2024

Timeline as I remember it:

  • January: BTC ETF approved. Craziest venture month I’ve ever experienced. Things got bid very fast and in size. I don’t think we see a month like this again for a while unless fund sizes get bigger. People are excited about BTC L2s. Celestia goes on a big run. Jupiter Airdrop.
  • February: Apple Vision Pro released which was underwhelming. Starknet airdrop was epitome of low float high fdv. WIF goes on a big run at the end of the month. I wanna say the most anticipated launch from most people at this point was still Eigenlayer. Solana outage for almost 5 hours. Bittensor is really hot.
  • March: Pump.fun gets popularish on CT. Goes from 0 to ~$300K in daily revenue. $WIF has a huge run. $SLERF happened. Landing Solana txs feels hard. Solana starts to feel like it’s becoming a default for attention/new builders. Dencun.
  • April: ORE! $ENA airdrop. Eigenlayer whitepaper comes out and isn’t received well. CZ sentenced to 4 months. Halvening. Runes.
  • May: ETH ETF approved. In spite of no explicit points, HL activity is pretty steady. People are excited about Telegram/TON stuff.
  • June: Think this was roughly the end of PolitiFi memes. Celebrity memecoin era (lots of rugging for very small dollar amounts). Pump is doing ~$780k in daily revenue. Blinks.
  • July: Trump speaks at BTC Nashville (smaller crowd than Saylor) and mentions strategic reserve . In the lead up to his speech which was delayed because of awaiting a special guess, people were trading flight patterns and coins as they relate to diff people (e.g. Elon). German government starts selling BTC. Kamala announces she’s running instead of Biden.
  • August: Yen carry trade unwind. Stablecoin MC hits new ATH from 2022 at 168B. Endgame rebrand announcement. Polymarket had been cooking for a while at this point, but remember my dad calling and asking if I knew about Polymarket in early August.
  • September: Token/Breakpoint. Sui KOL round? Fed cut. Moodeng.
  • October: Polymarket fully in the center stage. Pump.fun revenue is ~$1m/day. Truth terminal. Bridge.xyz acquisition
  • November: Election. Markets go ballistic, we keep breaking BTC ATHs. Hyperliquid Airdrop. Pump.fun revenue is consistently > $3m/day reaching over $5m in a single day. Venture starts to get busier again. ETH/BTC low of ~.0324
  • December: New BTC ATHs hit, first time over $100K. Hyperliquid hits 15B in 24h volume and 4.5B in OI and has a big run up in first half of month. AI Agent stuff (virtuals/ai16z/zerebro/arc/aixbt/etc.). Tether has 10B in net profits. Yapping.

At the app layer, the top 16 projects (excluding chains/stables) by revenue over the last year as per DefiLlama were:

  1. Pump.fun ($318M)
  2. Photon ($257M)
  3. Maker ($175M)
  4. Uniswap Labs ($131M)
  5. Trojan ($123M)
  6. Bonkbot ($119M)
  7. Pancakeswap ($114M)
  8. Aerodome ($108M)
  9. Lido ($103M)
  10. Ethena ($93M)
  11. BullX ($88M)
  12. Aave ($85M)
  13. Dexscreener ($75M)
  14. Metamask ($72M)
  15. dYdX ($69M)
  16. Phantom ($63M)

Worth noting that this says nothing about quality of revenue, cost of revenue, and may be inaccurate.

If we add back in chains/stables, the top 10 in order is Tether, Ethereum, Circle, Tron, Solana, Pump, Photon, Maker. The stuff that makes money in crypto today are blockchains, stables, and exchanges/trading frontends. If we included CEXes, the list would almost certainly be CEX dominated.

More concrete thoughts in a follow up post soon.