Best 5 crypto market trends and technologies: A guide for 2024

This involves projects providing essential infrastructure for AI applications. AI-focused Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs) fall into this category, focusing on areas like data storage and computing resources. For instance, platforms like Akash and Render offer decentralized marketplaces where users can trade GPU power needed for AI data processing.

Another trend involves projects like Fetch.ai, which allow developers to build and sell autonomous AI software and services. These AI solutions operate independently, enabling buyers to automate diverse business functions. Similarly, Bittensor is dedicated to establishing a decentralized AI industry. It aims to develop new AI frameworks and facilitate decentralized markets for compute resources, data storage, processing, and oracles within a unified ecosystem.

Tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) entails representing tangible assets like real estate, fine art, credit, and precious metals as digital tokens on a blockchain. Yearly, an increasing number of traditional finance firms seek to harness tokenization's potential owing to its advantages in secure, decentralized trading, transparent property rights, and fractional ownership. For illiquid assets like real estate and fine art, tokenization divides ownership rights into thousands of digital tokens, lowering entry barriers for small investors and facilitating seamless, instant trading on the blockchain. Blockchain transparency enables buyers to verify the transaction history of real estate, fine art, and classic cars.

Intangible assets such as copyrights, trademarks, and patents, often stored in paper or digital formats, benefit from tokenization by securely recording ownership rights on the blockchain. Tokenized copyrights, trademarks, or patents become tamper-proof, traceable, and verifiable in real-time. Credit markets have also seen tokenization, allowing investors to remotely purchase US treasuries, bonds, and cash-equivalent tokens online. Additionally, investors can earn yields by investing in tokens representing private credit loans to businesses. As per rwa.xyz, the tokenized private credit market boasts active loans exceeding $571 million and tokenized US treasuries surpassing $771 million as of December 2023. Exotic products like carbon credits are also undergoing tokenization, with carbon credit tokens awarded, sold, transferred, and retired on the blockchain. Tokenized carbon credits create a liquid market, simplifying carbon offset purchases for companies and enhancing fundraising efficiency for climate action projects.

In 2023, Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) piqued significant interest within the crypto community, a trend anticipated to burgeon further in 2024, especially with its alignment with the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. DePINs are blockchain protocols facilitating the construction, upkeep, and operation of physical infrastructure in a decentralized and open manner. These infrastructures encompass hardware like wireless hotspot routers, GPU chips for computing, and data centers for storage. Filecoin exemplifies a crypto-incentivized peer-to-peer storage network, rewarding suppliers with FIL tokens for furnishing reliable storage services.

Other DePIN networks, such as Render, Theta Network, and Akash, incentivize users to provide GPU computing power, catering to computing resource demands. Helium stands out as a decentralized wireless network encouraging users to furnish wireless coverage via hotspots. The allure of DePIN networks lies in their provision of an open and permissionless marketplace for infrastructure across various industries like media, gaming, AI, information services, and life sciences.

Crypto investors are increasingly drawn to yield, and one trend amplifying this interest is the emergence of restaking protocols. Restaking involves locking up liquid staking tokens (LST) to earn additional yield. For instance, by staking ether (ETH) on platforms like Lido and Rocket Pool, investors receive LSTs such as stETH and rETH, which can then be restaked for extra rewards. From a financial perspective, restaking resembles yield farming but streamlines the process. While yield farming entails multiple steps across various DeFi protocols, restaking simplifies this, making it accessible to a broader audience.

Technically, restaking enhances security for rollup applications, akin to how staking secures Layer One blockchains like Ethereum. EigenLayer stands out as a pioneering protocol for restaking on Ethereum. It allows developers to create rollup chains for individual decentralized applications (dApps), with LST holders earning rewards by becoming validators or delegating their tokens to operators. Restaking introduces a novel approach to crypto-economic security, enhancing the utility of LST protocols, particularly following Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake consensus.

The future of blockchain is envisioned as modular, with individual blockchains handling specific functions rather than managing everything. Data availability layers offer off-chain solutions for storing and verifying transaction data, reducing congestion and hardware demands on blockchains. They ensure historic transaction data accessibility and contribute to network scalability and security. The narrative around data availability surged in 2023, notably within Ethereum's scaling roadmap. The launch of Celestia's mainnet in October 2023 marked a milestone in modular data availability blockchain technology, with other platforms like NEAR, Avail, and EigenDA also entering the space.