Delphi Digital CEO: My 20 Favorite Crypto Projects for 2024

Author: Anil Lulla, CEO of Delphi Digital; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

People like to say that crypto has no PMF (product market fit), but from my perspective, that shows that they are a bunch of cynics who haven't taken the time to explore the various applications that developers around the world are constantly launching.

I want to highlight some of my favorite crypto applications that I have used in 2024, hoping to inspire some of you to try these applications. These teams work hard to create useful products, and we can at least take the time to test their efforts.

Before we dive in, some disclaimers and disclosures are in order. I have personally been exposed to these products and/or their tokens in various ways. I use * to indicate any project that I have been exposed to in any way. None of this constitutes financial advice - just a summary of my thoughts on the projects I like this year. The order in which the projects appear in this article does not represent the priority of the projects.

1、HyperLiquid

To stand out, HyperliquidX is doing really well. You’ve probably read a thousand tweets about it over the past month, so I’ll keep my thoughts short. Everyone who uses the product regularly has fallen in love with it, without exception. In fact, I haven’t heard many complaints yet — which is not something we can say about many crypto apps so far.

I try not to use leverage very often anymore, so I’m not the target user for HyperLiquid. In fact, my first experience with the app was buying HYPE* tokens when it was released. Soon, I saw why its fans have been going crazy for it all year. Not only is the UI/UX quite CEX-esque (yes, I know it only has four validators), it’s also inspiring to see how quickly the team responds to user criticism, concerns, and feedback in their discord.

Since its inception in 2023, HyperLiquid has amassed a fervent community with over 200,000 users and a cumulative trading volume of nearly $450 billion. The platform currently has over $2.5 billion in open interest. It has been very successful and currently accounts for over 60% of all USDC on Arbitrum.

Since HYPE launched, people have been interested in it not just because of its clean UI/UX as a trading platform. Although it is still in its early stages, it has already formed an impressive ecosystem. The project not only promises an exciting future, but has already achieved an ambitious vision.

2、Polymarket

Prediction markets have been a use case that I have been excited about since entering the crypto space in 2017, and I think this will be the first use case to really take off, such as early projects such as Augur. Apparently, that was not the case. Nearly 7 years later, thanks to Polymarket, prediction markets have officially gone mainstream in 2024. It worked perfectly on US presidential election night, announcing what I believe is the most important election winner of our generation. To put it in context, Polymarket handled $3.6 billion in election bets and predicted Trump’s win six hours before the Associated Press. It single-handedly created a new form of media and provided the world with additional data points to look at when being informed by other, potentially biased, sources of information about the future. Many people called for its abolition after the election, but honestly, it has been performing pretty well. Down from its November highs, but still above mid-October levels. I still use it regularly to see which markets are active, and it seems that the sports sector has begun to gain more and more share there. Also, we should give credit where it is due. Fun.xyz built a great checkout product for Polymarket that allows users to deposit any token on any chain, card, or CEX (Binance, Coinbase, etc.). Some of my regular folks are even using it and have no complaints about it. Crypto UX isn’t as bad as everyone makes it out to be!

3. Farcaster

To be honest, while I was a daily user of Warpcast in the first half of 2024, I only opened it once or twice a week at most in the second half. One thing I want to do going into 2025 is change that.

At the beginning of 2024, I attended FarCon in Los Angeles, and most of the people I talked to there were Farcaster builders. This was indeed a bullish sign. Although it’s early, many builders are focused on creating some really cool niche stuff, so there’s a chance that Farcaster will attract a dedicated and adventurous community to wow. I think you’ll see a lot of weird stuff built around this social graph in 2025.

I also believe that Dan Romero and team will continue to innovate at a rapid pace. Their focus on features that help core users grow their social graph and reputation will create a great sandbox for builders to create new experiences. Features like channels, frameworks, and tipping tokens like DEGEN are already developing new ways to coordinate social interactions. Games like Clankermon and Stokefire are showing me some interesting and unique content.

While it’s down 50% from its peak, it’s still doing well in terms of user retention.

4、Ethena

At Delphi, we had high expectations for the launch of Ethena, but somehow it exceeded our expectations. Over the past year, Ethena's synthetic USDDe has grown to nearly $6 billion. Among stablecoins, it is now second only to Tether and USDC.

I am particularly impressed that Ethena recently partnered with Blackrock to launch a new USD stablecoin, USDtb, backed by Blackrock's BUIDL fund. Like USDC, USDtb is backed by cash and cash equivalent reserve assets. In the short term, USDDe's yield may remain high due to funding issues. However, Ethena now has the flexibility to adjust the treasury yield to supplement USDDe. This effectively creates an APY "floor" around the Treasury rate, allowing Ethena to scale further.

Like most, I am bullish on the growth of stablecoins through 2025. The current market cap is around $200 billion, and I feel it is on track to exceed $300 billion and reach over $400 billion next year. I think Ethena will play an important role in helping to attract a lot of capital on the chain with its smart product and continued focus on integration. We have seen other decentralized stablecoins or synthetic dollars being incorporated into DeFi in various ways, and Ethena's USDe seems to be the first to do a good job of integrating with CEX (centralized exchanges) and TradFi. This helps them build a strong moat early on while chasing the largest crypto market.

5、Gunzilla

Delphi is well known for his passion for the crypto gaming industry. Through our early work and investments in teams like Axie Infinity, Yield Guild, and Immutable, we’ve been working to help bring games to market that bring the masses into the world of crypto. Gunzilla Games has done just that — without any friction from the crypto component.

Off the Grid, a cyberpunk-themed battle royale game, was the first crypto game to be released on Playstation and Xbox, and has attracted over 12 million wallets and 230 million transactions. Players have streamed over 4 million hours on platforms like Twitch, and the game has twice ranked in the top three live games. It uses Avalanche’s play-to-own mechanic, putting into action a much-talked-about benefit of cryptocurrency for games: digital ownership can increase player stickiness.

I highly recommend listening to Piers Kicks’ conversation with Gunzilla’s founders on the Delphi podcast last month. The team is evident in their unparalleled attention to detail and commitment to delivering what players actually want. Currently, they are developing their own product as they work towards becoming the infrastructure for more mainstream AAA games to be released in their ecosystem. I am really excited to get a glimpse of how Gunzilla continues to grow and shape the future of crypto gaming.

6,Lighthouse

Over the years, Delphi has invested in multiple portfolio trackers (Zapper, Debank) and wallet watchers that we believe have the potential to become mainstream tools in the crypto world. Tools like this, as well as Nansen, have become my primary tools for managing my wallet and watching others. Until a few weeks ago, I would still manually use spreadsheets and other applications to track my total portfolio.

Will Price casually mentioned Lighthouse to me, and I have been hooked ever since. It is by far the best and most complete portfolio tracker I have ever used. EVM, Solana, Cosmos, Aptos, Sui, CEX, Hyperliquid, DyDx; they track everything. I spoke with the team over the few days I tried the app, and they are extremely privacy-focused.

Of all the apps I mentioned in this article, I’m guessing this is the one that a lot of people are just hearing about. I was very impressed with it, and I think it’s a smart move. I’ve been looking for a product like this for years, and I’m glad I finally found it. I have no financial relationship with Lighthouse, although I did ask the Lighthouse team to let me invest. I’m just a very happy user of their product.

7、Pump.fun

This year, pump.fun turned attention into liquidity. I don’t think the mechanism gets enough credit it deserves - it’s a simple but necessary solution with a strong and immediate PMF (product-market fit). It lowers the barrier to entry while promoting a fairer issuance, and its bonding mechanism mitigates the risk of a rug pull.

In a year, pump.fun has reaped over $300 million in fees and helped issue over 5 million tokens. While everyone in the space expected the team to expand vertically by launching a DEX (decentralized exchange), they chose to grow horizontally by exploring new ways to attract attention. Live streaming initially seemed like an unexpected direction in my conversation. It eventually got out of control, but mainly because it was so successful.

Like it or not, anything that can be financialized will inevitably be financialized. Pump.fun has the potential to build a social app around speculation, so it's hard not to mention them here. By the way, my investment in pump.fun was through a small angel investment, not through Delphi Ventures. It was an easy decision to bet on the founders, but I'm still blown away by their execution.

8、GOAT

My favorite crypto moment of the year was probably when the Crypto x AI space found a sandbox to experiment with - Twitter and wallets. Our Delphi team has been very vocal about our excitement and curiosity about this intersection. Just as we were doing Crypto x AI research, GOAT was released and took over all the attention in the crypto space.

It was an incredible experience to witness the Turing test become a reality, as people on Crypto Twitter were questioning which bots were AI and which were real people. No matter how early it is, I think GOAT is one of the most important events of 2024 because it provides a tangible way to think about the interactive possibilities of this important intersection of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. Since then, we have witnessed a surge in these agents and seen teams innovate, stand out and attract attention. The coolest thing is that all of these upgrades are highly interoperable, and the efforts of each developer are maximized by being able to apply to other agents. While some of these bots are annoying, I truly believe that in 2025, these agents will come in droves to bring some truly interesting and even wacky things to the internet.

9VIRTUALECOSYSTEM

Not going to write too much about Virtuals right now, as it is one of the newer projects I have been working on. I just feel like it is a bit of a “pick and shovel” strategy for AI agents. They have released over 12,000 agents so far. Don’t get me wrong, most of the agents are still terrible and sometimes just annoying responders at best. However, I expect exponential improvements in the coming months, making this project worth keeping an eye on.

Aixbt* is a particularly compelling account to watch and observe. The numbers don’t lie, it has the most mindshare in crypto, and for good reason. It’s simply releasing alpha on Twitter — but it’s backed by years of research from 0rxbt, who’ve spent time collecting tons of crypto data and curating an intelligent Crypto Twitter social graph that gives aixbt a “personality”. While many crypto celebrities often talk about the same projects in the echo chamber of Crypto Twitter, aixbt consistently presents fresh alphas, mostly projects I haven’t seen anywhere else.

10&11:MetaDAO&MetaLeX

Few people know/remember this, but Delphi was one of the first companies to get paid by a DAO (Synthetix) in 2019. Since then, we’ve been active in dozens of governance processes and have even helped design governance systems and projects for cryptocurrencies like Gitcoin. Initially, DAOs were the most exciting aspect of this space for me. However, my enthusiasm waned when we faced the complexity of working with DAOs. Most DAOs are formed to achieve some ambitious vision, but they spend all their time on how to “DAO”. This year, two projects stood out for their practical approaches to solving these challenges: MetaDAO and MetaLeX (the two projects are not related despite the Meta in their names). MetaDAO has sparked many interesting discussions within Delphi (largely thanks to our META maxi mrink0). While some have criticized Solana for its lack of innovation, MetaDAO is the first project in the world to deploy futarchy. I had to mention it here because it is one of the coolest on-chain experiments I have seen in 2024. Unlike traditional voting, MetaDAO uses markets to predict and decide the best outcome for the DAO. It is interesting to see different protocols integrate this into their decision-making process. For example, Drift leverages MetaDAO for market-based token listings on its exchange. As we head into 2025, I am watching MetaDAO closely in hopes that it can increase voter engagement in crypto and improve voter diversity.

MetaLeX, on the other hand, is a concept that Lex node and Delphi Labs have been honing for years. It is finally live in 2024, building a future where DAOs can focus on their mission and not get bogged down in governance challenges. Through BORGs, MetaLeX enables DAOs to connect with the real world while remaining crypto-native.

This is the culmination of Gabe’s years of experience from both the traditional and crypto worlds. He was the Technical Director at Delphi Labs for many years, and I have a lot of respect for him, to be honest. For Delphi Labs, making this concept a reality was a no-brainer because no one else in the world could build it the right way. MetaLeX fills the gaps in code with law and fills the gaps in law with code. Their BORGs can enforce multilateral trusted commitments to each other and reduce trust assumptions for all counterparties.

MetaLeX has helped teams like Lido, Curve, and ZKSync transition to BORGs. They have been developing a comprehensive set of tools for trust-minimized governance, and I think in 2025 we will start to see the impact of their work on integrating their DAOs.

12、Sandwich

This is a product created by a friend of mine. Sandwich is a private trading tool for executing CEX orders (as well as HyperLiquid orders). It gives you access to insto-level algorithms, which helps save fees and reduce slippage, and gives you access to multiple tools and multiple exchange trading through a unified user interface.

Given that I mainly buy and hold tokens and don't use leverage often, I'm not a target user for this. That said, every trader friend who saw it became a power user. A Mac app is coming soon, but if you have a desktop, I encourage you to give it a try.

13、9dcc

I think what Gmoney and 9dcc are doing is the coolest thing in crypto right now. He has managed to combine his passions and carve out his own path to give crypto another mainstream try.

Cryptocurrency, at its core, is an incredibly powerful coordination tool. Using it to gamify something as ubiquitous as fashion and human interaction is genius — it’s surprisingly still an underexplored space. Gmoney is still deep in the field, so he’s able to connect the most cutting-edge on-chain ideas and bring them to the real world.

14、DeBridge

I've tried a lot of bridge tools over the years, but DeBridge is the one I've used the most this year. Not only is the experience seamless, but their team has been one of the fastest to integrate new chains. No matter where your assets are, or where you want them to go, the experience is the same.

They use cross-chain intents to connect DeFi in real time, making the bridging experience feel almost magical. According to deAlex, they have settled over 4 million intents with over $6 billion in transactions.

This is the first bridge I've recommended to my ordinary friends without having to answer any questions about how to use it. This alone is impressive, and for that, I'm grateful for the team's work.

15&16:Echo&Legion

2024 is the year the ICO returns. I’m a big fan of the approach Cobie is taking with Echo — it seems like a great fit for Crypto Twitter users with product-market fit. It’s a win-win to support people you trust and have them bring you interesting deal flow directly. Echo has helped facilitate over 150 deals and raised over $55M for projects from nearly 6,000 users.

Legion, on the other hand, takes a more bottom-up approach, getting project tokens into the hands of more aligned community members. They’ve developed a Legion Score that currently consists of three main variables: (1) on-chain activity, (2) social influence, and (3) developer experience. This score will evolve over time, giving projects a better understanding of who they are letting into their cap table.

Legion is a project we’ve been incubating at Delphi Labs for over a year, and just saw its first transactions on the platform a month ago. The numbers speak for themselves: over $5 million raised, and nearly 100,000 users have signed up for Legion Score.

I think we’ll see more projects using platforms like this to help distribute tokens by 2025. The timing couldn’t be better with a new US administration taking over. Both platforms I highly recommend everyone sign up and check in on a weekly basis. There could be a lot of traction as these platforms do their best to curate high-quality projects for their members.

17,Kaito

2024 Kaito has quickly become a very powerful tool for cryptocurrency users. In a way, Kaito and Delphi Research aim to solve a similar problem: helping crypto members cut through all the noise in the crypto world and find alpha and valuable insights. To do this, our research team spends hundreds of hours doing research and then condenses all the necessary and relevant information into about 30 minutes of reading, focusing on where we think alpha will appear. In this process, our analysts spend time thinking and sifting through most of the noise to analyze only the understanding and conclusions that are important for any particular protocol or niche. Where Kaito does a great job is using its clever algorithms to help dig out the nuggets from all the noise on CryptoTwitter. In fact, I was really surprised by how much noise it helped me skip when searching for a specific project or token.

I can see it being a very useful and necessary tool for all traders. However, I have been using it to find talent. Usually, some of the most vocal people in any given field become potential hires for our Delphi team. In fact, we just made an offer to a talent I discovered through Kaito, and they will join our team in January.

I think Kaito has the potential to serve many different user groups with one product, given how many cryptocurrencies continue to be active on Twitter.

18、Grass

Grass allows users to earn rewards by sharing excess internet bandwidth with the rest of the web. It’s a simple plugin, and I’ve been running Grass in the background for most of 2024. Our venture team has invested in a ton of Crypto x AI projects, but Grass is probably the one I’m personally most excited about (at least of the ones I can talk about publicly right now).

Data is the next frontier in model development. We’ve seen AI labs try to get into partnerships with platforms like Reddit or StackOverflow to get API key access to their data. Grass provides an API key for the entire internet.

It can do this efficiently and at scale. They already have 2.5 million nodes on the supply side, providing uncensored data for training and AI responses. There will also be new ways to join the network, such as mobile and hardware plug-ins that people can plug into their WiFi routers. According to research by 0xdrej, onboarding demand for the network is already in the 9-digit range.

Grass is already helping traditional AI people take the Crypto X AI intersection seriously, and I am optimistic about their prospects for 2025.

19、Ostium

Since our team partnered with Kain and the SNX family in 2019, we have been excited to give the on-chain world access to traditional assets. Ostium seems to be delivering on that promise.

Kaledora has made it clear that she is keen on making Ostium an all-encompassing marketplace. Currently, Ostium offers users long or short perpetual trading on FX, commodities, cryptocurrencies, and stock indices. So far, they have done over $166 million in trades. What’s cool is when certain trading pairs see a spike in volume. For example, the USD/JPY pair has done $21 million in volume since its creation, with most of that happening during the Bank of Japan rate decision (remember the 72-hour short-term bear market). They’ve already launched some neat structured products on top of Polymarket. So, for example, you can have Ostium go 10x long Bitcoin once the Polymarket odds of Trump winning on presidential election night reach a certain percentage. You can set it up like that, and then while the rest of the world is staying up late to see what’s going on, you go to bed and wake up very happy (and well rested). With the new US government no longer being against crypto, I feel like it will allow Ostium to launch some things on-chain that we couldn’t have imagined in the last four years. (Ostium actually launched SPX Perps when I published this!) 20. Moonwalk Fitness Moonwalk Fitness uses the coordination power of cryptocurrency to create a powerful accountability tool for fitness. Currently, the main purpose of the first version of Moonwalk is to motivate people to walk daily. You can create a group, set a daily step goal, and deposit USDC/SOL/BONK tokens. As long as you meet the goal you set, at least, you will get your money back. If others don't meet the goal, their money will be divided among the winners. It's a simple and powerful tool to incentivize good behavior, and I'm excited to see what the next iteration of it will look like. You can see that this concept applies to more than just step incentives: set goals for daily sleep hours, water intake, etc. In terms of rewards, I'm curious to see what projects are sponsoring competitions to help different people get into this space.

Even though it’s still early, they already have nearly 100k registered users; locking in over 500k for liability. They’re going to be releasing a mobile app soon, and I’ve been bugging the team about it for quite some time. This will probably be the first crypto app my parents will use on a weekly basis.

There you have it, my list of favorite projects for 2024. These are just a few products that I like and I want to thank their teams for all the hard work they’ve put in. Sadly, I obviously can’t be exhaustive in listing all the teams that I think are doing well in 2024. Other projects that quickly come to mind are Morpho, Jito, Cowswap, Jupiter, Pendle, and wallets like Phantom/Rabby.

I’m curious — what are your favorite projects for 2024?