2023 is a year when times change rapidly and differentiation intensifies.

The old smoke has not yet been extinguished, and new wars have begun. Technological blockade and economic repression are intensifying.

AI, represented by ChatGPT, has started to be used commercially on a large scale. On the eve of what could be the most significant innovative change in mankind, there is a debate between accelerationists and technological pessimists. The dispute between the two social giants, Musk and Zuckerberg, has played out online. Additionally, there is a lack of phenomenal culture, entertainment, fashion, and consumer products worldwide. All of the aforementioned phenomena appear to be the inevitable outcome of the deep development of multiple values.

Under changes in demographic structure and macroeconomics, industries like real estate and (mobile) Internet, which once drove rapid GDP growth, have lost their shine. On the other hand, industries such as smart manufacturing, AI, materials, and energy are gaining momentum. People in this region have finally returned to their “normal” offline lives and are trying to make up for lost time. However, they are also facing the impact of large-scale corporate layoffs and cost reductions.

In the Web3 field, amid differentiation and transformation, small actions are continuously being taken to bridge gaps and ensure survival of the fittest.

In terms of connectivity with the outside world, the progress of BTC spot ETF is accelerating, and the market is continuously absorbing the benefits of large funds entering. The adoption rate of Crypto as a payment method is steadily increasing. Worldcoin has collected over 2.53 million iris information in more than 130 days. The U.S. debt borrowing channel has performed well in RWA coupled with DeFi. CZ disarms, and other compliance participants will follow Binance through the turbulent regulatory river in the future. When crypto companies face US supervision, Hong Kong continues to release benefits. SBF is convicted, and the mess left in 2022 is gradually being cleaned up. The bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank and the de-anchoring of stable coins such as USDC prompt us to reexamine the risk distance between traditional finance and crypto finance.

Bitcoin ecological renaissance, asset issuance methods and protocol standards are changing again, and the new narrative returns to the oldest public chain with strong consensus; the wind of inscriptions and memes is blowing to multiple chains, and “innovators” are holding the name “Fairness” Pass, trying to redistribute benefits. Ethereum, which has completed the Shapella upgrade, bids farewell to mining and opens staking withdrawals. Lido, the leader of LSD, has become the king of DeFi TVL; EVM maintains its foundation of legitimacy, and new and old L2 enter the bottom-level competition.

In terms of applications, in 2023, there was no booming summer. DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and low-frequency micro-innovations have stable patterns. The only ones that can barely stir up the spring water are the Blur+Blend+Blast family. Fortunately, AI+Crypto takes over and integrates into application areas such as social, Q&A, data, and transactions.

This is also the year when people question narratives, understand narratives, and become narratives. Critics, observers, and builders grabbed the baton and twisted the three sets of melody variations into a 2023 version of Web3 symphonic poem.

In this long report, Odaily Planet Daily will look back at 2023 and predict 2024 with you from the perspectives of major event review, data interpretation, industry review, and from the macro market to the micro track.

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Regulatory policy: The United States suppresses it hard, but Hong Kong makes great strides forward

In 2023, other regulatory agencies, such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice, adopted stricter regulatory measures on the cryptocurrency industry in general.

From Genesis Global Capital and Gemini Trust Company’s crypto lending schemes, to actions against Kraken and SushiSwap, to the indictment of Tron founder Justin Sun, and legal actions against Coinbase and Binance, these events highlight the US regulators’ attitude towards crypto. The harsh attitude of the market in its “Wild West” state is committed to making the entire industry more standardized.

In particular, large exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance, which have embraced regulation, have not been spared, showing that regulators are not just focusing on small or fringe companies, but are conducting a comprehensive review of the entire industry.

When cryptocurrencies are heading into a bull market, pressure from large corporate legal teams, legislative bodies, and public opinion prevents regulatory pressure from being fully released, because everyone benefits from it; while during a bear market, regulators can use events such as FTX as a reason to Take a hands-off approach to supervision.

However, from another perspective, these legal actions and rulings in 2023 also bring a level of clarity and certainty to the cryptocurrency industry.

For example, the ruling in the Ripple case provides a clearer legal status for digital assets such as XRP, while the lawsuit won by Grayscale shows some successful legal challenges. Additionally, the agreement that Binance and its CEO CZ reached with the U.S. Department of Justice shows that when cryptocurrency companies work with regulators, paths can be found to resolve disputes. This gradual clarity of the regulatory environment is a positive sign for cryptocurrency companies, indicating that they no longer need to operate on tenterhooks and can instead develop their businesses within a clearer and more stable legal framework.

Despite the challenges, the cryptocurrency industry appears to be moving in a more mature and stable direction after experiencing this series of legal and regulatory events.

On this side of the ocean, Hong Kong, once an important financial hub between the East and the West, has opened its arms to Web3.

Chief Executive Lee Ka-chiu, Financial Secretary Paul Chan and others have frequently spoken out on behalf of the Hong Kong government, high-profile support for the implementation of Web3 in Hong Kong, and attracted encryption companies and talents from all over the world to build it. In terms of policy support, Hong Kong has introduced a licensing system for virtual asset service providers, allowing retail investors to trade cryptocurrencies, launched the Web3 Hub Ecological Fund with a scale of tens of millions of dollars, and plans to invest more than HK$700 million to accelerate the development of the digital economy and promote the development of the virtual asset industry. A Web3.0 development task force has also been established.

In terms of financial institutions, the first batch of HKD 800 million tokenized green bonds was successfully sold. Compliance representative Hashkey Exchange steadily promoted the opening of products and services and planned to issue the platform currency HSK. Cryptogroup BGX invested in another licensed exchange OSL. Futu has cooperated with Victory Securities to provide BTC and ETH trading services to Hong Kong retail customers. PantherTrade, Futu’s virtual asset trading platform, has submitted a license application to the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission. A number of virtual banks, insurance companies, etc. have also reached cooperation with the trading platform.

While making rapid progress, risky events are also taking advantage of the momentum. The unlicensed crypto exchange JPEX was involved in a case involving more than 1 billion Hong Kong dollars, the HOUNAX fraud case involved an amount of over 100 million yuan, and HongKongDAO and BitCuped were suspected of virtual asset fraud… These vicious incidents have attracted great attention from the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission and the police. The Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong stated that it will formulate risk assessment criteria for virtual asset cases with the police and conduct information exchanges on a weekly basis.

Outside the United States and Hong Kong:In January, South Korea allowed the issuance of security tokens; in August, Europe’s first spot Bitcoin ETF (Jacobi FT Wilshire Bitcoin ETF) was launched; in September, the Japanese government allowed start-ups to raise funds in cryptocurrency; in October, the G20 The leaders issued a joint communique and unanimously adopted a cryptocurrency regulatory roadmap; while Singapore plans to ban cryptocurrency margin or leverage trading in mid-2024 to curb retail speculation.

Secondary market: repair, accumulation, internal structure transformation

2023, the market gradually emerges from the deep bear market and gradually welcomes a Indian summer after the crypto winter following the FTX scandal.

Overall, Coingecko data shows that the total market value of the crypto market at the beginning of the year was approximately US$831.7 billion. Since then, it has been rising. As of December 12, the total market value has exceeded US$1.62 trillion, which has almost doubled compared with the beginning of the year and is approaching the global market value. The fourth largest company – Alphabet ($1.67 trillion).

During the critical period of bull-bear transition, the total market capitalization ratio of BTC and ETH has also undergone major changes: Bitcoin has risen from 38.31% at the beginning of the year to 49.5% today; ETH has risen from 17.45% at the beginning of the year to more than 18% , and then fell back to 16.2% today, failing to keep up with BTC’s gold-absorbing pace.

In terms of price, Bitcoin gradually rose from US$16,615 at the beginning of the year, breaking through US$20,000 on January 14, and US$30,000 on April 11. After half a year of adjustment, it broke through US$30,000 again on October 22. It officially broke through the US$40,000 mark on December 3, and was trading at US$41,890 on December 12, which was 2.5 times the price at the beginning of the year. ETH also gradually broke through from US$1,200 at the beginning of the year, breaking through US$2,000 on April 13. Since then, it has been fluctuating in the range of US$1,500 to US$2,000. By December, the price remained above US$2,000, reported $2,232 on December 12, an increase of 86% from the beginning of the year.

Among the top 100 tokens by market value at the end of the year, most of them benefited from the Indian summer and experienced sharp rises; only a small number of tokens such as SUI, BLUR, APE, CAKE, ALGO, etc. fell.

Among the top twenty tokens by market capitalization, the following three tokens have experienced larger increases:

1. Solana (SOL), mainly benefiting from news such as FTX’s restart, has grown from US$9.97 at the beginning of the year to US$66 now, with a growth rate of 579.57%, and its current market value ranks 6th;

2. Chainlink (LINK), the income encryption market has recovered, rising from US$5.62 at the beginning of the year to now trading at US$14.17, with a growth rate of 154.46%, and the current market value ranks 14th;

3. Bitcoin Cash (BCH), affected by the popularity of Bitcoin, has risen from US$95.96 at the beginning of the year to US$227.48 now, with a growth rate of 134.33%, and the current market value ranks 19th;

In addition, the concept of L2 has been hot this year. According to statistics from Coingecko, the total market cap of L2 tokens has reached $16.78 billion, with Polygon ($7.89 billion), Immutable ($2.6 billion), Optimism ($1.95 billion), Mantle ($1.786 billion), and Arbitrum ($1.45 billion) being the top five. Among them, tokens like IMX and OP have seen an annual growth of over 80%.

In terms of modular blockchain, the leading project Celestia has already launched its mainnet at the end of October, and its token TIA has surged by 188% within a month.

In terms of AI, with the release of ChatGPT at the end of last year, 2023 can be considered the year of large-scale AI model applications. Consequently, AI-related concept tokens have benefited and generally experienced high growth rates this year. The top concept tokens by market capitalization are Bittensor ($1.785 billion) and Render ($1.498 billion), with growth rates of 178% and 734% respectively. In July, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency startup project Worldcoin was officially launched, with an initial price of around $2. It dipped to around $1 in September and has slowly risen since then, currently priced at $2.38.

In terms of platform tokens, according to Coingecko’s data as of December 12th, the total market capitalization of platform tokens is $65.321 billion, with the top five being BNB ($37.962 billion), UNI ($4.58 billion), OKB ($3.605 billion), LEO ($3.449 billion), and CRO ($2.584 billion). The platform tokens with significant growth this year are RUNE (297.61%), BGB (168.79%), and OKB (117.03%). It’s worth mentioning that FTT, which crashed last year, has experienced significant growth this year due to news related to the relaunch of FTX, with a growth rate of 246.49% since the beginning of the year.

In terms of stablecoins, as of December 12th, the total market capitalization of stablecoins reached $129.8 billion, accounting for 8.0% of the total cryptocurrency market value. In terms of market size, currently USDT ($90.5 billion), USDC ($24 billion), DAI ($5.28 billion), TUSD ($2.6 billion), and BUSD ($1.47 billion) have essentially divided the majority of the stablecoin market share. Compared to Tether, USDC, and BUSD’s neck-and-neck competition last year, USDC and BUSD have both experienced significant declines in market share.

In March 2023, there was a major event involving Circle, the issuer of USDC, and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). SVB faced a liquidity crisis and customer fund withdrawals, putting the $3.3 billion held by Circle in the bank at risk. This led to fluctuations in the price of Circle’s stablecoin USDC, breaking its pegging status. Circle is closely connected to the U.S. banking system, and SVB’s bankruptcy event severely impacted its reputation, resulting in a significant reduction in the circulation of USDC. Both Circle and its competitor Tether invest their stablecoin reserves ($24 billion and $87 billion respectively) in assets such as U.S. government bonds to earn returns, but the decline in USDC’s market share has presented Circle with more challenging IPO prospects. As a result, the market capitalization of USDC has significantly decreased from $44 billion in January to $24.5 billion at the end of November, a decrease of approximately 44.32%.

In February, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a Wells notice to the stablecoin company Paxos, indicating that it may file a lawsuit on the grounds that the Binance USD (BUSD) issued and listed by Paxos is considered an unregistered security. On the same day, the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) directed Paxos to stop minting new BUSD. Paxos announced that it will stop issuing new BUSD tokens as of February 21, but will continue to support the product to ensure redemption until at least February 2024. CZ believes that the SEC’s consideration of BUSD as an unregistered security could have a profound impact on the crypto industry and expects users to gradually switch to other stablecoins. There is also speculation that the SEC’s crackdown on BUSD may be related to its deposit-based interest-earning products, or to the broader category of “securities.” Since then, BUSD has seen a significant decline in market capitalization, from $16 billion at the beginning of the year to around $1.69 billion today. In November, Binance announced that it would be removing BUSD and exchanging BUSD for FDUSD.

Different from the above two, the market value of USDT has increased significantly due to users abandoning other stablecoins and turning to Tether, gradually rising from US$66 billion at the beginning of the year to US$90.5 billion at the end of November, with a growth rate of 37.12%. At the same time, PayPal’s PYUSD and Aave’s stablecoin GHO also appeared during the year, making the stablecoin ecosystem more diverse.

Primary market: Total financing exceeds US$7.4 billion, looking to rebound at a trough

According to incomplete statistics from Odaily Planet Daily, as of November 25, the encryption industry has publicly disclosed 1,023 investment and financing events in 2023, a year-on-year decrease of 38.3%. The total announced financing amount is approximately US$7.44 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 78.74%.

Number and amount of financing from January to November 2023

Web3 primary market financing in 2023: In terms of quantity, the average monthly number is nearly 100, which is generally balanced but declining; from the perspective of financing amount, the first 5 months are higher than the last 6 months.

Looking at the primary market financing projects in 2023, Odaily Planet Daily classified all projects that disclosed financing into five major tracks based on the business type, service objects, business models and other dimensions of the invested projects - infrastructure, applications, technical service providers, Financial service providers and other service providers, and further identifies subdivisions such as DeFi, underlying facilities, GameFi, CeFi, tools, NFT and Layer 1.

As can be seen from the above figure, the popular financing track in 2023 falls on applications, with the number of financings throughout the year exceeding 500. This also indicates that the development of Web3 infrastructure is slowing down, and the industry is in urgent need of “Fat App” with large-scale adoption potential.

Judging from the number of financings in sub-sectors, the DeFi sector ranked first among sub-sectors throughout the year with 187 financings. Among them, trading platforms serving institutions and order book-based DEX based on high-performance blockchain are emerging.

Secondly, as a sector favored by capital all year round, underlying facilities have also received 148 financings. At the same time, more underlying facilities projects are also actively serving traditional fields, and the profit channels are more diversified.

The GameFi and CeFi sectors followed, with 99 and 84 funding rounds respectively. GameFi has always been at the forefront of accepting Web3 newcomers due to its playability and rate of return. In the past two years, the number of GameFi project financings has ranked among the best. Perhaps for capital, GameFi’s return cycle is shorter.

Some new models have also emerged in the segmented sectors, such as Telegram Bot, portal entry-level platform, and AI+. The rise of Telegram Bot and application portal platforms provide new users with an easy-to-use Web3 entrance; the rise of AI+ projects benefits from the rapid development of the AI ​​field.

During the bear market stage, capital was more cautious, and the number of projects with financing amounts exceeding 10 million US dollars was approximately 200, a year-on-year decrease of 58.68%. But there are also projects with financing amounts exceeding 100 million.

Top 10 investment amount in 2023

Ramp, LayerZero and Worldcoin are the top three in terms of investment amount this year:

Ramp mainly serves the legal currency payment channel between the encryption market and the traditional financial market, and provides infrastructure for the introduction of Web3 funds.

As the underlying infrastructure, LayerZero has won the favor of well-known Web3 institutions such as a16z and Coinbase Ventures, as well as traditional institutions such as Sequoia Capital and PayPal Ventures.

With its team background and unique technology future value setting, Worldcoin has attracted attention and pursuit in the encryption market. As a new leader in the DID track, Worldcoin has made the public look forward to the integration of the identity system and Web3 in the AI ​​era.

As can be seen in the chart above, HashKey Capital and DWF Labs tied for first place in the number of transactions made this year. In terms of preferences, infrastructure and DeFi account for nearly two-thirds of HashKey Capital’s investments this year. DWF Labs, which has attracted attention for its market-making style and vertical business model, focuses on the Layer 1 and GameFi tracks (17 transactions in total).

At the same time, we also see many institutions that were on the list last year, such as a16z, Animoca Brands, Shima Capital, and Coinbase. Although the number of projects has dropped significantly compared to last year, the projects they invested in are still attracting attention, such as Worldcoin, LayerZero, YGG, etc.

Finally, although some institutions did not make the list, they still achieved outstanding results. For example, Paradigm only made 6 public attempts throughout the year, but among them, Friend.tech, Blast and Flashbots received extremely high attention.

In general, compared with last year, primary market financing in 2023 has declined seriously in terms of quantity and amount. This is partly due to the fact that the secondary market is in a bear market stage. But the trough has been formed, and a rebound may come next year. The organization that planted the seeds will also see the seedlings grow into trees.

Bitcoin: The two forces of ecology from the bottom up and capital from the outside to the inside

On January 30, the “Ordinals” protocol created by Casey Rodarmor was officially launched on the Bitcoin mainnet, opening the way for a magnificent wave of Bitcoin ecological innovation in 2023.

Initially, Ordinals focused on NFT projects and developed the concept of sub10K (the inscription of the first 10,000 serial numbers). At this time, the projects were all kinds of weird, and they were basically created by community members themselves.

Subsequently, Yuga Labs released the TwelveFold series as an early regular army. “Yuga Labs explores the relationship between time, mathematics and variability for the TwelveFold series.” Unlike PFPs like BAYC, the pieces that make up the TwelveFold collection are crafted in-house by Yuga Labs’ art team using 3D modeling, algorithmic construction, and high-end rendering tools to pay homage to the serial number inscriptions that are currently done by hand.

The series of Bitcoin NFTs initially focused on transporting NFT series from other chains. For example, Ordinal Punks and Bitcoin Punks used images of Ethereum CryptoPunks. NFTs in this era are also very simple. The validity check of Bitcoin Punks is based on the development team’s image comparison and one-by-one verification of whether the hash is first launched.

At this time, the waves formed between gentle waves, and then the BRC-20 craze hit.

A token standard proposed by Domo on March 9, engraved a specific text on Bitcoin and “regarded” it as a token, and the first BRC-20 token ORDI was born. Ecological participants subsequently deployed ownerless community tokens such as meme, punk, and pepe, and sats was born on March 9.

In March, the BRC-20 token did not attract much attention and was mainly traded through OTC. At the end of April, the ORDI price reached 1 U, which began to drive a series of BRC-20 increases. At this time, the mainstream trading varieties were still established and established spontaneously by the community. Spread, such as the aforementioned meme, punk, etc., Ordinals founder concept domo, complete combination concept nals, etc.

Subsequently, ORDI rose above 4 U, BRC-20 became more and more popular, and various tokens with project parties began to be born, such as IDO platform TURT, game concept ORDZ, etc.

At the same time, some X platform Vs also began to participate. XEN founder Jack Levin’s related tokens include PUSY, EPIC, DRAC, etc. Finally, he publicly issued VMPX, which caused the transaction fee of the Bitcoin network to soar to 400 sats/word. Festival and above. Similarly, a user named BitGod became popular through a series of operations, and the token OXBT he promoted became the most popular BRC-20 for a time.

Extreme FOMO also heralds the arrival of an inflection point. On May 8, Gate.io announced the launch of ORDI, which rose to a maximum of 29.5 USDT and closed at 17.8 USDT that day. Because the network on the chain was too congested, it was difficult for users to place orders. After the existing orders were cleared, the ORDI on Unisat once exceeded 30 USDT. On May 20, OKX announced the launch of ORDI. ORDI rose to a maximum of 17.1 USDT and closed at 12.5 USDT.

The second spring of BRC-20 started on September 25. The minting of BRC-20 token sats was completed. The total number of mintings reached 21, 107, 258 times, and the number of holders reached 36, 061. Mining began on March 9, 2023 From the beginning, it took a total of 6 months and the casting cost exceeded 20 million US dollars. On this day, the monster from Corsica landed in Port Juan, and ORDI closed at 3.6 USDT.

On October 30, the Bitcoin inscription wallet UniSat Wallet issued a statement stating that it has decided to include 14 inscription assets in the first batch of support lists for the brc 20-swap mainnet, including sats, ordi, oxbt, meme, vmpx, pepe, etc.

In early November, sats rose all the way, which once again triggered the popularity of BRC-20. The concept of zoo began to rise, and a series of animal tokens including rats, cats, bears, etc. began to occupy the top of the trading list.

His Majesty the Supreme Emperor arrived in his loyal Paris on November 7: As Binance launched ORDI, ORDI also began to regain lost ground, rising to a maximum of 27.8 USDT on November 24, becoming the BRC-20 token with the largest market capitalization again. On December 7, ORDI hit an all-time high of 69.7 USDT, with a market value of over US$1 billion.

On November 16, regular transaction fees on the Bitcoin network rose to 186 sats/byte. The engraving cost of BRC-20 is getting higher and higher, but it has not stopped the enthusiasm of users. Several high-volume BRC-20s including MMSS, Bear, etc. have all been engraving quickly.

With the vigorous development of BRC-20, various competing product protocols have gradually come into people’s view. The relevant head protocols are as follows:

Taproot Assets (formerly Taro) is a protocol powered by Taproot for issuing assets on the Bitcoin blockchain, creating assets that can be transmitted on the Lightning Network, thereby enabling instant, high-volume, and low-fee transactions.

Atomicals Protocol, is a simple and flexible protocol for creating, transferring, and updating digital objects (traditionally called NFTs) on UTXO blockchains (such as the Bitcoin network). Different from Ordinals, which were originally designed for NFT, it rethinks how to issue tokens on BTC in a centralized, non-tamperable and fair manner from the bottom up.

BRC-420, introduces a method of digital asset management in the Metaverse, providing creators with a comprehensive system to manage, share and monetize their creations through recursion, licensing and royalties.

While the native ecosystem of Bitcoin is developing, the external environment has also undergone drastic changes. The application for Bitcoin spot ETF has opened up the road to compliance for Bitcoin. On the other hand, top whales are also vigorously increasing their positions, and their holdings and the corresponding right to speak has further increased.

As early as June 29, 2021, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest submitted a Bitcoin ETF application document. After multiple extensions, it was officially rejected by the SEC in April 2022. Then ARK’s application was rejected for the second time in early 2023, and it applied for a third Bitcoin spot ETF in May. Some asset management companies are not hopeful about the emergence of Bitcoin spot ETFs. During this period, the Bitcoin spot ETF had a modest impact on the market.

Until June 15, people familiar with the matter said that BlackRock, the largest asset management company, was about to submit a Bitcoin ETF application. This news triggered market enthusiasm, and BTC bottomed at 24,800 USDT, becoming the lowest price after June. The bottom of the market. Subsequently, Fidelity, the third largest asset management company, also joined the application queue. After the news of Franklin Templeton’s application came out on September 12, the market completed its final bottom. The expected amount of funds from these asset management giants made spot ETFs an important factor in Bitcoin’s short-term and long-term fluctuations.

Although in September and November, the SEC repeatedly postponed its decision on the Bitcoin Spot ETF, and on October 16, false news came out that the SEC approved BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Spot ETF, but many people believe that Bitcoin The approval of currency spot ETFs is inevitable, it’s just a matter of when.

CME, the United States’ traditional financial participation in crypto options, has seen its open interest in Bitcoin contracts rise all the way, surpassing Binance to rank first, and is close to its historical high in 2021.

As a representative of giant whales, MicroStrategy has purchased a total of 174,530 Bitcoins as of December 7, with a total cost of US$5.28 billion, that is, the average position price is 30,252 USDT. According to the current price of 44,000 USDT The price estimate shows a profit of US$2.4 billion.

MicroStrategy was once considered a counter-indicator because of its large floating losses. It waited until the market reversed by continuing to add positions, and it is still very optimistic about the future of Bitcoin. MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor participated in an interview with CNBC and his key points include:

Or will keep buying, you will never be able to say “own too many Bitcoins”;

SEC approval of a Bitcoin spot ETF does not threaten MicroStrategy, which is a differentiated product;

Post-halving selling pressure will drop from $12 billion to $6 billion per year, which is quite optimistic about the next twelve months;

SEC approval of a Bitcoin spot ETF is expected in the first quarter of next year, or sometime in the next 12 months.

Ethereum: becoming more mature, bravely facing old opponents and new challenges

As the most important force in the crypto ecosystem, Ethereum’s performance in 2023 is not satisfactory. In particular, after the completion of the Shapella upgrade (Shanghai+Capella), the Cancun upgrade (Cancun) has been postponed. There has been no major progress in technology, and there is a lack of hot spots for speculation in the news. The currency price has been sluggish, and it was not until the end of the year that it began to rebound with the broader market, but Has been weaker than Bitcoin.

1. Data: Prices are sluggish, and the ETH/BTC exchange rate continues to fall.

Throughout 2023, the price performance of ETH can only be described as “bland”. It has neither the heroic surge from US$750 to US$4,860 in 2021, nor the thrilling drop from the peak to below US$900 in 2022. .

At the beginning of 2023, ETH started from $1,200 and began to rise following the market, but it always fluctuated around $1,500. It seems that the good and bad things from the outside world can’t have much impact on it. It was not until the completion of the Shanghai upgrade in April that the price of ETH briefly broke through 2,000 US dollars, rising to a maximum of around 2,150 US dollars. However, it was unable to continue and slowly fell back, always fluctuating below 2,000 US dollars. It was not until the bull market signal was confirmed at the end of the year that ETH seemed to “make up its mind” and entered the land of fairyland again, returning to US$2,000 and reaching a maximum of US$2,400, with a cumulative increase of 83% throughout the year.

ETH Price Trend

The “blandness” of ETH is not only reflected in the price, but also in terms of market capitalization share. Throughout this year, ETH’s market value has remained around 17% -18%, while BTC’s market value has continued to rise during the same period and exceeded 50% at the end of the year. The difference between the two is even more obvious through the ETH/BTC exchange rate. The exchange rate has been declining from 0.072 at the beginning of the year, and once fell below 0.05 in December this year, and has currently been maintained at around 0.052. Although looking at a larger level, we can see that the ETH/BTC exchange rate has bottomed out, but whether it can “stand firm” and continue to rise is still worth waiting to see.

ETH/BTC exchange rate trend, weekly chart

The total lock-up volume (TVL) of Ethereum DeFi has basically increased in line with the price this year, from US$3.4 billion at the beginning of the year to US$6.4 billion at the end of the year, an increase of less than 100%. From a data point of view, due to the overall cold winter in the industry in 2023, Ethereum-based DEX, lending and other sectors have generally cooled down, making the DeFi ecosystem that Ethereum is proud of, no longer growing strongly.

Another thing to note is that the Ethereum LSD (liquidity staking derivatives) sector became a hot spot in the market in the first quarter of this year and is highly sought after. The reason behind this is: With the transformation of the Ethereum main network from POW to POS, users can stake 32 ETH as a staking node. Since ETH staking brings a reduction in asset liquidity to users, there is a subsequent increase in the demand for collateral. Due to the strong demand for liquidity, LSD services came into being.

However, after the Shanghai upgrade, ETH withdrawals were opened, and the LSD sector quickly cooled down. Except for the top few projects, it was basically difficult for other latecomers to gain market share again. As of now, Lido, a liquid staking solution provider, ranks first among many pledgers, accounting for 31.8%, while Coinbase ranks second with a share of 8.84%, and Stakefish ranks first with a share of 7.3%. Ranked third.

2. Technology: two major upgrades, full of expectations

From a technical perspective, the two biggest events in Ethereum this year are related to upgrades: the Shapella upgrade and the Cancun upgrade.

On April 12, 7 months after the “merger” upgrade, Ethereum simultaneously carried out the Shanghai upgrade and Capella upgrade, collectively known as the “Shapella upgrade”. The final change is that after the upgrade, pledgers who did not provide withdrawal certificates when making initial deposits have the ability to provide certificates to achieve withdrawals. Bringing the pledge withdrawal function to the execution layer, enabling pledgers to withdraw the nearly 20 million ETH they have locked since 2020 from the beacon chain to the execution layer, achieving optional full withdrawal or pledge earnings withdrawal, releasing Increase the liquidity of pledged tokens.

Although the Shanghai upgrade does not reduce gas fees, the implemented EIP-3651, EIP-3855, and EIP-3869 reduce gas fees for Ethereum developers and block creators. More importantly, this is the last important step in Ethereum’s transformation from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).

After the completion of the Shanghai upgrade, although some early pledgers made withdrawals, the situation reversed in the following two weeks. The net inflow of pledges began to increase, and the amount of pledges and the number of verifiers showed an accelerating upward trend.

Another highly anticipated upgrade is the Cancun upgrade Dencun (Dencun+Cancun), which is also another milestone upgrade of Ethereum. The Cancun upgrade focuses on the Ethereum execution layer (Execution Layer), and the Deneb upgrade focuses on the Consensus Layer.

The Cancun upgrade will bring substantial benefits to the Ethereum network, including: enhanced scalability, reduced gas fees, enhanced security, efficient data storage, enhanced cross-chain connections, etc. After the upgrade is completed, it is expected to stimulate the explosion of Ethereum L1 itself and L2 ecological applications, as well as cross-chain bridges, storage, GameFi and other sectors.

The Cancun upgrade originally scheduled for November continued Ethereum’s usual pattern of being continuously postponed. Currently, at the Ethereum Core Developer Conference, officials publicly stated that the Cancun upgrade may be postponed to early 2024. Under multiple factors such as the Bitcoin halving next year and the continued promotion of spot ETFs, Ethereum may be able to obtain greater positive returns if it completes the upgrade by then.

3. Other levels: Buterin is beginning to be anxious, and spot ETFs are waiting to be implemented.

This year’s Ethereum seems to be truly “cultivating internal strength” and fully absorbing and digesting past achievements. At the same time, Ethereum has not stopped exploring new technologies.

For example, among the 30 personal expressions of Vitalik’s opinions collected by Odaily this year, 8 are related to wallets, especially account abstract wallets. Even in the middle and late this year, there was a question about who is better, Account Abstract wallets or EOA wallets. Industry debate. Compared with EOA wallets, account abstraction certainly has advantages. But “Account abstraction upgrade can attract billions of people to use Ethereum”, Vitalik’s statement at the Ethereum community meeting, may be the reason why Buterin has a soft spot for it.

God V is also anxious. This anxiety is multifaceted. First, the recent rise of the Bitcoin ecosystem and the birth of various consensus protocols have made Bitcoin faster and lower-cost to deploy applications. At the same time, it has also begun to divide the market’s attention towards Ethereum; However, high-performance new public chains represented by Aptos, Sui, Ton, etc. are becoming mature, and some Layer 2 have also taken away users and funds that originally belonged to Ethereum.

At the end of this year, another big news is that the Ethereum spot ETF is also about to come out. Along with the application for Bitcoin spot ETF, companies such as BlackRock and ARK have also begun to apply for Ethereum spot ETF. Once the former is approved, the possibility of the emergence of an Ethereum spot ETF will be greatly increased, which will eventually bring more incremental funds into the market, which may allow the price of Ethereum to soar.

As an ecosystem with the most complete system in the Web3 industry, and at the same time the most representative of Web3 product forms to the traditional world, after a year of accumulation, Ethereum will truly be prosperous when the real world fully accepts it. At the same time, it will also face its old opponents and new challenges with a new attitude.

Layer 2: Hundreds of flowers bloom, and the tide is coming

In 2023, Layer 2 has gradually become the mainstream choice for execution layer expansion.

In the past year, we have seen a number of Layer 2 gradually catch up with the established Layer 1 at the data level. We have also seen centralized institutions such as Coinbase and ConsenSys test the waters of Layer 2. We have even seen Celo Wait for Layer 1 to start transforming towards Layer 2.

Odaily Planet Daily Note: In comparison of mainstream Layer 1/Layer 2 ecological TVL, Arbitrum has ranked among the top five, and Optimism and Base have both ranked in the top ten.

Looking closely at the Layer 2 track, relying on the first-mover advantage, the two representative projects of the Optimismtic-Rollup series, Arbitrum and Optimism, still lead the track in terms of TVL, but the two have shown clear differences in their development strategies.

Odaily Planet Daily Note: Comparing the changes in the status of the top ten mainstream Layer 2 TVLs during the year, Arbitrum and Optimism still lead the way, and the ZK system began to gradually expand its share around the second half of the year.

Arbitrum launched the governance token ARB in March this year, and immediately launched Layer 2, which was the largest airdrop event in the entire Crypto industry this year. Today, Arbitrum is continuing to stimulate the activity of the main chain through frequent ARB incentives; it is also exploring the possibility of vertical expansion through Arbitrum Orbit; in addition, Arbitrum is also actively building a new development environment Stylus, trying to support more programming languages Support to achieve expansion of EVM.

Optimism continues to promote its horizontal expansion based on the OP Stack architecture, and during the year, it “promoted” the support of Base, Zora and other strong support. In August, Optimism signed a governance and revenue sharing agreement with Base, which also unveiled the future collaborative operation of the “super chain” ecosystem - based on the Law of Chain. The framework allows OP to realize the governance effect of the entire ecosystem; the main Chain Optimism expands the ecosystem and promotes decentralization by distributing OP; ecological chains such as Base will use revenue to continuously feed back to the main chain.

It is also worth mentioning that Blast, which currently only has smart contracts but claims to be an automatic interest-generating Layer 2 that will build Optimismtic-Rollup, suddenly disrupted the entire Layer 2 market at the end of the year and relied on the extremely colorful marketing of founder Tieshan CX. Dafa successfully attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in real money and became TVL’s third largest “Layer 2” after Arbitrum and Optimism.

In terms of ZK-Rollup, the legendary zkEVM is no longer just a phantom that exists in the narrative. zkSync Era, Polygon-zkEVM, Linea, and Scroll have successively launched the main network this year and achieved a certain ecological scale. Starknet has also completed the “Quantum Leap” upgrade, greatly improving network execution efficiency.

Nowadays, these major networks have become the main battlefields for airdrop hunters. Countless woolists and robots are accumulating interaction data day and night, trying to get a share of future airdrops that are still undetermined.

Another focus on Layer 2 in 2023 is that the development of projects such as Celestia and Eigenlayer has promoted discussions on modularity, and as some Rollups turn to third-party networks instead of Ethereum as the data availability layer (DA), What exactly is considered a “pure” Layer 2 immediately triggered a heated discussion in the market.

In this regard, Vitalik’s recent articles seem to be quite directional. He first redefined various types of Layer 2, and then proposed that the market explore the potential feasibility of ZK+Plasma. Overtly or covertly, he seems to be deliberately guiding the market away from third-party DAs. plan.

Looking back at the entire year of 2023, one of the more regrettable things is that the Cancun upgrade, which has been brewing for nearly a year, has finally been delayed. However, this has also become our greatest expectation for the development of the Layer 2 track in 2024.

Looking forward to the coming year, the Cancun upgrade is expected to drive Layer 2 to achieve large-scale fee reductions and growth, which may push Layer 2 to usher in a new round of growth peaks.

In addition, the decentralization process of Layer 2 itself in the coming year is also worth looking forward to. This includes whether ZK-Rollup will generally launch tokens and improve the governance system, as well as the development and implementation of the decentralized sequencer (sequencer). process.

The tide is coming. Will 2024 be the year of Layer 2? We will witness it together with a positive attitude.

Layer 1: Market diversity is reduced, and the glory of the “Ethereum Killer” is no longer there

With the gradual improvement of Layer 2, there are already many competing Layer 2 devices on the market. DeFiLlama data shows that Layer 2 currently ranks among the top 10 chains in TVL, and Layer 2 may still occupy more Layer 1 positions in the future.

And against this background, how are the “Ethereum killers” who have been so prominent in the past doing?

In the past year, most emerging Layer 1s have already drifted away from their shining moments. But this does not mean that the Layer 1 market is silent. At present, the former “emerging” Layer 1 has still seen many changes and innovations in the past year.

Taking a quick look at the Layer 1 track, the most noteworthy event is the sudden rise of Solana. After the FTX crash, Solana experienced a long period of silence, but was still steadily rebuilding from the ruins.

Solana didn’t get off to a great start at the beginning of the year. In February, the Solana network just experienced a fork event. The incident began when a node on the network failed. The glitch resulted in a “fork,” essentially creating two separate versions of the Solana blockchain. As a result, the nodes in the network cannot reach an agreement, causing consensus to fail. Under this major outage, the processing capacity of the Solana network fell to less than 100 transactions per second.

The network outage lasted for several hours and caused significant disruption to users and developers. Although the developers were able to quickly identify and resolve the issue, the incident still had a negative impact. Panic following the outage raised questions about the platform’s scalability and reliability. The confidence and trust of the community was tested, and the incident also caused the price of the SOL token to drop sharply.

Since then, the Solana Foundation and developers have been redoubling their efforts to improve the stability and resiliency of the network. Until Q4 this year, the Solana network ushered in a significant recovery and showed a strong growth trend.

Taking TVL data as an example, DeFiLlama data shows that in the first three quarters of 2023, Solana TVL performance has been relatively stable, hovering around US$300 million. However, after entering Q4, Solana’s TVL has grown rapidly and has now exceeded US$800 million, an increase of approximately 200% compared to before this round of increases.

Solana’s DEX trading volume has also risen rapidly. In mid-December, weekly trading volume hit a record high, exceeding $3.7 billion.

In the crypto market, it is not difficult to achieve temporary gains. Most tokens have had their own highlight moments. The uniqueness of Solana is that this project can actually come back “secondary”. This is rare for crypto projects.

Among the scattered non-EVM networks on the market, the “Move duo” is also a new public chain that has been very popular this year.

In April, Aptos announced the launch of a delegated staking feature that allows users to delegate staking rights to trusted network validators and receive rewards as individuals.

In May, Sui mainnet was launched. Although it lags behind Aptos, which was launched last year, Sui’s launch has also achieved good results. Today, when Layer 2 has gradually become the focus of the market and the Layer 1 narrative is fading, what is so special about these two Move-based public chains that have high hopes from a large amount of capital?

Looking back at the story of the founding of “Two Heroes”, we have to start with Facebook back then. As a social giant, Facebook once intended to enter the field of encryption. They developed the quite original Diem blockchain. But as regulatory failures continued, Diem ultimately failed to achieve the expected results. Diem developers realized that in order not to be constrained by regulation, they had to break away from the original field, so some networks that were closer to the “native” encryption-Sui and Aptos were born.

Since these two networks are more or less related to Facebook’s original Diem, they both inherited the Move language as their smart contract language.

There are big differences between Move and Solidity, and we won’t make any judgments here, but the huge differences make Sui and Aptos a distinctive set of similar products in the market.

DeFiLlama data shows that Sui’s current TVL has reached approximately $150 million, while Aptos’s is approximately $78 million. The on-chain browser shows that the current total number of accounts on the Sui network exceeds 9.11 million, and the current total number of accounts on the Aptos network exceeds 9.9 million.

Overall, Sui Blockchain is off to a great start in 2023. The platform has made progress in both technology and ecosystem, and gained support from investors and developers.

In addition, some other “ancient” Layer 1 also performed well.

Filecoin is one non-EVM network making big moves this year. In March this year, the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) was successfully launched. Since then, the Filecoin blockchain has been able to support smart contracts and user programmability through FVM.

As a fairly mature network, Filecoin has long been unique in the storage sector. After this FVM update, the introduction of smart contracts gives it computing power. The compatibility of EVM also makes it easier to introduce developers and dApps. This major move sets a new milestone for Filecoin’s future development.

Similar to Filecoin, in the following April, the EOS EVM mainnet Beta version was officially launched. This launch also marks EOS’s ability to achieve interoperability between the Ethereum and EOS ecosystems.

Looking back at non-EVM Layer 1 in 2023, we also found a quite interesting phenomenon.

The popularity of Layer 2 not only drives Ethereum forward, but also has a more or less subtle but long-term impact on the Layer 1 market. Solidity’s huge developer ecosystem has allowed more non-EVM-compatible networks to actively embrace the EVM ecosystem. Some niche, non-mainstream networks that are incompatible with EVM seem to be struggling to survive in the market.

The gravity of Ethereum is so strong that other public chains are either actively or passively affected by the Ethereum ecosystem. In November this year, EVM Layer 1 Celo made even more embarrassing moves. cLabs, the main developer of the blockchain, posted the topic “Selecting the L2 Protocol Stack Framework” on its forum, inviting the community to provide feedback and participate in the discussion.

Celo is trying to reposition itself. The network attempts to develop a Layer 2 network using a mature stack and migrate the ecosystem while inheriting old assets. Within the framework of the plan, priorities will include “easy migration, minimal downtime, keeping gas fees low, and Ethereum compatibility.”

This also means that when the migration is completed, there will be one less network competing in the Layer 1 world, and users will get a new Layer 2.

Through the changes in the Celo brand ecological niche, it is not difficult to predict that perhaps more and more Layer 1 projects will usher in the countdown to life. For more niche networks, they will either be swallowed up by Ethereum, or they will become completely “maverick” - just like Solana, Aptos, and Sui.

The living space of Layer 1 like Ethereum has become increasingly narrow.

That being the case, what about the development of a large number of high-efficiency, low-gas, and EVM-compatible “Ethereum killers” that have emerged in the past?

Take Fantom, for example, which was on the rise during the last bull run with back-to-back ACs. Fantom uses Multichain as the main cross-chain bridge of the ecosystem. In July this year, Fantom was in danger due to the Multichain incident. Approximately $118 million in assets were transferred from the Multichain Fantom bridge contract, and the stablecoins issued by the Multichain bridge contract on Fantom experienced significant de-anchoring.

This incident also dealt a heavy blow to Fantom. TVL was in a state of collapse and it is still difficult to recover.

The fate of another “Ethereum killer” Avalanche is quite different. Despite being in a bear market, Avalanche Network’s TVL has not declined significantly so far this year. Interestingly, at the end of the year, the AVAX token rose strongly, and TVL also rose significantly along with it.

In mid-December, AVAX price briefly exceeded $40. Although it is still far from the high point of the last bull market, it has achieved a single-month increase of about 100%. The quarterly gains have been even more dramatic. In Q3 this year, the AVAX token has been hovering at just over $10 for a long time.

Finally, BNB Chain remains the most noteworthy among the EVM networks. Although it is an established public chain, BNB Chain has never stopped innovating. With the launch of BNB Greenfield and opBNB, BNB Chain currently includes computing, storage, Layer, zk and other fields.

Of course, the BNB Chain brand is not just one chain, but a huge family composed of 5 chains. This also makes it unique in the Layer 1 field and occupies a very different ecological niche.

There are so many players in the Layer 1 field that it is difficult to list them all in this article. In addition to the main ones mentioned above, other public chains have also made a lot of progress.

For example, in November, the new CEO of Web3 Foundation, the Polkadot development organization, said that Polkadot is about to undergo a major transformation. The “slot auction” that has caused market hot spots many times before will become a thing of the past. Polkadot is about to abandon the slot auction of parachains and instead adopt a new mechanism that allows application developers to rent block space as needed. In November, NEAR also announced the launch of the NEAR Data Availability (NEAR DA) layer, a network that provides powerful, cost-effective data availability for ETH rollup and Ethereum developers. NEAR DA reduces costs and improves rollup reliability while maintaining the security of Ethereum. The TON network is also a unique flower that is quite different from other networks. In July, the popularity of the BOT circuit turned Telegram into an alternative encryption application that combines wallet and transaction. Although the tokens people trade are not located on the TON network, they can still trigger people’s imagination about the TON network. In September, Telegram officially announced its cooperation with the TON Foundation. The huge number of users has brought huge room for imagination for the user growth of the TON network.

Looking forward, it is difficult for us to predict the specific future direction of the Layer 1 market. However, it is obvious that the strong rise of Ethereum Layer 2 will further compress the living space of other Layer 1.

For public chains, being “like Ethereum” may increasingly become a constraint on development in the future—either integrating into the Ethereum ecosystem or completely different from it.

As the bull market approaches, will the Layer 1 narrative be completely overtaken by Layer 2 in this cycle? In the coming year 2024, we will jointly witness the answer to this question.

DeFi: Going through the cold winter and heading towards recovery

In our year-end summary of 2022, we described the DeFi track like this - this is obviously not the best year.

The same words still apply to 2023. DeFi Llama data shows that as of early December, the TVL locked in all DeFi protocols on major networks was approximately US$50.8 billion, which is still far from the peak of US$178.54 billion at DeFi Summer in 2021. A gap of more than three times.

Odaily Planet Daily Note: The TVL of the entire network is still far away from the historical peak.

The difference is that 2023 is obviously not the worst year for DeFi. After the cold winter of 2022, DeFi this year has shown sufficient signs of recovery. This is not only reflected in the relative recovery of the TVL of the entire network and individual token prices, but also reflected in the overall silence compared to 2022. We once again saw multiple sub-sectors achieve small-scale explosions, and multiple projects complete breakthrough iterations and innovations.

In April, Ethereum successfully completed the Shanghai upgrade and officially activated the pledge and redemption function, which directly promoted the launch of the LSDFi sector. Lido took this opportunity to surpass the established leaders in many sectors such as trading and lending, and took the top spot on the TVL rankings. At the same time, as the scale of the LST “pool” continues to expand, more and more different types of upper-level applications have begun to appear around the LSD scene. Many of these projects have performed well in the secondary market, such as hoping to borrow native pledges. Lybra, whose revenue has broken through the stablecoin market, and Pendle, which has made a big fuss around the revenue part, etc.

In addition to LSDFi, RWA is also the most popular sector on the DeFi track this year. As a pioneer representative, Maker opened up income channels for U.S. debt through DSR and the new window Spark Protocol, reaping the dividends of the high-interest cycle, which in turn amplified the market demand for DAI, pushed up the market value of MKR itself, and became the longest-running cryptocurrency this year. The most outstanding DeFi project in a period of time.

While DAI is gaining strength through high interest rates, a number of projects have begun to “poach corners.” The stablecoin sector has welcomed a number of heavyweight new players this year. CrvUSD and GHO, which have been warmed up by Curve and Aave for a long time, have both been launched. Although they are still not comparable to DAI in terms of scale, there are scenarios that can be obtained by relying on leading protocols. The advantages have determined that its stamina cannot be underestimated. For the sake of healthy competition, we are happy to see more different stablecoins emerge. After all, after experiencing the large-scale decoupling crisis caused by the Silicon Valley Bank incident at the beginning of the year, the market has already realized that having more options is the key. Optimal solution.

The clichéd derivatives are another eye-catching sector in the DeFi track this year. From dYdX, which has completed the transition from application to network, to Dazai, which is about to launch the v3 version, and then to GMX, which dominates Arbitrum, we are Witness the power of DeFi gradually eroding this sector that was once almost monopolized by CeFi.

The “intention” promoted by Paradigm is a recent narrative in the DeFi track, and a small number of projects involved in this sector have received early investment from VCs.

Continuing to look at the micro level, many projects have also delivered commendable answers in 2023. Uniswap, which continues to lead the trading track, has surprisingly released the v4 blueprint, aiming to use hooks to achieve more flexible and comprehensive functions; the all-round biologic Frax has performed in multiple sectors such as stablecoins, lending, LSD, and RWA, and has It showed excellent ability to withstand pressure during the CRV liquidation crisis in the middle of the year; Aevo, through its “early bird” contract focusing on pre-TGE tokens, has become the main place for value discovery before many popular tokens go online… Similar excellent representatives There are still many.

Of course, in addition to these positive signs of recovery, there are still many hidden worries in the DeFi world in 2023, such as the large-scale deanchoring of stablecoins caused by the Silicon Valley Bank incident mentioned earlier, and the “ The vulnerability of the lending system highlighted by “malicious lending”, as well as the centralization problem that has been criticized frequently by Uniswap Labs, and the continued escalation of hacker threats represented by the “Kyber power seizure threat” incident…

This is the first bear market that DeFi has experienced as a complete narrative, but completeness does not mean maturity. DeFi obviously still faces many problems to be solved, but overall, after 2023, we have seen that DeFi It has not been knocked down by the cold winter, but is moving towards recovery.

Looking forward to 2024, although we still don’t know what will ignite the fuse that will ignite another explosion of DeFi, but looking at the general trend, as the on-chain ecology flourishes again due to the collective emergence of different types of Dapps such as games and social networking, DeFi as a The infrastructure will definitely welcome more users and greater traffic.

Those projects that have the courage to travel through the cold winter are destined to receive rewards in the years to come.

NFT: Innovation is limited and few people care about it. Will there be a bright future next year?

Compared with the brilliant inscription, NFT has fallen into a continuous low ebb this year. Except for the occasional bright spots in individual projects throughout the year, the leading blue chips have fallen into a rebound rather than a reversal. With BAYC as an example, at the beginning of the year its average price was around 71 ETH, but by the end of this year the floor price was less than 30 ETH.

The opposite example is Pudgy Penguins. From the time when the community was on the verge of disbandment to when the physical toys were sold out on Amazon, the new team advanced its layout in an orderly manner, and its floor price also bucked the trend in the bear market. A few days ago, it even exceeded the 10 ETH mark.

The structure of the NFT market has also undergone major changes. Blur went from competing with Opensea at the beginning of the year to almost taking the vast majority of the market share by the end of the year. Opensea, which was once unparalleled, only accounted for 10% of the weekly trading volume in December. 20% of the entire market. Although OpenSea has made some product responses and community feedback in response to the impact of Blur, it still does not help. The zero-royalty debate has also come to an end with Blur’s rise to the top - few people will discuss “whether creators should receive royalties” anymore.

X2Y2 and LooksRare, which sell mining transactions, have not become surprises in the market because of their models. At the end of September this year, LooksRare took the lead in adjusting token economics and ended the transaction mining model that lasted for more than a year. And use games as a new selling point of the platform. Although X2Y2 retained the mining transaction model, it also announced in November that it would reduce token emissions and launch a cross-chain aggregator. But the embarrassing thing is that whether it is the former or the latter, its trading volume accounts for less and less in the market, and eventually becomes one of countless denominators.

But behind the rise of Blur is the exodus of whales. On February 15 this year, Blur released its second season airdrop plan, encouraging

Users are encouraged to place bids and place orders. The myth of getting rich in the first season attracted a large influx of users, and everyone began to bid more crazily in order to eat meat. Franklin and Huang Licheng, both BAYC whales, began to fight openly and secretly, and their trading volume once occupied 8% of the market. However, due to excessive liquidity, the giant whales also took a large number of selling orders during the process of brushing points. Huang Licheng lost more than 500 ETH in this game of brushing points. Franklin, who had acted boldly in the BendDAO collective liquidation incident, was deeply involved in the quagmire of on-chain casinos. He eventually liquidated all NFTs and canceled his Twitter account.

Even blue-chip project developers who were supposed to earn royalties couldn’t stand it anymore. At 0:00 on June 28, Azuki Elemental Beans, a new series of works by the leading NFT project Azuki, officially went on sale. The sale with a starting price of 2 ETH brought a total of 2 W ETH to the project, and the enthusiasm of the community is evident. However, the Azuki Elemental Beans after the drawing was almost a 100% replica of the original Azuki drawing. The project team’s perfunctory angered the supporters. Although Azuki officials proposed an airdrop plan after the incident in an attempt to make up for it, Holders still have headaches. Without replying, he exchanged his little picture for real money, and then left the community forever.

The only ones that have gained something are probably the platforms that take the multi-chain aggregation route. Platforms such as OKX NFT Marketplace and Magic Eden are going against the trend. In particular, the former takes advantage of its built-in Web3 wallet to maximize the power of the aggregator. Taking advantage of the opportunity of the rise of BTC ecosystem, it has stabilized its position and become a presence that cannot be ignored in the market. But looking to the future, NFTFi, which was originally a hot topic, has become dispensable due to the gradual fading of market enthusiasm and Blur’s abundant liquidity. Aggregators may also become the end of NFT market innovation.

GameFi: Ponzi left, full chain right

If the blockchain games in 2021 and 2022 are colorful, then the blockchain games in 2023 are endless gray-from “Play to Earn” to “X to Earn”, countless projects use various token models and crudely made The game graphics attracted groups of speculators eager to recreate the dream of getting rich. However, in the end, all that was left was a pile of chicken feathers behind the project’s death spiral.

In June, Bored Ape Yacht Club’s official Twitter released a promotional video for the new game “HV-MTL Forge” and revealed that the game will be officially launched on June 29. This space building game revolves around Yuga Labs’ latest mecha NFT series HV-MTL. It supports players who hold HV-MTL to build or customize an exclusive special space in the game, and use their HV-MTL through the game. Upgrade to a new form. However, Yuga’s new games have not received the same high attention as previous bull markets—people are beginning to get tired of NFTs, and they are also beginning to get tired of NFT derivative games.

In July, ATMTA, the development company of Solana ecological 3A chain game Star Atlas, announced significant layoffs. Including full-time employees and contractors of cooperative studios invited to co-develop the game, the total number of team members was reduced from 167 to 45. The layoff ratio As high as 73%, this project, which was severely damaged by the FTX thunderstorm, can barely support itself by the meager income from the NFT trading market, but it is not enough to cover the salary of everyone on the team. Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick directly stated on Twitter that “the reminder a year ago was to protect Web3 investors from potential pitfalls” and publicly poached the corner.

How about another 3A chain game that everyone is looking forward to?

As a product of the last bull market, Bigtime, which was officially launched in 2021, has attracted much attention, and the NFTs it sold were quickly wiped out. Now the game officially opened the pre-season version on October 10 this year. After nearly 3 In 2019, the launch of Bigtime has been highly anticipated.

However, as the official rules continue to be revised, many new studios choose to leave after weighing the pros and cons, and there is even a situation where “install the machines on Monday, start gold mining on Tuesday, and all retreat on Wednesday”; and this was planned early. The studio that has created a masterpiece still chooses to stick to it, but its income is gradually declining. Although independent regulation by the project team can maintain the Token output and currency price at a more reasonable level, overly centralized regulation also makes players return to the game. It was far from hopeless - after all, no one was really here to play games.

There is also a bright color among all the gray. FOCG (Fully-on-chain Games) has attracted much attention this year. Unlike GameFi 1.0, which has assets on the chain, all interactive behaviors and states of FOCG are completed on the chain. , thereby realizing a truly decentralized game. A series of excellent works such as Loot Survivor, Dark forest, Ryo, and Skystrife have quickly become the favorites of supporters, and the community is inseparable from the “Bible” and “Halal” of the entire chain.

“Why do people put games on the blockchain?” Full-chain games try to combine the characteristics of the blockchain with the playability of the game itself, aiming to provide a perfect answer to the previous sentence.

Make bricks without straw. Whether it is FOCG, which tests extreme performance, or traditional Ponzi-Game, they all need to rely on infrastructure to accomplish great achievements, and Ronin and Starknet each have an end: the former has reached agreements with various game studios, attracting various ideas and ideas. Different chain game developers have even contacted Sandbox; the latter has been labeled “the most popular development platform for fully on-chain games” due to its performance advantages and the emergence of the fully on-chain game engine Dojo, attracting various Degen front-end developers. Come and show off your skills. Don’t forget about Sui - the small game Sui 8192 based on this blockchain is simple and brisk. The gameplay is exactly the same as the once popular 2048. You only need to use the direction keys to move the blocks and overlap two identical numbers to form a larger one. number. This simple and easy-to-understand game once helped Sui Network exceed 20 million daily transactions and surpass Solana.

Whether for practitioners or ordinary users, there is no middle choice in the Crypto Game track: go left to the traditional chain game, and rise and fall with Ponzi in the wave of token flywheels, although you have to endure the frequent Bugs, but you can still gain wealth; go right to the fully on-chain game, and experience the true joy of the game in the novel experience, but there is a high probability that you will not make money.

What about you, where do you stand?

SocialFi: A dark horse emerges, and the track is no longer useless

The Web3 Social track, which was originally regarded as useless, has suddenly emerged this year.

On February 1, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey tweeted that social products Damus and Amethyst based on the distributed social media protocol Nostr have been launched on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store respectively. Subsequently, Damus announced that it would randomly distribute small amounts of Bitcoin to users through the Bitcoin Lightning Network, and would launch a Bitcoin reward function for posts in the next version.

For a time, the WeChat Moments and Twitter timelines were flooded with a long string of letters. People were frantically forwarding their public keys and re-establishing their relationships in the encryption world.

Farcaster, which uses the Ethereum architecture, is even more niche. The invitation-only entry method allows this application to gather VCs, project founders, Ethereum community users, and of course Buterin. The protocol, founded by former Coinbase executive Dan Romero, is fully decentralized and makes it easier for developers to build decentralized social network applications, and creating a profile on Farcaster generates a mnemonic phrase and an identity on the Ethereum Goerli testnet.

If the first two are just a small group of people’s entertainment, then the emergence of Friend.tech (hereinafter referred to as FT) has completely ignited the track.

This social protocol built on the Base chain uses Key to price connections, which fully combines dynamic gaming and social value. It also adopts a “royalty” model similar to NFT. The project charges 10 for each transaction of Key. % of the fee, 5% of which is allocated to the person who is buying and selling the Key, and the remaining 5% belongs to the treasury revenue. The high royalties and the official points airdrop mechanism make mutual holding of high-value KEY (3, 3) the best choice for everyone.

In just a few days, FT has received a large influx of new users, and its protocol revenue and transaction volume have also surged. As of press time, the total revenue of the FT protocol has reached 15,509.276 ETH, and a total of 12,452,771 transactions have occurred.

The popularity of FT has also directly driven the traffic of the entire track. Competitors such as Stars Arena, Tomo, and New Bitcoin City have successively joined the battle. Among them, Stars Arena, where the founder of AVAX personally came to the platform, took the lead and grabbed the second place in the market. However, the theft of the protocol and the slow response of the development team caused it to lose market share to Tomo, which subsequently became more complete and had more project platforms, and eventually became silent.

However, a series of actions such as the founder’s cash withdrawals, a large number of robot accounts rushing to make profits, and frequent changes in points rules gradually made FT lose its vitality, and a large number of real users were misjudged as robots, which poured fuel on the burning project. , the founder Racer left on the platform “Family, who understands?” It completely raised this matter to an unprecedented level.

At this point, it has become a foregone conclusion that a large number of users have left the market. On November 19, FT TVL fell to US$36.04 million, compared with US$42.25 million on November 18, a decrease of 18.13%.

Is FT’s foray into SocialFi the right thing?

From a mechanism design perspective, FT has indeed created an unprecedented model, and the daily activity and protocol revenue prove the feasibility of this (3, 3) flywheel. This model provides users with an opportunity to participate and share value, thereby attracting a large number of user participation in the early stages. However, despite its attractive mechanism design, FT is still a product with strong financial attributes, rather than a truly social product that can have long-term sticky users. The long-term stickiness of social products is usually based on real social relationships, common interests and value sharing between users. The KOLs participating in this “making friends” game are more motivated from the perspective of economic interests, and the social relationships built by Key have also been continuously destroyed by the market in the decline of TVL.

But this track still has its significance - in Web2, social networking is always a piece of fat that the giants are unwilling to let go, and in Web3, the immature Wild West also needs a group of people native to the region. The protocols of the blockchain world strengthen the connection between the entire network, and narratives such as “decentralization”, “breaking data monopoly”, and “owning assets” have always been the goals pursued by idealists.

The new year is coming, what kind of surprises will the SocialFi track bring us?

The security situation is complicated, and it is not just technical vulnerabilities that introduce risks.

2023 is a year that has produced many innovations in the encryption world, but behind the innovations, many staggering security incidents have also occurred. A series of security incidents not only highlight current system vulnerabilities, but also leave important lessons for future security strategy and technology development.

Looking back on 2023, the Web3 industry has experienced a number of large-scale security incidents in the bear market. These incidents involve multiple aspects, including smart contract vulnerabilities, wallet security, cross-chain transaction issues, and attacks on decentralized financial platforms.

Just like in previous years, as an intermediary for cross-ecological assets, the large amount of assets locked in the cross-chain bridge is undoubtedly the best target for hackers. In 2023, the single loss amount of multiple cross-chain bridge attacks still ranks among the top, and the reasons for the damage are also diverse.

In July, the cross-chain interoperability protocol Poly Network suffered an attack. Hackers used Poly to issue additional assets on several chains, including nearly 100 million BNB and nearly 10 billion BUSD on the Metis network. Hackers have also issued multiple assets on Ethereum, HECO, Polygon, Avalanche, BSC and other chains.

In addition, the BNB Tianliang attack case that occurred in 2022 has made gratifying progress. Previously, attackers who exploited a Binance Bridge vulnerability to steal approximately 2 million BNB (worth nearly $600 million) deposited 924,821 BNB worth $249 million on VenusProtocol. Whether the deposited positions will be liquidated will trigger further chain reactions in the market, which has always affected users of the entire BNB ecosystem.

The proposal passed by the Venus team shows that Binance and other BNB chain ecosystem participants cooperate to take over the position when it reaches the liquidation line and jointly repay the debt. Therefore, the BNB Chain core team is actually the only liquidator of this position to safely control this ultra-large BNB supply and avoid direct chain liquidation. This year, the position has been liquidated several times (relative to the total amount) in small amounts, and BNB is still developing steadily. Neither the on-chain ecology nor the price of BNB has experienced the worst-case scenario - a stampede. , serial liquidations, and currency prices spiraling downward.

From the perspective of ecological impact, the Multichain incident may be the most serious accident in the past year. This accident is also the most bizarre accident among the cross-chain bridge losses.

In May 2023, users of the cross-chain bridge Multichain suddenly found that their transfers could not be received. As time went by, Multichain’s native token MULTI also suffered a rapid decline, and the token price plummeted by 35% in one day. A series of problems have caused some cross-link routes to become unusable. This incident quickly aroused widespread concern and concern in the community and triggered panic in the crypto community.

On July 6, more than $126 million in assets were artificially transferred out of the MPC custody address. According to the analysis of the contract audit team Beosin, the transfer of funds was completely manual, and the private key of Multichain’s MPC custody address has been controlled by external forces.

However, here’s the surprise. Afterwards, according to the official statement, we learned that the private keys of Multichain’s 24 MPC nodes are all controlled by Zhaojun alone, and all node services are completely run on his personal server.

Although this incident was not due to purely technical aspects such as vulnerabilities or attacks, the project party’s risk management capabilities and high degree of centralization are still disappointing. This only further highlights the importance of project governance - “loopholes” in non-technical fields are far more destructive than code loopholes.

This risk event not only endangered the project itself, but also dealt a heavy blow to the Fantom ecosystem. Fantom uses Multichain as the main cross-chain bridge of the ecosystem. Even more unfortunately, in October this year, some wallets on Fantom Foundation Ethereum and Fantom were attacked, with confirmed losses exceeding $657,000. Fantom is caught in the dilemma of being more “bear” than bear.

The “thunderstorm” of the JPEX exchange also further highlighted the human risks of centralized operations. This is also another risk incident that has nothing to do with technology but harms a large number of users.

In September, during the token 2049 conference, the JPEX exchange restricted withdrawals. The withdrawal limit is limited to 1,000 USDT, but the handling fee is as high as 999 USDT. The JPEX booth currently participating in the conference was also “empty”. In this case, more than 2,000 people called the police claiming to have been victimized, involving a total amount of HK$1.3 billion. This case was also called “the largest financial fraud case in history” by some Hong Kong media. A large number of people including exchange personnel and KOLs who promoted it were involved in the case.

While the Hong Kong government encourages and supports Web3, but the policy is not yet complete, the occurrence of the JPEX case is undoubtedly a blow to the Hong Kong Web3 industry and has overdrafted the trust of ordinary people. This incident has drawn a small footnote to Hong Kong Web3, which has just promoted regulatory compliance.

Other established exchanges are also facing challenges in security management.

In November this year, Justin Sun’s Poloniex was attacked. On-chain data shows that hackers have stolen approximately US$114 million in total assets. Tron also promptly froze some of the hackers’ on-chain assets, but the effect was not significant.

Justin Sun issued an article advising hackers to “refund” as soon as possible, and was willing to give 5% of assets as a white hat reward. What is dramatic is that the hackers exchanged most of the stolen assets into TRX tokens, which actually caused a short-term surge in TRX tokens.

Another exchange owned by Justin Sun also suffered bad luck - Heco and HTX were attacked in the same month.

In November, a withdrawal operation of 10,145 ETH occurred on Heco Bridge, and then other assets continued to be transferred out, including a series of assets such as 42 million USDT and 489 HBTC. Outside of the HECO bridge, HTX also saw $23.4 million in suspicious transfers.

At present, these two exchanges have recovered from the crisis, their operations have not been seriously affected, and user deposits have also been restored in an orderly manner.

For those well-known DeFi projects, the huge capital pool makes them a coveted feast for hackers. In mid-March, Euler Finance was hacked, resulting in losses of nearly $200 million, before the attackers returned all the stolen funds. The stolen assets were returned, which is extremely rare in the cryptocurrency space.

The security of cutting-edge projects deserves more attention. Excessive development, lack of experience, and a large amount of investment have made emerging star projects a safe place. When SocialFi took off this year, Stars Arena stole the show. But in early October this year, the platform suffered a serious exploit that resulted in nearly $3 million in AVAX tokens being stolen, raising concerns about existing security measures.

Subsequently, the team suspended the smart contract and stated that it would migrate the contract. For this reason, all members of the original team paid the price of being dismissed. At the end of November, Stars Arena completed the migration of keys and funds and the website has been restored. In early December, the team stated that it would upgrade and migrate the contract. When users restart transactions, the TVL in the contract will be transferred to the new smart contract.

Perhaps affected by the recovery of the encryption market, security incidents occurred frequently in Q4. In late November, an “attack” also occurred on the veteran project dYdX.

YFI posted a drop of about 45% in one day. The plunge affected long positions on dYdX, causing a series of liquidations of positions on dYdX, with nearly $38 million in funds liquidated. Due to the rapid decline, there was a funding gap, and dYdX paid a price of US$9 million.

Unlike the “theft” of other well-known projects, the attackers of dYdX used purely financial means to carry out the attack. The operations performed were all open market trading operations and did not exploit any security loopholes.

This type of attack is not the first time it has occurred in the encryption market. In 2022, the $116 million attack on Mango Markets sounded the alarm to the market. The attacker even bluntly stated that what he was conducting was only a “high-profit trading strategy” and refused to acknowledge the identity of the “attacker” imposed on him by the outside world.

Overall, the security situation we will face in 2023 will be more complex. When discussing the security of the on-chain world, we have to face a reality: although “code is law” is the vision and pursuit of the crypto world, the writing and deployment of any code, the operation and maintenance of the project, and the negotiation and execution of governance, It’s all still done by people.

In many alternative “security” incidents this year, we can all observe a similar phenomenon - there may be no technically discovered vulnerabilities, but the project still suffered huge losses due to non-technical reasons, which in turn led to users Assets damaged. The dYdX attack directly exposed the “dark forest” environment of the on-chain world. Completely open market operations without breaking any rules are enough to cause serious damage to a well-known project.

These security incidents in 2023 demonstrate the different challenges faced by the Web3 industry in various tracks. The industry still needs to further optimize in different aspects such as regulatory compliance, mechanism design, and technical security to protect user assets from these increasingly complex threats. Impact.

This recurring issue reminds us that the crypto ecosystem is far from mature and investors and developers alike must adopt a more cautious strategy. Only through the industry’s collective efforts and continued innovation can we realize the potential of the crypto world while minimizing risks.

2024, the year of rejuvenation

2023 has come to an end, and the encryption market in 2024 is even more worth looking forward to. Odaily Planet Daily has screened several dimensions of information worthy of focus for readers.

The first is that spot ETFs are about to come out, which will open up channels for traditional funds to enter. Currently, many traditional asset management institutions, including BlackRock and Invesco, are actively responding to the SEC’s relevant requirements and constantly revising application documents. Judging from the time point, there will be 8 ETFs waiting for resolution around mid-January next year, especially the approval result of the ARK 21 Shares Bitcoin ETF will become a weather vane.

January 10, 2024 is the final time for the approval of ARK 21 Shares Bitcoin ETF. If ARK 21 Shares is successfully approved, there is a high probability that several others will also be approved at the same time. The SEC will not allow a certain institution to gain an important first-mover advantage; if rejected, ARK 21 Shares will have to go through the process again to open The long review period of 240 days; the deeper impact is that other companies are not immune, and this round of spot ETF applications can basically be declared dead in advance - although the final decision time of several other ETFs is mid-March next year.

According to multiple forecasts including Bloomberg analysts, the probability of adoption of a Bitcoin spot ETF next year exceeds 90%. Once officially passed, a large amount of incremental OTC funds will enter the encryption market, driving the price of Bitcoin to rise.

VanEck, an American asset management giant with a management scale of up to US$70 billion, issued a statement: “We expect more than US$2.4 billion to flow into the newly approved US spot Bitcoin ETF in the first quarter of 2024 and drive up the price of Bitcoin. Despite the sharp Volatility is possible, but Bitcoin price is unlikely to fall below $30,000 in the first quarter of 2024.”

The second is that Bitcoin will undergo its fourth halving in history in April next year, bringing about a “halving market.” In this round of halving, the reward per block created is reduced to 3.125 BTC. Historically, Bitcoin halving has been an important catalyst for pushing Bitcoin into a new bull market. The first three halvings all ushered in a sharp increase in the price of BTC. The Bitcoin halving in 2024 is coming, and countless project parties have begun gearing up. With the efforts of many parties, history may repeat itself. However, it should be noted that Bitcoin’s “halving market” is inseparable from the improvement of the macroeconomic environment, including the Fed’s adoption of monetary policy adjustments such as slowing down interest rate increases, stopping interest rate increases, and starting interest rate cuts.

Thomas Perfumo, head of strategy at Kraken, said: “What’s special about this halving is that the inflation rate of Bitcoin’s circulating supply will drop below 1% for the first time in history.” At the same time, the Federal Reserve may adjust its policy, and U.S. spot ETFs are approved for listing. Against this backdrop, investors may be facing a “perfect storm.”

The third is the Ethereum Cancun upgrade and the advent of the Ethereum spot ETF. The Ethereum Cancun upgrade is regarded as a milestone event in the Ethereum upgrade route. This upgrade will form a “two-wheel drive” expansion model by introducing sharding technology and the previously used Rollup solution. The Cancun upgrade can not only solve the performance bottleneck problem faced by the current Ethereum network, but also lay the foundation for future in-depth upgrades. In addition, in next year’s upgrade, Ethereum will also implement EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), which will reduce transaction fees and improve the scalability of L2 such as Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, etc. Driven by the upgrade, the price of ETH may be expected to rebound significantly next year, and the ETH/BTC exchange rate will also stabilize and rebound.

The fourth is the change in the exchange landscape, and more emerging CEX/DEX may emerge. As a number of CEX giants such as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken have been sued this year, compliance has become the number one problem facing the development of exchanges. Some funds and users may turn to the DeFi world, promoting the emergence of more emerging DEXs. In addition, OKX, Bybit, Coinbase and Bitget may also accept some users, thus changing the existing CEX landscape. More importantly, in every bull market in the past, emerging platforms would become dark horses and seize a certain market share, and this time is no exception. Investors need to pay close attention to emerging platforms with potential, and their platform coins may have more excess value.

The fifth is the development of Meme culture, and inscriptions will continue to be popular. The birth of the Ordinals protocol. It promotes the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem and allows miners to gain more benefits. More importantly, a fairer Freemint model has been formed under the leadership of Meme culture such as Mingwen, which broke the previous situation of project tokens controlled by VCs in the encryption market, truly returning value to the community and driving prices through consensus.

Andrei Grachev, partner at DWF Labs, commented that Meme is an important part of cryptocurrency and a cultural phenomenon. Sleepy, the founder of Little Ghost, believes that Meme will never disappear and will always emerge, endlessly. In 2024, the life cycle of Meme NFT will be even shorter than it is now, and the wealth effect of individual projects will be even crazier.

Sixth, there may be explosive hits in the blockchain game sector. In the past few years, Axie Infinity, Stepn, etc. have all exploded out of the circle, driving more traditional users to enter the encryption market. The next round of bull market chain games will still be one of the breakthroughs for growth. According to VanEck’s prediction, at least one blockchain game will have more than 1 million daily active users in 2024, showing the long-awaited potential. The underlying blockchain related to chain games can also focus on it.

Finally, the future price of Bitcoin is also the topic that everyone is most concerned about. Many crypto market leaders also gave their own views on the future market:

Binance co-founder He Yi said that the market will reach a high point next year. “The encryption cycle still exists. From next year to the year after, the market will reach a high point. But as the size of the industry becomes larger, the growth rate will be lower than the previous cycle.”

Galaxy Digital CEO Michael Novogratz believes that BTC prices will rise significantly next year, especially with the possibility of the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates, and believes that Bitcoin may reach all-time highs by the end of next year.

Matt Hougan, chief investment officer (CIO) of Bitwise Asset Management, said that the recent surge in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has coincided with a sharp rise in the price of gold, a trend that reflects investors’ shift to assets that are sensitive to inflation and can protect against economic risks. Hougan is optimistic about the future of Bitcoin, predicting that Bitcoin prices will reach record highs in the next 6 months to 1 year, and he expects investors to continue to pour into the cryptocurrency market.

Skybridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci predicts that Bitcoin’s market value will reach $10 trillion to $12 trillion in the future, and this has nothing to do with whether the U.S. SEC approves a spot Bitcoin ETF application.

The new year is approaching, and Odaily Planet Daily will continue to stay at the forefront of Web3 and bring the changes and hopes to our readers.

May entropy increase while entropy decreases, and all things grow.

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