Reviewing a16z's nine predictions for the 2024 crypto market: What are the representative projects they have invested in?

Author: defioasis, Colin Wu, Wu Says Blockchain

Editor: Colin Wu, Wu Says Blockchain

Note: This article is for information sharing only and does not endorse any projects, nor does it have any financial ties to the projects mentioned.

On December 7, the renowned crypto venture capital firm a16z released a list of trends they are excited about in the crypto industry for 2024, including entering a new era of decentralization, reshaping future user experiences, the rise of modular tech stacks, the combination of AI and blockchain, the shift from play-to-earn to play-and-earn, AI becoming game creators, crypto providing security, formal verification becoming more accessible, NFTs becoming ubiquitous brand assets, and SNARKs (Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge) becoming mainstream.

This article will review the nine major areas listed by a16z, prioritizing a16z's invested projects, and selecting based on the current status of the projects, funding situations, and personal understanding from multiple dimensions.

Entering a New Era of Decentralization

Building on the "living laboratory" of Web3 over the past few years, more practices around decentralization have begun to emerge, including decentralized models that can adapt to applications with richer features and DAOs adopting Machiavellian principles to design more effective decentralized governance models.

PartyDAO

Party allows users to create on-chain groups on the Ethereum network, where they can initiate crowdfunding, on-chain voting and authorization, execute Ethereum transactions as a collective entity, and even play on-chain games collectively. According to official data, over 9,000 groups have been created on Party, with 55,000 participating wallets, facilitating over 10,000 ETH in transaction volume. Party itself is also operated in a decentralized manner as a DAO, namely PartyDAO.

PartyDAO completed a $16.4 million funding round led by a16z on June 10, 2022, with participation from Dragonfly, Uniswap Ventures, and others.

Fingerprints DAO

Fingerprints is a community and platform focused on digital art, featuring a shared treasury and a highly curated collection of NFTs gathered by a community curation committee. Fingerprints operates as a DAO, allowing any user to join and become a member by acquiring 5,000 PRINTS Tokens or 1 Voxelglyph NFT. Members gain economic exposure to the collectibles, meaning if the value of the collectibles rises, they benefit; they also gain access to cutting-edge blockchain artists, collectors, and curators, and can participate in governance through proposals and voting. FingerprintsDAO showcased its work "Terra0" at the Dubai Art Fair in 2022 and launched the Maschine NFT in collaboration with German automaker Mercedes-Benz this June.

Fingerprints completed a funding round in September 2021 with a16z participating, but the amount and valuation were not disclosed; the current market cap of PRINTS is $9.1 million, but trading is sparse.

Reshaping Future User Experiences

Developers are actively building front-end UX that can reshape crypto applications, such as simplifying user login with passkeys, programmable and easily manageable smart accounts, embedded wallets, multi-party computation (MPC), and advanced RPC endpoints.

Dynamic Labs

Dynamic is a multi-chain authentication and authorization platform that includes features like embedded wallets, crypto-native login, profiles, and multi-chain wallets, as well as authorization and certification. Additionally, Dynamic offers a customizable integrated service that can place crypto wallet technology in the background for novice users or in the foreground for Web3-native users.

Dynamic Labs completed a $13.5 million funding round led by a16z and Founders Fund on December 13 of this year, with a total funding amount of $21 million.

Pimlico

Pimlico is an infrastructure platform for building ERC-4337 smart accounts, providing developers with features like validators, payment validators, and ERC-20 payments. In November of this year, Pimlico became the first platform to integrate ERC-4337 smart accounts with the multi-signature contract Safe, acting as a bundle within the Safe ecosystem. Pimlico is now one of the largest bundlers and processors of user operations in ERC-4337 account abstraction.

Pimlico completed a $4.2 million seed round led by a16z on November 7 of this year, with a total funding amount of $5.8 million.

The Rise of Modular Tech Stacks

The greatest advantage of open-source modular tech stacks is that they unleash permissionless innovation, allow participants to specialize, and incentivize more competition.

Stackr Labs

Stackr is a modular rollup SDK that introduces micro-rollups, allowing various functions within dApps to be developed, optimized, and maintained as independent state machines. Stackr Labs is also developing pre-built state machines and cross-chain modules to facilitate easier interaction between micro-rollups in different language environments. Some examples and applications include games, databases and cloud services, oracles and real-world data, off-chain multi-node networks, and social algorithms.

Stackr Labs completed a $5.5 million seed round led by Archetype on November 9 of this year, with a16z CCS participating; the project was also shortlisted for a16z Crypto Startup School 2023 in May of this year.

Celestia

Celestia is a modular blockchain that introduces new capabilities for data availability sampling, aiming to achieve breakthroughs in scalability, flexibility, and interoperability. The Celestia mainnet launched on October 31, enabling rollups and other modular public chains to utilize Celestia for data availability and consensus. Currently, Celestia's data availability layer has integrated with Arbitrum Orbit and Polygon CDK.

Celestia Labs completed a $55 million funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital on October 20, 2022, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Jump Crypto; the total funding amount has reached $56.5 million. The current market cap of Celestia TIA is $2 billion.

Combining AI and Blockchain

Decentralized open-source crypto networks will democratize AI innovation and make it safer for users.

Gensyn

The Gensyn network is a machine learning computation protocol that claims to unite the world's computing resources into a global supercluster that anyone can access at any time. Gensyn plans to lower costs and achieve trustless free access by decentralizing computing resources using blockchain and trading processor cycles with tokens.

Gensyn completed a $43 million Series A funding round led by a16z on June 12 of this year, with a total funding amount of $49.5 million.

Fetch.ai

At its core, Fetch.ai is a decentralized autonomous AI agent network that provides infrastructure for building smart, funded services. Fetch.ai offers a smart wallet that serves as a machine learning platform and AI agent-based trading tool, and has integrated with OpenAI's GPT API; it can also serve as an off-chain layer for L1 networks.

Fetch.ai completed a $40 million funding round from DWF Labs on March 29 of this year; on April 27, it received a $10 million support commitment from crypto exchange Bitget and was listed on Launchpad. The current market cap of Fetch.ai FET is $650 million.

From Play to Earn to Play and Earn

What the industry truly needs are games that are both fun and provide players with more value; P2E will shift to Play-and-Earn, establishing a significant distinction between gaming and "work."

EthXY

EthXY is a one-click poker MMORPG game based on Telegram, featuring PvP and poker combat mechanics. The game is played on-chain on the Base network, where players can earn loot through various incentive structures. According to official data, EthXY attracted a betting volume of 1,060 ETH (over $2 million) in the first two weeks after launch, with players engaging in 30,000 matches; over 3,000 battles were executed in the last 24 hours.

EthXY completed a $1.6 million pre-seed funding round on November 15 of this year, with participation from the a16z CSS23 accelerator program; the current market cap of the game token SEXY is approximately $6.5 million.

Proof of Play

Proof of Play is a blockchain game startup aiming to create engaging full-chain games. Currently, Proof of Play has launched the beta version of its first on-chain role-playing game, Pirate Nation, featuring competitions, PvE, and PvP, as well as customizable characters and islands. The character Pirate NFTs are based on Ethereum, while the game is built on Arbitrum Nova.

Proof of Play completed a $33 million seed round co-led by Greenoaks and a16z on September 21 of this year.

AI as Game Creators, Crypto Providing Security

AI generates legends, terrains, narratives, and logic for games, while Crypto provides the ability to understand, diagnose, and penalize when AI encounters issues.

Pahdo Labs

Pahdo Labs is a game studio building an anime-style action RPG called Halcyon Zero and launching a UGC platform. Pahdo Labs democratizes anime game creation, allowing players to create unique anime-style mods and worlds using generative AI tools.

Pahdo Labs completed a $15 million funding round led by a16z on September 12 of this year, with a total funding amount of $17.5 million.

CCP Games

CCP Games is an independent game developer founded in 1997, known for launching the sci-fi space epic MMORPG EVE Online in May 2003, which has won numerous awards. CCP Games is developing a new AAA blockchain game set in the EVE Online universe, utilizing smart contracts and blockchain technology to create new relationships between the virtual world and players. A player-operated organization in EVE Online, Neural Nexus, has appointed ChatGPT as its new leader, granting GPT-4 decision-making authority to enjoy long-term development and reduce reliance on a single leader.

CCP Games completed a $40 million funding round led by a16z on March 21 of this year.

Formal Verification Becoming More Accessible

In software development, especially in smart contract development, there is a need for more accessible formal verification methods to minimize the occurrence of security incidents.

Buildspace

Buildspace is a community for crypto developers that provides training courses for Web3 developers through live streaming and offers an environment for Web3 developers to communicate. Current courses include Solidity, Ethereum NFTs, Solana Web3 Apps, and more. In July of this year, Buildspace opened its first campus in Francisco, where students can freely build anything they want.

Buildspace completed a $10 million funding round led by a16z on November 18, 2022, with participation from Y Combinator and Solana Ventures.

Convex

Convex is a global state management platform for full-stack TypeScript development and Web3 developers. As a developer, you can interact with shared state using JavaScript or TypeScript functions and bind that state to reactive applications.

Convex completed a $26 million Series A funding round led by a16z on July 4, 2022, with general partner Martin Casado joining the Convex board.

NFTs Becoming Ubiquitous Brand Assets

An increasing number of well-known brands have brought digital assets into mainstream consumers through NFTs. With custodial wallets and low transaction costs on L2, conditions are being created for NFTs to become digital brand assets for broader companies and communities.

Sound xyz

Sound xyz is a music NFT platform aimed at becoming a new home for music discovery on the internet, open to all artists. Sound is also creating a platform to fix the music streaming economy, allowing artists to earn from their music while maintaining complete control and retaining 100% of their copyright. According to official data, Sound has generated over $5.5 million in revenue for a select group of creators in less than a year since its launch.

Sound xyz completed a $20 million funding round led by a16z on July 12 of this year, with a total funding amount of $25 million.

Ready Player Me

Ready Player Me is a metaverse identity platform where users can establish virtual identities through NFTs in the metaverse, and developers can integrate the platform into their own applications. The platform states that over 3,000 partners, including VRChat, Somebody Space, and Nike's NFT studio RTFKT, have integrated the Ready Player Me platform.

Ready Player Me completed a $56 million Series B funding round led by a16z on August 23, 2022, with a total funding amount of $69 million.

SNARKs Becoming Mainstream

SNARKs (Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge) allow untrusted "provers" to compute "cryptographic receipts" for certain computational workloads that cannot be forged.

zkSync

zkSync is an L2 protocol based on ZK rollup architecture. All funds are held by smart contracts on the main chain, while computation and storage occur off-chain. Validator transactions are bundled in a separate block and submit a cryptographic commitment (i.e., root hash) to the Ethereum mainnet's smart contract, along with a cryptographic proof (a SNARK) that proves this new state is indeed the result of applying some correct transactions to the old state.

The development team behind zkSync, Matter Labs, completed a $200 million Series C funding round co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly on November 16, 2022, with participation from a16z and others. The total funding amount for zkSync/Matter Labs has reached $258 million.

Manta Pacific

Manta Pacific is an L2 network powered by Manta Network and driven by zk-SNARKs, offering programmable ZK and allowing ZK applications to be developed using Solidity. Additionally, Manta Pacific has launched Universal Circuits 2.0, enhancing the developer experience for deploying EVM-native ZK applications and providing ZK as a service. Manta Pacific has recently introduced New Paradigm, bringing yield tokens and composability to L2.

Manta Pacific's developer p0x labs completed a $25 million funding round led by Polychain Capital and Qiming Venture Partners on July 19 of this year, with a total funding amount of $31.6 million.

References:

https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/a-few-of-the-things-were-excited-about-in-crypto-2024/#section--9