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Pendle
Pendle exists because crypto wants to speculate.
In Pendle’s short history, the team has constantly reiterated its yield trading product using narratives from stablecoins and infamous “DeFi 2.0” (Olympus DAO) in the 2021 bull, to liquid staking tokens, real-world assets on Arbitrum, and liquid restaking during the prolonged bear.
It wasn’t until the points meta blew up in early 2024 that Pendle struck gold, with its TVL shooting up from the multi-million to multi-billion dollar range. Pendle’s Principle Tokens (PT) and Yield Token (YT) yield mechanisms remain an indispensable tool for anyone looking to perform any form of leveraged points or fixed yield farms.
Fluid
Fluid is a picture-perfect example of what innovation looks like. Fluid took many of DeFi’s successful primitives, such as Uniswap v3’s concentrated liquidity and Aave’s utilization rate curves, then redesigned traditional AMM liquidity provisioning from the ground up.
With its “smart debt” and “smart collateral” mechanisms, Fluid enables deep multi-million dollar DEX liquidity pools that are, technically speaking, $0 in TVL. This capital efficiency was an ingenious combination of users’ debt from lending protocols and AMM liquidity pools.
Ethena
Stablecoins are some of the hardest sectors to compete in. That makes USDe’s $6 billion market cap achievement very impressive — all within the span of a year.
Previous stablecoins built along the spectrum of centralization (USDT) vs. scalability (DAI). Ethena instead put together a series of impressive business development deals with CEXs and designed USDe, a scalable stablecoin that exploited the arbitrage in CEX-DEX perps funding rates and delivered yield to users.
GEODNET
For GPS technology to work well at centimeter-level accuracy, traditional companies deploy thousands of real-time kinematic (RTK) networks, like base stations and mobile rovers, globally.
Using crypto token incentives, GEODNET sought to scale the deployment of RTK networks. Based on November data, GEODNET has already deployed at least 10,000 stations across 140 countries, surpassing the 5,000 stations put together from traditional providers Trimble and Hexagon.
Notably, GEODNET has found a significant cost advantage. Deploying a base station with GEODNET is about $700, or 97% cheaper than legacy costs of $25,000. If that’s not innovation, I don’t know what is.
For more, see Blockworks Research’s free report on GEODNET.
Virtuals
Virtuals is the premier “picks and shovel” play of the recent AI agent frenzy.
It’s an AI agent factory that lets anyone spawn a tokenized AI agent. Similar to pump.fun, the agent’s native token is bonded to a DEX liquidity pool (Uniswap v2) once the criteria of a $420k market cap is met.
Built on Base, Virtuals has spawned at least 12,000 AI agents since its inception, including the wildly popular anime bot Luna, which runs 24/7 and can be tipped with the agent’s respective token.
Virtual’s innovation comes from a combination of many different pieces including LLM models, crypto wallets, innovative value accretive tokenomics, NFTs and IPFS for data storage.
For more, see this comprehensive post from Chainofthought.
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