🔎The State of Crypto in 7 charts🗺️
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In today’s newsletter:
🔎The State of Crypto in 7 Charts
😂Crypto meme of the week
🗞️The latest DeFi news
🔎The State of Crypto in 7 Charts
A lot of things have changed over the past few months.
So I thought now would be a great time to take a look at some relevant metrics that show what’s trending and the current state of the market.
Here are 7 key charts that can help you better understand the big picture:
The total market cap of AI agents on Virtuals is only ~$1b
AI Agents have been the hottest narrative over the past months.
Despite this, while the token of Virtuals, the largest AI agent launchpad, has reached a $4b market cap, the market cap of AI agents is still relatively low.
I believe the AI agent narrative will keep gaining momentum over the next months.
The DEX to CEX trading volume is surging
Especially perpetual DEXs have grown a lot in popularity lately.
Another interesting development is that more and more projects are starting to reach multi-billion dollar valuations without CEX listings.
This is great to see as the end goal for DeFi has always been to build a decentralized future and onboard as many ppl as possible on-chain.
The mindshare of the Decentralized Science (DeSci) narrative skyrocketed
I haven’t spent much time researching DeSci, but now maybe I should.
Liquid Restaking, BRC-20, Modularity, and L2 are among the biggest losers in terms of narrative mindshare in the past 12 months.
Surprisingly, RWA has also seen a big drop even though many RWA coins have been top performers. But I expect it to make a comeback in 2025.
The % of the BTC supply on exchanges keeps dropping
This is a great sign as it shows that whales aren’t done buying.
The less BTC supply remains on exchanges, the easier it becomes for BTC to pump.
Interestingly, the ETH supply on exchanges is also dropping, but for some reason this hasn’t hasn’t been reflected in ETH price so far.
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The first sBTC deposit cap of 1,000 BTC has been reached in just a few days.
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Stablecoin supply hit a new ATH of $200 billion
At the start of 2024, there were $125 billion of stablecoins in circulation. So in the past 12 months alone, their supply increased by ~$75 billion!
I’ve said multiple times that stablecoins are a trillion-dollar opportunity.
They’ve already surpassed Visa in annual transaction volume, and I expect them to hit new records this year.
The monthly crypto funding is finally starting to go up
Funding is still well below its 2021 levels, but the recent small surge signals that private investors are starting to deploy more capital in the market.
Historically, crypto funding has always been at all-time highs when the cycle top was in, so this also shows that we haven’t reached peak euphoria yet.
Solana now rivals Ethereum across nearly all metrics
This is one of the main reasons why I’m bullish on Solana.
I believe the future is multichain and Ethereum and Solana will probably co-exist. But the constant surge in its activity shows that Solana is here to stay.
Interestingly, at some point in December, the network managed to generate $431M in fees — more than all other L1s combined.
With Firedancer, a major network scalability upgrade, coming later in 2025, Solana activity will likely continue to increase.
Those are the charts I wanted to cover today.
I want to conclude by wishing you a Happy New Year!
2024 has been epic and I hope you’ll manage to reach your goals in 2025.
Cheers to a fruitful 2025🍻
Crypto Meme😂
The latest developments in DeFi
US Congress is set to prioritize crypto legislation in 2025
Hyperliquid released HYPE Staking on mainnet. Rumors are circulating that HYPE stakers will get ecosystem airdrops
Usual announced that it will activate the fee switch on Jan. 7
Solv Protocol announced the upcoming launch of $SOLV on Hyperliquid and Binance
ai16z teased the launch of its own L1 blockchain and a tokenomics overhaul. In Q1 2025, it also plans to introduce a token launchpad similar to pumpdotfun
Avalanche AI teased its upcoming launch on Avalanche. The project will allow the seamless creation of AI agents for both Web3 & Web2
Jito, a Solana liquid staking platform, surpassed $400M in fees in Q4
FTX will start the process of paying $16 billion to its former users tomorrow
TON Foundation teamed up with Jupiter Exchange to release a liquidity aggregator on TON Blockchain
Drift Protocol announced its S2 Airdrop scheduled for May 2025
EtherFi launched a new set of pre-deposit Berachain vaults with rewards in 5 types of airdrop tokens. Currently, they support deposits in ETH and BTC
Sonic SVM, the first Solana SVM L2, introduced its token $SONIC. SONIC token will launch on Jan. 7
Fuel Network introduced the Fuel Agent Kit for building AI agents
That’s all for this week!
Until next time,
The DeFi Investor
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