With prices surging over the last year for crypto we are finally in 2024 seeing a major turning point happening. With $BTC nearing a new all time high soon and $ETH also paving the way for major breakout we are starting to get a glimpse into the projects and sectors for future of what this next bull run might look like.
DeFi Expanded
The last bull run swap DeFi as a major area of focus with crazy high APR rates when interest rates where sitting at near 0% it was an attractive way to try and boost revenue while the market was liquid hot! But with that came a few bad actors that scammed and rug pulled many people out of millions if not billions in assets. Once the markets cooled off few defi platforms survived and even fewer launched.
This time around it seems like we are focusing in on just a few solid sourced for defi such as PancakeSwap, Lido, Uniswap, Thorchain and a few others. Outside of that most projects have now integrated their own defi systems directly into their UI which at times tap into these larger networks. However for the most part it's centralized to that UI and what they need swap or liquidity pools for. This allows these applications to be smaller and issue their own rules for the pool which is often very beneficial to the players or people using it compared to the larger defi platforms. That's not to say these larger platforms don't have a point to them anymore. In fact they do play a critical role in all of this as well it's just now being more spread out where smaller projects do their own thing.
Social
Social should have been a big move however all of this talk about decentralization and so forth simply is not going anywhere. All of these platforms so far have simply been clones of platforms like X and Facebook with no real added value and their main pitch is simply that they are so called web3 and decentralized (which is many MANY cases it's not true).
What many of these platforms lack however is any real wealth generation which would be paid back to people using the platform. The only one I know of so far doing this would be InLeo which I'm going to be honest still blows my mind because I don't understand where these platforms feel they are going to generate wealth they are trying to pay out. Not many people are going to buy up crypto and then hand it out to others and it's why I feel Hive is one of the most unique platforms ever still that actully works and hopefully we see many other applications for social sprout off of it.
Gaming
Gaming will always be a center point of any blockchain. If offers up a low friction option to get people involved with development on chain and also users who use the chains in order to collect these types of assets. Gaming just makes sense on so many levels. As much as some people want to make fun of NFTs and gaming the real core of it is a simple matter of owning the game or assets within the game as NFTs to be able to freely move them between accounts, rent out, swap or trade puts a whole new powerful perspective into the gaming world.
RWA Real World Assets
Real world assets was starting to be a hot topic back in mid to late 2023 and it makes sense. There's been a lot of moves where normal assets are now in digital form such as Gold, silver, ETFs, Cards, art and so forth. Normally expensive to move items that are housed in one location by a so called trusted source and backed by the NFTs or crypto tokens they represent. I mean to be fair I'd love to see a true gold backed cryptocurrency that could be mind blowing.
What areas are you most excited about for this next bull run in the crypto space?