The five greatest app innovations of 2024

Author: Donovan Choy, Blockworks; Translator: Baishui, Golden Finance

Pendle

Pendle exists because cryptocurrencies want to speculate.

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

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

Fluid

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

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

Ethena

Stablecoins are one of the hardest areas to compete in. This has allowed USDe to reach an impressive $6 billion market cap in a year.

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

GEODNET

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

GEODNET uses crypto token incentives to expand the deployment of RTK networks. According to November data, GEODNET has deployed at least 10,000 stations in 140 countries, exceeding the combined 5,000 stations of traditional providers Trimble and Hexagon.

It is worth noting that GEODNET has a significant cost advantage. It costs about $700 to deploy a base station using GEODNET, which is 97% cheaper than the traditional cost of $25,000. If this is not innovation, I don’t know what is.

Virtuals

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

It is an AI agent platform that allows anyone to generate a tokenized AI agent. Similar to Pump.fun, once the criteria of $420,000 market cap is met, the agent’s native token is tied to a DEX liquidity pool (Uniswap v2).

Virtuals is built on Base, which has spawned at least 12,000 AI agents since its inception, including the popular anime ship Luna, which runs 24/7 and can be tipped in the agents’ respective tokens.

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