Messari Crypto Announcements 2024 Explained: Focus on Solana and AI + DePin Track
MessariIt was stated in the report thatSolana, Depin, AI+Crypto, and Perps tracks are all likely to generate Mass Adoption applications. Among them, Solana technology upgrades have significantly reduced downtime. Depin applications such as Helium, Hivemapper, Render, etc. have migrated to Solana. Advances in AI will increase demand for cryptocurrency solutions. Rollup is as cheap as other Alt L1s, and analysts' main profit comes from the Solana ecosystem and AI+Depin concept.
Author: Severin, MT Capital
Source of original text:medium
TL; DR
Messari showed strong optimism for Solana, DePin, AI + Crypto, and Perps tracks in the report.
Judging from the distribution of analysts' holdings, Messari's internal optimism is still Solana and the AI+ DePin concept.
Key investment themesSolana:
The rapid release of new products on Solana, the surge in on-chain liquidity, and the continued expansion of the usability of developer tools have always been something to look forward to.
On a technical level, upgrades such as Local Fee Markets, QUIC, and Stake-Weighted QOS have significantly reduced the occurrence of Solana outages and made Solana run more steadily. The advent of technology such as cNFT has drastically reduced the cost of minting and managing NFTs on Solana, so that agreements such as Helium and Render can use cNFT to drastically reduce costs and expenses, and promote the prosperity of the Solana Depin ecosystem.
Market expectations for Solana in 2024 focus on the following aspects:
Achieve a 10x increase in throughput and performance with the Firedancer and Sig client. Firedancer enables Solana to process 1 million transactions per second. Improved user experience can attract more developers to participate in the use and development based on Solana, and enrich Solana's thriving ecosystem.
Developing a lightweight client through Tinydancer allows validators to complete verification work at a lower cost and achieve a higher degree of decentralization.
Deploy tokens - 22 standards to extend Solana's token functionality. For example, token-22 will support interest-bearing tokens, allow complex contract logic to be triggered when transferring tokens, etc.
Solana's Local Fee Markets and state compression technology make the following applications “only possible on Solana”.
DePin: Projects such as Helium, Hivemapper, and Render have all migrated to Solana. Render abandoned its blockchain and switched to Solana for compressible cNFT, faster transaction speeds, and a composable on-chain order book.
Payments: Solana has partnered with Visa to enable users to use Solana USDC to trade on Shopify at a lower cost and faster speed through the Solana Pay plugin. Consumer apps: Extremely low-cost cNFTs can boost the efforts of emerging consumers who focus on NFTs. In DRiP, for example, DRiP collaborates with artists to distribute NFTs to subscribers for free. Since the end of March, it has minted over 78 million cNFTs into 1.6 million wallets, while each NFT only costs around $0.00036.
DeFi: Extremely low transaction fees and faster final state confirmation enable the DeFi protocol on Solana to create a full-chain order book model, providing users with a smoother user experience not supported by other blockchain networks.
DePin, DeSoc, DeSci
In the non-financial sector, Messari is more concerned about the future development of DePIN, DeSoC, and DeSci. These three tracks have huge potential market sizes and can make more practical changes to the shortcomings of real-world business processes.
Messari paid particular attention to the following four subdivisions of DePin sub-tracks:
Decentralized Storage: The current cloud storage market has a market size of 80 billion US dollars and continues to grow at a rate of 25% per year. However, although the cost of decentralized storage services is 70% lower than that of cloud service providers such as Amazon S3, decentralized storage currently accounts for less than 1% of the market, and decentralized storage still has huge market opportunities.
Decentralized Databases: Decentralized databases have been plagued by performance and latency until now, and these issues are expected to be resolved in 2024. The emergence of applications such as DeSoC, games, dynamic NFTs, ML, and AL will greatly increase the demand for decentralized databases.
Decentralized Wireless Network: The DePin project, represented by Helium Mobile, has gradually found its own PMF, leading to growing user adoption. Take Helium Mobile as an example. Early on, users were attracted by providing low-cost services and tokens, and the growth of users will further drive the increase in token prices, thereby attracting more users and payments, and turning a growth flywheel.
Decentralized AI Machine: The development of artificial intelligence is currently facing computational bottlenecks and lack of collaboration. And the DePin project, which focuses on the field of AI, is a good solution to these two problems. Gensyn can provide sufficient decentralized computing power support for AI model training, and Bittensor enables individuals to participate in open source AI model training. DePin has a natural combination with AI.
In addition to DePin, Messari also paid extra attention to the DeSoC and DeSci tracks. Similarly, creators contributed $230 billion in revenue in the social media sector, yet only a small percentage of creators received a corresponding share of revenue. Friend.tech shared $50 million in revenue with its creators just a few months after it went live. Messari believes DeSoc is poised to replicate the 2020 DeFi Summer wave.
On the DeSci side, blockchain can effectively optimize key processes such as peer review and funding for scientific research, and can promote research development in key scientific fields through DAO and token sales.
Although DeSoC and DeSci have not yet reached the level of performance such as DePin, Messari remains optimistic about them, and hopes that DeSoC and DeSci fields will also generate applications leading to Mass DeSOC.
AI & Crypto:
Messari believes that advances in AI will increase demand for cryptocurrency solutions, and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are also naturally suitable as payment currencies for AI.
AI and Crypto have the following combination scenarios:
AI agents can make payments and autonomously access digital resources using cryptographic infrastructure.
Innovations such as zKML enable smart contracts to safely schedule AI models, thereby supporting more complex application logic.
Token provides a way to reward individuals to fine-tune models and gather valuable real-world data, and is naturally suited to be combined with DePin.
Perps
Messari made it clear in his report that if you want to focus on one of DeFi's sub-tracks this year, it should be Perp DEX.
As dYdX migrates to a customized Cosmos application chain, dYdX's central limit order book can better provide a trading experience similar to CEX. And given the regulatory pressure CEX is facing, the distance between dYdX and CEX is likely to shrink further.
In addition to the Solana ecosystem's Perp DEX (Drift and Jupiter), Synthetix also deserves extra attention. With the launch of the Synthetix Andromeda version, Synthetix will introduce a full position margin function to support a variety of new collateral types, as well as a series of improvements in trading and clearing. Synthetix has also eliminated years of token inflation and is likely to shift to token deflation. In terms of currency prices, Synthetix is also the fourth best performing DEX since the beginning of the year.
ETH
ETH is currently in a dilemma. Not as appealing to institutions as the BTC digital gold narrative, other L0, L1, and L2 competitors are also gradually eating away at the trading volume on Ethereum. Although the investment cost of ETH is relatively low at present, ETH's Cancun upgrade is still worth watching. Ethereum's Cancun upgrade can reduce Rollup's transaction costs by 90%-99%, making Rollup as cheap as other Alt L1s. The delivery date for the Cancun upgrade is one of the most notable dates.
Analyst holdings
The most interesting thing is Messari's open analyst positions. The figure below shows the distribution of Messari analysts' biggest increases in 2023 in currencies. As can be seen, the analysts' main profit comes from the Solana ecosystem and the AI + DePIN concept. This also reflects the analysts' narrative that has captured this round of rising markets very well.
The figure below shows the current distribution of coins held by Messari analysts (coins that have only appeared once have been removed). Analysts' main holdings are similar to those with the biggest increase in 2023, and are still concentrated in the Solana and AI + DePin concepts. Interestingly, for other tracks that analysts are strongly optimistic about, such as DeSoC, DeSci, Perps, etc., analysts do not hold any relevant tokens.
The following image shows Messari analysts' favorite track (the track that only appeared once has been removed). Similar to the previous situation, Solana and DePin concepts still dominate. But decentralized derivatives have surpassed AI to become one of analysts' favorite racetracks, and the ZK concept has also reached an important level on equal footing with AI.
