper, Debank) and wallet observers over the years that we believe have the potential to become mainstream tools in the crypto world. Tools like this, as well as Nansen, have become my My primary tool for managing my wallet and observing others Until a few weeks ago, I would still use spreadsheets and other applications manually to track my total portfolio.

Will Price casually mentioned Lighthouse to me and I've been hooked ever since. It's by far the best and most complete portfolio tracker I've ever used for EVM, Solana, Cosmos, Aptos, Sui, CEX, etc. Hyperliquid, DyDx; they track everything. I spoke with the team over the course of a few days trying out the app, and they are extremely privacy-focused.

Of all the apps I've mentioned in this article, I'm guessing this is the one a lot of people have just heard of. I'm very impressed with it and I think it's a smart try. I've been looking for a product like this for several years and I'm so happy I finally found it. I have no financial ties to Lighthouse, although I did ask the Lighthouse team to let me invest. I'm just a very happy user of their product.

7. Pump.fun

This year, pump.fun turned its attention into liquidity. I don't think this mechanism gets enough of the credit it deserves - it's a simple but necessary solution with strong and straightforward PMF (product market fit). It lowers the threshold while promoting fairer issuance, and its bonding mechanism mitigates the risk of carpet pulling.

In one year, pump.fun has collected more than $300 million in fees and helped issue more than 5 million tokens. While everyone in the space expected the team to expand vertically by launching a DEX (decentralized exchange), they instead chose to grow horizontally by exploring new ways to attract attention. In my conversations, live streaming initially seemed like an unexpected direction. It eventually got out of hand, but mostly because it was so successful.

Whether you like it or not, anything that can be financialized will inevitably be financialized. Pump.fun has the potential to build a social app around speculation, so I can’t help but mention them here. By the way, my investment in pump.fun was through a small angel investment, not through Delphi Ventures. It was an easy decision to bet on the founders, but I'm still blown away by their ability to execute.

8. GOAT

Probably my favorite crypto moment this year was the Crypto x AI field finding an experimental sandbox - Twitter and wallet. Our Delphi team has been vocal about our excitement and curiosity about this intersection. Just as we were doing research on Crypto x AI, GOAT was released and took up all the attention in the crypto space.

Witnessing the Turing Test become a reality was an incredible experience, as people on Crypto Twitter questioned which bots were AI and which were Real person. No matter how early it is, I think GOAT is one of the most important events of 2024 because it provides a tangible way to think about cryptocurrencies and peopleThe interactive possibilities of this important intersection of artificial intelligence. Since then, we’ve watched these agencies proliferate and seen teams innovate, stand out and attract attention. The cool thing is the high degree of interoperability of all these upgrades, with each developer's efforts being maximized by being able to be applied to other agents. While some of these bots are annoying, I truly believe that in 2025, these agents will be swarming with really interesting and even wacky stuff on the internet.

9. VIRTUAL Ecosystem

I don’t plan to write too much about Virtuals now, because this is one of the new projects I have been working on. I just feel like this is a "picks and shovels" strategy for AI agents. So far, they have released more than 12,000 proxies. Don't get me wrong, most agents are still terrible and sometimes just annoying responders at best. However, I expect exponential improvements in the coming months, making this project worth keeping an eye on.

Aixbt* is a particularly compelling account that deserves attention and observation. The data doesn’t lie, and it’s taking over cryptocurrency’s mindshare, and for good reason. It simply tweets out the alpha - but it's backed by years of research by 0rxbt, who has spent time collecting vast amounts of crypto data and curating an intelligent Crypto Twitter social graph that gives aixbt a "personality." While many crypto celebrities often talk about the same projects in the Crypto Twitter echo chamber, aixbt always comes out with fresh alpha, mostly projects that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

10 and 11: MetaDAO and MetaLeX one. Since then, we have been active in dozens of governance processes and even helped design governance systems and projects for cryptocurrencies such as Gitcoin. Initially, DAOs were the most exciting aspect of this space to me. However, my enthusiasm waned when we were faced with the complexities of working with a DAO. Most DAOs were founded to achieve some ambitious vision, but they spend all their time focusing on how to "DAO". This year, two projects stood out for their hands-on approach to solving these challenges: MetaDAO and MetaLeX (although both have Meta in their names, the two projects are not related).

MetaDAO sparked a lot of interesting discussions within Delphi (thanks in large part to our META maxi mrink0). While some criticized Solana for its lack of innovation, MetaDAO was the first project in the world to deploy futarchy. I had to I mention it here because it is one of the coolest on-chain experiments I have seen in 2024.

Unlike traditional voting methods, MetaDAO uses the market to predict and decide the best outcome for the DAO. It is interesting to see different protocols integrating this into their decision-making process. For example, Drift utilizes MetaDAO in its Exchanges conduct market-based token listings As we move into 2025, I’m keeping a close eye on MetaDAO, hoping it will increase voter participation in cryptocurrencies and improve voter diversity.

MetaLeX, on the other hand, is a concept that Lex node and Delphi Labs have been polishing for years. It finally went online in 2024, building a future where DAOs can focus on their own tasks and not get bogged down in governance challenges quagmire. Through BORGs, MetaLeX enables DAOs to connect to the real world while remaining crypto-native.

This is the culmination of Gabe's years of experience from both the traditional world and the crypto world. He was the technical director at Delphi Labs for many years, and honestly, I have a lot of respect for him. For Delphi For Labs, making this concept a reality was a no-brainer because no one else in the world had built it the right way. MetaLeX fills the code gaps with code, and their BORGs are interoperable. Multilateral trusted commitments and reduced trust assumptions for all counterparties

MetaLeX has helped teams like Lido, Curve, and ZKSync transition to BORGs. They have been developing a comprehensive set of tools for trust-minimized governance, and I think in 2025 we will start to see their work What impact will it have on integrating their DAO?

12. Sandwich

This is a product created by a friend of mine. Sandwich is a private placement trading tool for executing CEX orders (as well as HyperLiquid orders). It gives you access to insto-level algorithms, which helps save fees and reduce slippage , and gives you access to multiple tools through a unified user interfaceinstruments and trade on multiple exchanges.

Considering that I mainly buy and hold tokens and don't often use leverage, I am not the target user for this. In other words, every trader friend who sees it becomes a power user. A Mac app is coming soon, but if you have a desktop, I encourage you to give it a try.

13. 9dcc

I think what Gmoney and 9dcc are doing is the coolest thing in the encryption field right now. He successfully combined his passions and forged his own path, giving cryptocurrencies another mainstream try.

At its core, cryptocurrency is a very powerful coordination tool. Using it to gamify something as ubiquitous as fashion and human interaction is a stroke of genius—and surprisingly still an underexplored area. Gmoney is still deeply involved in the field, so he is able to connect the most cutting-edge on-chain ideas and bring them into the real world.

14. DeBridge

I have tried many bridging tools over the years, but DeBridge is the one I have used the most this year. Not only is the experience seamless, but their team has been one of the fastest at integrating new chains. No matter where your assets are, or where you want them to go, the experience is the same.

They utilize cross-chain intents to connect to DeFi in real time, making the bridging experience feel almost magical. According to deAlex, they have settled over 4 million intents with over $6 billion in transaction volume.

This is the first bridge I recommend to my regular friends that doesn’t require answering any questions about how to use it. That alone is impressive, and for that, I'm grateful for the team's work.

15 and 16: Echo and Legion

2024 is the year of the return of ICO. I'm a big fan of Cobie's approach to the Echo - it seems like a perfect fit for Crypto Twitter users, with product-market fit. Supporting people you trust and letting them bring interesting deal flow directly to you is a win-win. Echo has helped facilitate more than 150 deals and raised more than $55 million for projects from nearly 6,000 users.

On the other hand, Legion takes a more bottom-up approach, putting project tokens into the hands of more consistent community members. They have developed a Legion Score, which currently contains three main variables: (1) on-chain activity, (2) social influence, and (3) development experience. This score will change over time, giving projects a better understanding of who they are letting onto their capital structure tables.

Legion is a project that we at Delphi Labs have incubated for more than a year. The first batch of transactions only appeared on its platform a month ago. The numbers speak for themselves: more than $5 million has been raised, and nearly 100,000 users have signed up for Legion Score.

I think that by 2025, we will see more projects utilizing platforms like this to help distribute tokens. The new America could not have come to power at a better time. I highly recommend everyone to sign up for both platforms and check them out weekly. While these platforms strive to curate high-quality projects for their members, there may be many attractive opportunities.

17. Kaito

In 2024, Kaito has quickly become a very powerful tool for cryptocurrency users. In a way, Kaito and Delphi Research aim to solve a similar problem: helping crypto members cut through all the noise in the crypto world and find alpha and valuable insights. To do this, our research team spends hundreds of hours researching and then condenses all the necessary and relevant information into a 30-minute or so read, focusing on where we think alpha will occur. During this process, our analysts take the time to think and sift through most of the noise to analyze only the understanding and conclusions that matter to any particular protocol or niche. What Kaito does so well is precisely with the help of its clever algorithms. Digging out the golden nugget from all the noise on CryptoTwitter. I'm actually surprised by how much noise it helps me skip through when I'm searching for a specific project or coin.

I can see it being a very useful and necessary tool for all traders. However, I have been using it to find talent. Often, some of the most vocal people in any given field become potential recruits for our Delphi team. We actually just made an offer to the talent I discovered through Kaito to join our team in January.

I think Kaito has the potential to serve many different user groups with one product because of how many cryptocurrencies followContinue to be active on Twitter.

18. Grass

Grass allows users to earn rewards by sharing excess Internet bandwidth with the rest of the network. It's a simple plugin and I've had Grass running in the background for most of 2024. Our VC team has invested in a number of Crypto x AI projects, but Grass is probably the one I’m personally most excited about (at least among the ones I can talk about publicly right now).

Data is the next frontier in model development. We’ve already seen AI labs trying to partner with platforms like Reddit or StackOverflow to gain API key access to their data. Grass provides an API key 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 AI responses. There will also be new ways to join the network, such as mobile and hardware plug-ins that people can plug into their WiFi routers. According to 0xdrej’s research, current demand for entry into the network is already in the nine-digit range.

The Grass project is already helping traditional artificial intelligence people take the Crypto X AI intersection seriously, and I am optimistic about their development prospects in 2025.

19. Ostium

Since our team partnered with kain and the SNX family in 2019, we are excited to bring traditional assets to the on-chain world. Ostium appears to be delivering on this promise.

Kaledora has made it clear that she is passionate about making Ostium an all-encompassing marketplace. Currently, Ostium provides users with long-term or short-term perpetual trading in foreign exchange, commodities, cryptocurrencies and stock indices. To date, they have completed more than $166 million in transactions. What’s cool is when the volume of certain trading pairs spikes. For example, the USD/JPY trading pair has seen $21 million in trading volume since its inception, most of which occurred during the Bank of Japan rate decision (if you remember the 72-hour short-term bear market).

They have launched some simple structured products based on Polymarket. So, for example, once Trump on election nightWith winning Polymarket odds up to a certain percentage, you can make Ostium 10x long Bitcoin. You can set it up this way, and then while the rest of the world stays up to see what's going on, you go to bed and wake up very happy (and well rested).

With the new United States no longer opposed to cryptocurrencies, I feel it will allow Ostium to launch something on-chain that we could not have imagined in the past four years. (As I publish this article, Ostium has actually launched SPX Perps!)

20. Moonwalk Fitness

Moonwalk Fitness leverages the coordination power of cryptocurrency to provide Fitness creates a powerful accountability tool.

Currently, the main purpose of the first version of Moonwalk is to inspire people to walk every day. You can create a group, set daily step goals, and deposit USDC/SOL/BONK tokens. As long as you accomplish the goals you set, at least, you'll get your money back. If others don't reach their goal, their money will be distributed to the winner. It's a simple yet powerful tool for motivating good behavior, and I'm excited to see what the next iteration of it looks like. You can see that this concept applies to more than just step counting incentives: setting goals, daily sleep time, water intake, etc. In terms of incentives, I'd be interested to know what programs sponsor competitions to help different people get into this field.

Although it is still early days, they already have nearly 100,000 registered users; more than 500,000 people have been locked in to take responsibility. They are releasing a mobile app soon and I've been bugging the team about it for quite some time. This is probably the first encryption app my parents use every week.

Okay, that’s my list of favorite projects for 2024. These are just a few of the products that I love and I want to thank their team for all the hard work they put in. Unfortunately, I obviously can't exhaustively list all the teams that I think will do well in 2024. Other projects that quickly come to mind are wallets like Morpho, Jito, Cowswap, Jupiter, Pendle, and Phantom/Rabby.

I'm curious - what is your favorite project in 2024?