My take on how things will unfold in 2024.
Blockchain wars, brands, adoption and future tech... One things for sure, we’re in for one hell of a year.
Blockchain
1. ETH dominance is far from over but there are many other winners, and those winners will win big
ETH will move away from the 'ultrasound money' meme to a narrative more poised towards mainstream.
Retail don’t care & for ETH to keep it's dominance, it needs to focus onboarding outside of current crypto holders. It'll focus on yield as it's something everyone in TradFi understands & it appeals to them.
Inflow will continue to ETH following the ETF and L2s transactions will continue to rise. Dominance will be from the main players e.g. ARB, OP etc. and a few more niche e.g. Blast.
But other ecosystems will have the pop ETH did last cycle, SOL and a number cosmos ecosystem the major contenders.
Blockchain
2. Data availability wars will be in full swing and initial focus will be on brand & security
Rise of EigenDA, Celestia etc. will be a major talking point and initial brand & security will be the most important.
Later 2024 and 2025, focus will transition into cost and begin the race to the bottom.
Blockchain
3. Parallelization and VM optimization are not a passing narrative
Modular / component based chains will gain traction e.g. Eclipse, NEON.
Dominance of ETH as a settlement layer, while chains choose different pick and choose different components parallel execution, data availability etc.
Why make compromises across security, speed and decentralisation if you don't have too?
Brands
4. Web3 brand platform consolidation
Web3 platforms are vast & too desperate for brands to easily enter this space.
We'll begin to see consolidation across these domains:
- loyalty & rewards
- experience & engagement (tokenisation)
- marketing, CRM & community
- blockchain infra
- data & insight
Brands
5. Web3 loyalty will begin to reach early proof of significant ROI for brands
While they will still be relatively small pools of activity, we’ll begin to see the benefits it brings to brands will a significant number of their customer base holding tokens in wallets as collectibles, points, rewards etc.
Web3 enables interoperability and rich customer data, created far more targeted collabs & partnerships and personalised experiences and rewards. These proof points will show power of using web3 loyalty and give enough signal of future ROI that more brands will begin to test.
FIAT, Starbucks, VISA, Lacoste will be leading proof points.
Adoption
6. UX will remain the biggest barrier to adoption
We're still miles off web3 being usable. I define this as 90% of people I know couldn't easily carry out 90% of current web3 use cases.
Interoperability is still a massive challenge. Fine getting someone to buy ETH on coinbase. Now ask them to swap on a dex and bridge over to cosmos to play a game they think looks fun... not happening.
This will improve in 2024 but ease of vital on-chain activities will still block meaningful adoption and a killer use-case.
Adoption
7. Blockchain funding starts to focus on growth tooling
We've seen an increase spotlight on consumer crypto in H2 2023 with the hope of a killer application to bring on more transactions.
However, many dApps are still either unusable or lack the appropriate data, marketing and UX tooling to reach the right audiences.
The ecosystems with the best support to grow will see the highest usage.
Future tech
8. AI & crypto join forces and prove to the safest and most scalable approach to AI
Ecosystems like Bittensor and Tau will begin to gain meaningful traction. Particularly as headlines increase on the dangers of AI and the how powerful yet decentralised LLMs can become when using these types of networks.
These will also rise as part of the DePin narrative, along with many other innovative projects. For example, Render Network will be used more and more for rendering in a year where the requirements on compute continue to increase exponentially.
Future tech
9. AI agents start to dominate
Not only will they be on-chain with companies like Autonolas but in our day-to-day with Delphi.ai allow people to replicate themselves. As AI assistants begin to use crypto online, crypto will confirm it's role as the native currency of the internet.
Future tech
10. Media will drive a 'AR/ VR flop' narrative, while tech advancements are so significant that we move rapidly closer to inevitable mass adoption of AR/VR
Apple's headset will catch bad headlines but be significant infrastructure for application builders to start to create the next generation of mixed reality applications.
AI advancements will be so significant that we see the first AI-driven, real-time open world in 2024. We've move closer to a world where building virtual 3D spaces is as easy as getting answers in ChatGPT 4.
It's a matter of time until 'I don't know how we use to live without AR'.
If none of that got you excited, I’ll leave you with a quote from Larry Fink, Blackrock CEO:
“ETFs are step one in the technological revolution in the financial markets. Step two is going to be the tokenization of every financial asset”