2023 Crypto Assets Industry Review and 2024 Outlook

In 2023, the total market value of the Crypto Assets market returned to 1.7 trillion USD, with an annual growth of over 110%, marking that the industry has passed through the cyclical winter. Looking back at this year, several important events are worth noting:

1. A large trading platform has reached a settlement with U.S. regulators, pushing the compliance of Crypto Assets companies to become a mainstream trend.

2. The Bitcoin ecosystem leads a new model for fair issuance of inscriptions, which is mainly attributed to the technical feasibility brought by the Taproot upgrade.

3. Ethereum's LSD/LSDFi defines the industry's concept of "risk-free yield", with ETH staking rewards seen as similar to "Crypto Assets government bond yields".

4. Layer 2 is gradually taking over the Ethereum ecosystem applications, with the total locked value of Layer 2 having reached 2 billion USD, close to Ethereum's 2.9 billion USD.

5. Solana has once again become a market hotspot, with its DePIN and MEME projects in the ecosystem attracting widespread attention.

6. Real World Asset (RWA) yields have become an important source of profit for decentralized finance lending protocols. For example, 58.1% of the revenue from a well-known DeFi protocol comes from RWA (mainly U.S. Treasury bonds).

Looking ahead to 2024, industry experts predict that the following ten major trends may emerge:

1. After the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF, it is expected to bring in more than $30 billion in incremental funds.

2. The total market value of inscriptions in the Bitcoin ecosystem may exceed $20 billion, with genuinely fairly issued top MEME projects potentially gaining medium to long-term consensus.

3. Bitcoin Layer2 will rapidly develop, benefiting the development of Bitcoin ecological application infrastructure.

4. The total locked value of Ethereum Layer 2 is expected to surpass Layer 1, potentially reaching over $100 billion.

5. Although the scale of ZK Rollup cannot temporarily compete with Optimistic Rollup, the zk modular components in the Ethereum Layer2 will tend towards completeness.

6. A certain cross-chain protocol is expected to issue coins in the first half of 2024, which may trigger a boom in the entire chain ecosystem market.

7. The new narrative of parallel EVM will drive the secondary growth of certain public chains.

8. The market size of decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) may grow tenfold.

9. There may emerge popular autonomous worlds or full-chain games with strong social attributes.

10. The integration of AI and Crypto Assets in multiple application scenarios may produce star cases, such as using Bitcoin as an AI payment currency and adopting zero-knowledge machine learning (ZKML) for sensitive data training and model evaluation.

These trends reflect the ongoing innovation and development of the Crypto Assets industry, providing valuable insights for market trends in 2024.