Delphi CEO: My 20 favorite crypto projects of 2024

Author: Anil Lulla, founding partner and CEO of Delphi Digital

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

People often say that crypto projects don’t have PMF (product market fit), but in my opinion, this just shows that they are cynical and don’t take the time to explore the applications that developers around the world are constantly launching.

I wanted to highlight some of my favorite crypto apps I’ve used this year and hopefully inspire some of you to try some of them. These teams work hard to create useful products, and we can at least take the time to test the results of their efforts.

Before we dive in, a few disclaimers and disclosures. Whether it's through Delphi Ventures, angel investing, or just buying personally, **I have exposure to some of these tokens and I 'd give them a *** . This article is not financial advice, just my reflections on projects that I enjoyed this year.

HyperLiquid

Hyperliquid is great. You've probably read over 1,000 tweets about it in the past month, so I'll just briefly share my thoughts. Anyone who uses Hyperliquid regularly will love it, and I rarely hear a complaint, unlike most applications.

I generally avoid using leverage, so I'm not Hyperliquid's target user. In fact, I purchased HYPE* for the first time using this app when it launched. Soon enough, I saw something its fans had been buzzing about for a year. Not only is the UI/UX very CEX-like (I know it only has four validators right now), it's also encouraging to see how quickly the team responds to criticism, concerns, and feedback from users in their discord.

Since its founding in 2023, HyperLiquid has amassed a cult-like community with more than 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 extremely successful and currently accounts for over 60% of all USDC trading volume on Arbitrum. The craze that HYPE has generated since its launch is not just due to its simple UI/UX as a perpetual contract exchange. It promises to launch its own L1, and although it's still early days, there's already an ecosystem forming around it that can't be ignored.

Polymarket

Prediction markets have been a use case that has excited me since entering the cryptocurrency space in 2017, and I thought it would be the first use case to really take off. Apparently, this is not the case. This process took nearly 7 years, but thanks to the success of Polymarket, 2024 officially became the year that prediction markets entered the mainstream. It worked flawlessly on election night and previewed the winner of what I believe is the most important election of our generation. Against this backdrop, Polymarket processed $3.6 billion in election bets and declared Trump's victory six hours before the Associated Press.

Polymarket creates a new form of media and provides the world with a valuable source of data on predictions of future events. Many thought Polymarket would die off after the election, but it has actually been performing quite well, down from its November highs but still above mid-October levels. I still visit it frequently to see which markets are active, and it seems that the sports market has gained a decent share.

Additionally, Fun.xyz has built a great Checkout product for Polymarket that enables users to deposit using tokens on any chain or CEX (Binance, Coinbase, etc.). My friends outside the industry have even used it and had no complaints. Cryptocurrency user experience is not as bad as everyone says!

Farcaster

To be honest, although I used Warpcast every day for the first half of this year, after that I only checked it once or twice a week at most. One thing I want to do in 2025 is change that.

I attended FarCon in Los Angeles earlier this year, and most of the people I talked to there were Farcaster builders. This is a very optimistic sign. Although it's still early days, many builders are focused on creating something cool/niche that has the potential to wow Farcaster's dedicated and adventurous community. I think we'll also see a lot of weird toys being built around this social graph in 2025.

I also believe that Dan Romero and the Farcaster team will continue to innovate rapidly. Their focus on purposeful features that help empower core users and allow them to expand their social graph and reputation will provide a great sandbox for developers to create new experiences. Features like channels, frames, and DEGEN tips have explored new ways to orchestrate social interactions. Games like Clankermon and Stokefire showed me early signs of something interesting and unique. While they're down about 50% from their peak, they're still generally doing a good job of retaining users.

Ethena*

Delphi had high expectations for Ethena, but it still exceeded our expectations. Ethena’s synthetic U.S. dollar, USDe, has grown to nearly $6 billion in the past year, making it the second largest stablecoin behind Tether and USDC.

I'm particularly impressed by Ethena's recent partnership with BlackRock to launch USDtb, a new USD stablecoin backed by BlackRock's BUIDL fund. Like USDC, USDtb is backed by cash and cash-equivalent reserve assets. In the short term, USDe yields are likely to remain high due to funding rates. However, Ethena now has the flexibility to redirect Treasury yields to complement that. This effectively places an APY "floor" around the Treasury bill rate, allowing Ethena to scale even further.

Like most people, I am bullish on the growth of stablecoins in 2025. The current value of stablecoins is about US$200 billion. I think it will exceed US$300 billion, and there is great hope to reach more than US$400 billion next year. I think that with Ethena's clever products and continued focus on product integration, it will play a big role in attracting significant on-chain capital. We’ve seen other decentralized stablecoins or synthetic USD integrated into DeFi in various ways, and Ethena’s USDe appears to be the first to make headway with CEX and TradFi integration. This helped them build a strong moat early on.

Gunzilla*

Delphi’s enthusiasm for the crypto gaming space is well known. Through early partnerships and investments with teams like Axie Infinity, Yield Guild, and Immutable, we're always looking to bring games to market and make cryptocurrencies accessible to the masses. Gunzilla Games has made it so that users don’t experience any friction because of its cryptographic component.

Off the Grid is a cyberpunk-themed battle royale game that was the first crypto game to launch on Playstation and Xbox and has attracted more than 12 million wallets and 230 million transactions. Players have streamed more than 4 million hours of gameplay on platforms such as Twitch, and the game has twice ranked among the top three live streaming games. It uses Avalanche to implement game-native mechanics, putting into practice the much-discussed benefit of cryptocurrency for gaming: digital ownership enhances player engagement.

I highly recommend listening to a conversation Piers Kicks had with the founder of Gunzilla on the Delphi Podcast last month. The team's unparalleled attention to detail and commitment to delivering what players really want is evident. Currently, they are conducting internal testing of their products and are committed to becoming the infrastructure for more mainstream AAA games. I'm really excited to see how Gunzilla continues to grow and shape the future of crypto gaming.

Lighthouse.One

Over the years, Delphi has invested in several portfolio trackers (Zapper, Debank) and wallet watchers that we believe have the potential to become front-page news in the crypto space. They, along with Nansen, have become my primary tools for managing wallets and monitoring other wallets. That being said, I still did portfolio tracking manually using spreadsheets and other applications...until a few weeks ago.

Will Price casually mentioned Lighthouse One during a conversation with me, and I've been hooked ever since. This is by far the best complete portfolio tracker I have ever used. EVM, Solana, Cosmos, Aptos, Sui, CEXs, Hyperliquid, dYdX; it’s all possible. I spoke with the Lighthouse One team within a few days of trying out the app, and their focus on privacy is second to none.

Of the apps I mentioned in this article, I'm guessing many people are hearing about it for the first time. I was impressed with how effortless it was to try. I've been looking for a product like this for years and I'm so glad I finally found it. Although I begged the team to let me invest, I currently have no financial interest in Lighthouse. I'm just a very happy user of their products.

Pump.Fun*

This year, Pump. Fun has managed to turn attention into liquidity. I don't think this mechanism gets enough praise, it's a simple but necessary solution with powerful and instant PMF. It lowers barriers to entry while promoting fairer distribution, and its bonding mechanism eases rug pulls.

Within a year, Pump. Fun generated over $300 million in fee revenue and helped issue over 5 million tokens. While everyone expected the team to expand vertically by launching a DEX, they instead chose to grow horizontally by exploring new ways to attract attention. The live streaming feature seems like an unexpected direction to me. It eventually got out of hand, but mostly because it was so successful. Really cool, I really think this feature needs better review.

Like it or not, everything that can be financialized will inevitably be financialized. Pump.Fun has the potential to build the go-to social app around speculation, so it cannot be ignored. BTW, I angel invested in Pump. Fun, not through Delphi Ventures. Betting on Founders was an easy decision, and I'm still shocked by their performance this year.

Truth Terminal and GOAT *

Probably one of my most exciting moments in crypto this year is that the Crypto x AI space has found a sandbox to experiment with: Twitter and wallets. The Delphi team has been vocal about our excitement and curiosity about this intersection. We were in the midst of Crypto x AI research when GOAT launched and grabbed all the attention in the crypto space.

Watching the Turing Test unfold live was an incredible experience, as people on Crypto Twitter (CT) questioned which bots were artificial intelligence and which were human. Although it’s still early days, I think GOAT is one of the most important things happening this year because it helps provide a practical way of thinking about how this important intersection of Crypto x AI interacts. Since then, we’ve witnessed a proliferation of AI agents and seen teams constantly innovating to stand out and attract attention. The cool thing is the interoperability of these upgrades, where each developer's efforts can be maximized by applying to everyone else's agents. While some of these bots are annoying, I believe that the swarm of these agents will bring about a truly interesting and strange space on the internet over the next year.

VIRTUAL

I won't write too much about Virtual s right now because it's one of the new projects I've been working on. I just think it's interesting as a "pickaxe and shovel" for AI agents. To date, more than 12,000 agents have been launched on Virtual. Don't get me wrong, most of these agents are still terrible and sometimes just annoying responders at best. However, I expect a significant improvement in the coming months.

aixbt * is a particularly compelling account that deserves attention. The data doesn’t lie, it’s taken over crypto’s attention by simply tweeting about alpha, but it’s backed by years of work by rxbt who have spent time aggregating massive amounts of crypto data and curating a smart CT social graph , which gives aixbt "personality". While many crypto KOLs often talk about the same projects in the CT echo chamber, aixbt consistently showcases fresh alpha and gets prominently featured in my feed. This is a project I want to follow more closely.

MetaDAO and MetaLeX *

Not many people know that Delphi was one of the first companies to receive compensation from the DAO (Synthetix) in 2019. Since then, we have been active in dozens of governance processes and even helped design governance systems and projects in the crypto space, such as Gitcoin. Initially, DAOs were one of the most exciting aspects of this space to me. However, my enthusiasm waned as we dealt with the complexities of working with them. Most DAOs are founded to achieve some ambitious vision, but then spend all their time figuring out how to "DAO". This year, two projects stand out for their practical approach to solving these challenges: Meta DAO and Meta LeX (although both are called Meta, these two projects are not related).

MetaDAO has sparked a lot of interesting discussions in Delphi (thanks in large part to META enthusiasts

mrink0). While some have criticized Solana for its lack of innovation, MetaDAO is the world's first futuristic project. I have to mention it here because it’s one of the coolest on-chain experiments I’ve seen this year.

Meta DAO does not use traditional voting, but uses the market to predict and decide the best outcome for the DAO. It's interesting to see the different protocols integrating this into their decision-making process. For example, Drift utilizes Meta DAO for market-based token listings on its exchange. As we head towards 2025, I’m keeping a close eye on Meta DAO in the hope that it will increase cryptocurrency voter participation and increase the diversity of the electorate.

MetaLeX, on the other hand, is a concept that lex_node and Delphi Labs have been improving over the years. This year, it finally went live, moving toward a future where the DAO can focus on its mission without getting bogged down in governance challenges. Through BORG, MetaLeX enables DAOs to connect to the real world while remaining crypto-native.

This is the culmination of Gabe’s years of experience working in both traditional and crypto law. He's been the general counsel of Delphi Labs for many years, and to be honest, I have a lot of respect for him. Delphi Labs didn't hesitate to help make this happen because no one else in the world could build it the right way. MetaLeX uses law to fill code gaps and code to fill legal gaps. Their BORG can enforce mutual, multilateral credible commitments and reduce trust assumptions for all counterparties.

MetaLeX has helped teams such as Lido, Curve and ZKSync transition to BORG. They have been developing a comprehensive set of tools to enable trust-minimized governance. I think by 2025 we will start to see their work having an impact on DAOs that integrate these tools.

Sandwich

This is a product launched by a friend of mine. Sandwich is a private trading tool for CEX order execution (as well as HyperLiquid). It gives you access to insto-level algorithms, which helps save fees and slippage, and enables you to access multiple instruments and multiple exchanges from a unified UI.

Given that I primarily buy and hold assets and don't frequently use leverage, I'm not the target user of this product. Having said that, every trader friend who saw it became a power user. The Mac app is coming soon, so if you have a desktop, give it a try.

9dcc

I think gmoney is working on one of the coolest things in crypto 9dcc. He successfully combined his passions and forged his own path, giving cryptocurrencies another outlet, into the mainstream.

At its core, cryptocurrency is a very powerful coordination tool. Using it to gamify something as universal as fashion and face-to-face human interaction is a stroke of genius and surprisingly remains an underexplored avenue. gmoney remains obsessed with it, so he's able to connect the dots between cutting-edge on-chain ideas that are happening and translate them into the real world.

My personal favorite piece so far is the guano hat (IYKYK), but I've already seen the beginnings of what's to come. I have no doubt that 9dcc will gain some recognition outside of the crypto world in 2025.

DeBridge

I've tried many cross-link bridges over the years, but the DeBridge is the one I've used the most this year. Not only is the experience seamless, but its team is consistently one of the fastest to integrate new chains. No matter where your assets are or where you want them to go, you can use DeBridge.

They use cross-chain intent to connect to DeFi in real time, making the cross-chain experience almost completely hidden. DeBridge co-founder deAlex said that they have processed more than 4 million intentions and the transaction volume exceeds 6 billion US dollars. This is the first cross-chain bridge that I can recommend to casual friends without any questions. That alone is impressive, and for that, I'm grateful for the team's work.

Echo and Legion*

2024 is the year ICOs come back. I really like the approach Cobie's Echo takes. It seems to have perfect product-market fit with the crypto Twitter audience. Being able to support someone you trust and have them curate and bring you an interesting deal flow directly is a win-win. Echo has helped facilitate more than 150 deals and raised more than $55 million for projects from nearly 6,000 users.

Legion, on the other hand, takes a bottom-up approach by putting project tokens into the hands of more consistent community members. They developed the Legion Score, which currently mainly considers scores in three aspects: (1) on-chain activities, (2) social influence and (3) development experience. The score will evolve over time, giving projects a better idea of ​​who they let onto their equity structure.

Legion is a project incubated by Delphi Labs. We have been working on it for more than a year, and the first transaction was launched on its platform just a month ago. The numbers speak for themselves: more than $5 million has been raised, and nearly 100,000 users have signed up for Legion Score.

I think we will see more projects leveraging platforms like this in 2025 to help issue tokens. The timing of the new administration could not be better. Both platforms are ones I highly recommend everyone sign up for and check out every week. There may be many attractive opportunities available on these platforms as these platforms try their best to curate quality projects for their members.

Kaito

Kaito has quickly become a favorite among crypto users this year. In a way, Kaito and Delphi Research aim to solve a similar problem: helping users ignore the noise in the market to find alpha and valuable insights. Our research team does this by spending hundreds of hours conducting research and then condensing all the necessary and relevant information into approximately 30 minutes of reading. Along the way, our analysts take the time to think through and sift through much of the noise to simply analyze what is important to understand and summarize for any given protocol or industry.

What’s great about Kaito is that it uses clever algorithms to help dig out the treasures from all the noise on crypto Twitter. I'm impressed at how much it helps me cut through a lot of the noise when I'm searching for a specific project or stock symbol.

I understand how useful and essential a tool it is for all traders. However, I also use it to find talent. Often some of the most articulate people in any given field become potential candidates for our recruitment. We actually just made an offer to a guy I found through Kaito, and he'll be joining our team in January. I think Kaito has the potential to serve many different user groups with one product.

Grass*

Grass allows users to earn rewards by sharing excess internet bandwidth with the rest of the network. It's a simple plugin that I've been running in the background for most of this year. Our Ventures team has invested in a number of Crypto x AI projects, but Grass is probably the one I'm personally most excited about (at least among the deals I can talk about publicly right now).

Data is the next frontier in model development. We've seen AI labs try to strike deals with platforms like Reddit or StackOverflow to gain API key access to their data. Grass provides API keys to 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 answers in AI responses. There will also be new ways to join the network in the future, such as mobile and hardware plug-ins that people can order and plug into their WiFi routers.

Grass co-founder Andrej said that the current inbound demand for the network has reached 9 figures. Grass is a project that has helped traditional AI people take the Crypto x AI intersection seriously, and I am confident about their success in 2025.

Ostium

Ever since our team worked with Kain and SNX in 2019, we have been looking forward to making traditional assets accessible to the on-chain world. Ostium appears to be delivering on that promise.

Ostium's kaledora has made it clear that she is passionate about making Ostium a universal marketplace. Currently, they offer users long or short perpetual contracts on forex, commodities, cryptocurrencies, and stock indices. To date, their trading volume has exceeded $166 million. Certain currency pairs are seeing a surge in trading volume, which is cool. For example, USD/JPY has seen $21 million in trading volume since its inception - most of which occurred around the time of the Bank of Japan rate decision (if you remember that 72-hour bear market).

They have launched some neat structured products on Polymarket. For example, you could make Ostium 10x long BTC once Polymarket predicts that Trump's odds of winning reach a certain percentage on election night. You can set it up to go to sleep while the rest of the world stays up waiting for what's to come, and wake up without missing out on profit opportunities. With the new government no longer opposed to cryptocurrencies, I have a feeling this will allow Ostium to launch something on-chain that we couldn't have imagined in the past four years.

Moonwalk Fitness*

Moonwalk Fitness leverages the orchestrating power of cryptocurrency to create powerful accountability tools for fitness.

Currently, the first version of Moonwalk is focused on motivating daily steps. You can create a group, set daily step goals, and deposit USDC/SOL/BONK. As long as you complete the goals you set, you can at least get your money back. If others in the match don't reach their goal, their money will be distributed to the winner. It's a simple yet powerful tool for motivating good behavior, and I'm excited to see its next iteration. This concept can be applied to much more than just running: weight lifting goals, daily sleep hours, water intake, and more.

Although it's still early days, they already have nearly 100,000 users signed up. They are launching a mobile app soon, which may be the first crypto app my parents will be able to use on a weekly basis.

Summarize

That’s it for my list. These are just products that I love and I want to thank their team for all the hard work they put in. Unfortunately, I obviously can't list all the teams that I think did a great job this year. Some others that quickly come to mind are wallets like Morpho, Jito, Cowswap, Jupiter, Pendle, and Phantom/Rabby.