Taking stock of the five greatest application innovations in 2024

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

Pendle

Pendle exists because cryptocurrencies want to be speculated on.

Throughout Pendle’s short history, the team has continually reiterated its yield trading offerings, using stablecoins and the infamous “DeFi 2.0” (Olympus DAO) narrative in the 2021 bull run, to the real world on liquid staking tokens, Arbitrum Assets and liquidity rehypothecation during 2021.

It was not until early 2024 that Pendle's points exploded that Pendle achieved impressive results, with its TVL soaring from millions of dollars to billions of dollars. Pendle's Principle Tokens (PT) and Yield Token (YT) yield mechanisms remain an indispensable tool for anyone looking to execute any form of leverage point or fixed income.

Fluid

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

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

Ethena

Stablecoins are one of the hardest areas to compete in. This brings USDe to an impressive market capitalization of $6 billion in one year.

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

GEODNET

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

GEODNET leverages crypto token incentives to scale deployment of the RTK network. According to November data, GEODNET has deployed at least 10,000 sites in 140 countries, more than the 5,000 sites of legacy providers Trimble and Hexagon combined.

It is worth noting that GEODNET has significant cost advantages. Deploying a base station using GEODNET costs approximately US$700, which is 97% cheaper than the traditional cost of US$25,000. If that's not innovation, I don't know what is.

Virtuals

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

This is an AI agent platform where anyone can generate tokenized AI agents. Similar to Pump.fun, the agent's native token will be tied to the DEX liquidity pool (Uniswap v2) once the $420,000 market capitalization criterion is met.

Virtuals is built on Base and 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 using 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.