After talking to multiple participants at Token 2049, here are 11 areas to watch:

Author: Xave Meegan, founder of Frachtis; Translator: Felix, PANews

During the Token 2049 conference, Frachtis founder Xave Meegan communicated with several VCs and project founders, and published an article on the X platform to summarize. Pointed out 11 areas that he believes are worthy of attention, such as DeSci and AI.

DeSci

After communicating with the founder of HairDAO, I have a better understanding of DeSci. Cryptocurrency is very suitable for solving deep-rooted scientific problems in academia and government funding. Now I am studying DeSci's business model and finding out which sciences people care about are underfunded. At some point, an L1 winner may emerge and may dominate the category.

Dating

AI agent dating is starting to develop outside of crypto. It is foreseeable that some kind of dating app targeting crypto native users is emerging, perhaps with a bounty model where someone offers a bounty to someone else (or an agent) for a tailored profile. The best match will receive the bounty set by the bounty owner.

Publicity

With the recent shift in stance on consumer privacy, there is an opportunity to build applications that actually "invade" consumer privacy to some extent. Other users can see other accounts more easily than ever before/be notified of other accounts' actions more easily than ever before. Users want to be prompted and prefer a convenient/targeted experience over a private/anonymous one. However, institutional DeFi still needs privacy tools and is an area of ​​opportunity over the next 12 months.

Artificial Intelligence

Crypto x AI is an interesting space right now, with closed source models improving over time and open source models at risk of becoming closed source (as the marketing effect of open source wears off). It’s still early days in understanding how decentralized technology can best address consumer (and enterprise) needs. Crypto tools can be used to solve some interesting problems in the AI ​​RAG space, such as privacy.

Applications

It’s undeniable that we are now entering the age of applications. Most infrastructure entrepreneurs are now developing applications. AI has made it easier than ever for anyone to create applications. There are now excellent infrastructure and blockchains that are growing rapidly (Solana, Base, Telegram, etc.). The applications that perform best in this cycle will be released on infrastructure and have the best distribution channels. In particular, popular social applications have a great chance of being released in any ecosystem with promotion capabilities. We have already seen early signs of the development of social applications, such as pump.fun and Farcaster.

CRDTs

One ​​interesting technology used in social that will continue to innovate is CRDTs (Note: Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, a data structure that can be replicated on multiple computers in a network, the copies can be updated independently and in parallel, without the need for coordination between the copies, and guarantee that no conflicts will occur). Farcaster is one of the first companies to use the protocol in interesting ways, and others will follow and innovate the technology. CRDTs simply eliminate the need for consensus, ensuring that data is eventually consistent and conflict-free. As social protocols become more popular and require faster/cheaper storage, CRDTs and/or alternative technologies may become an interesting area for experimentation.

Telegram Mini App

Most app developers want to build a Telegram Mini App to complement their web app. In the next 12-24 months, all web apps on any blockchain will also have a TG Mini App, because it is much easier to distribute apps there. There is an opportunity to build infrastructure for this now, making it easier for developers to launch TG Mini Apps.

Telegram Middleware

Similarly, if all web apps eventually build TG Mini App versions, there will likely be a ton of opportunities to build other middleware that developers can use to enhance their apps. Telegram is intentionally opening up its technology to other third parties to build tools on top of it. This opportunity is somewhat similar to what happened when Facebook launched the Facebook Platform, which provided a framework for developers to easily create apps (resulting in 100s of apps being created every day). Only this time it’s happening on Telegram, and the framework that developers are building apps on is likely to be created by a third party. It’s expected that when the decentralized Telegram Platform stack matures (thanks to AI), there will be far more than 100 apps coming online every day.

User Experience

As more and more apps come online, crypto needs to quickly address its user experience issues. It’s great to see teams like Infinex making significant progress in this direction. More teams should follow in the future. Using Face ID to onboard users is a great way to get more people into the space. There could be an interesting intersection with the new UX frontend and TG Mini Apps. There will be some winners in the UX/onboarding category targeting different markets.

Robotics

It’s still early days at the intersection of crypto and robotics, but some teams are working on it. Some projects are coming online that encourage robots to upload data for learning, but the winners in this category in the crypto space will need to do more for companies outside of crypto to stand out. Not many people at the conference explored this category in depth.

Intellectual Property

There wasn’t much talk at the conference about Story Protocol’s huge funding, but they have a big presence in Korea. Story has the potential to develop similarly to other popular blockchains like Solana, Telegram. It’s still early, but as the IPFi market develops, expect some interesting applications and protocols to emerge in the next 12 months.