Interpretation of Messari Crypto Theses 2024: Optimistic about Solana and AI+DePIN tracks

MT Capital

23-12-26 15:00

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Original Title: "MT Capital Insight: Messari Crypto Theses 2024 Interpretation - Key Bets on Solana and AI + DePIN Track"

Original Author: Severin, MT Capital

TL;DR

Messari expressed strong optimism for Solana, DePIN, AI + Crypto, and Perps in its report.

From the analyst's position distribution, Solana and the AI + DePIN concept are still the most favored internally by Messari.

重点投资主题

translates to

Key Investment Themes

Solana：

Solana's rapid product release, soaring on-chain liquidity, and continuously expanding developer tool availability have always been highly anticipated.

From a technical perspective, upgrades such as Local Fee Markets, QUIC, and Stake-Weighted QOS have significantly reduced the occurrence of Solana crashes, making Solana's operation more robust. The emergence of technologies such as cNFT has greatly reduced the cost of NFT casting and management on Solana, enabling protocols such as Helium and Render to significantly reduce costs and promote the prosperity of the Solana DePIN ecosystem.

The market's expectations for Solana in 2024 are focused on the following areas:

1. Achieve more than 10 times throughput and performance improvement through Firedancer and Sig clients. Firedancer enables Solana to process 1 million transactions per second. The improvement in user experience can attract more developers to participate in the use and development based on Solana, enriching the thriving ecosystem of Solana.

2. Through Tinydancer development of lightweight clients, validators can complete verification work at lower costs, achieving a higher degree of decentralization.

3. Deploy token-22 standard to expand Solana's token functionality. For example, token-22 will support interest-bearing tokens and allow for complex contract logic to be triggered during token transfers, among other things.

Solana's Local Fee Markets and state compression technology make the following applications "only possible on Solana."

1. DePIN: Projects such as Helium, Hivemapper, and Render have all migrated to Solana. Render abandoned its own blockchain and turned to Solana for compressible cNFTs, faster transaction speeds, and a composable on-chain order book.

2.Payments: Solana has partnered with Visa to allow users to trade Solana USDC on Shopify through the Solana Pay plugin at lower costs and faster speeds.

3. Consumer apps: Low-cost cNFTs can help drive emerging consumer applications centered around NFTs. Take DRiP for example, which collaborates with artists to distribute NFTs for free to subscribers. Since the end of March, it has minted over 78 million cNFTs to 1.6 million wallets, with each NFT costing only about $0.00036.

4. DeFi: The extremely low transaction fees and faster final state confirmation on Solana enable DeFi protocols to create a full-chain order book model, providing users with a smoother user experience that other blockchain networks cannot support.

DePIN, DeSoc, DeSci

In the non-financial sector, Messari is more focused on the future development of DePIN, DeSoc, and DeSci. The above three tracks have huge potential market size and can make more practical changes to the shortcomings of real-world business processes.

Messari pays special attention to the following four sub-tracks of DePIN:

1. Decentralized Storage: The current cloud storage market has a market size of $80 billion and continues to grow at a rate of 25% per year. Despite the fact that the cost of decentralized storage services is 70% lower than that of cloud service providers such as Amazon S3, the market share of decentralized storage is still less than 1%, indicating a huge market opportunity for decentralized storage.

2. Decentralized Databases: Decentralized databases have long been plagued by performance and latency issues, which are expected to be resolved by 2024. The emergence of applications such as DeSoc, gaming, dynamic NFTs, ML, and AL will greatly increase the demand for decentralized databases.

3. Decentralized Wireless Network: The DePIN project, represented by Helium Mobile, has gradually found its PMF, leading to a continuous increase in user adoption. Taking Helium Mobile as an example, early on, it attracted users by offering low-cost services and tokens, and the growth of users further drove up the token price, attracting more users and payments, thus turning the growth wheel.

4. Decentralized AI Machine: The development of artificial intelligence currently faces computational bottlenecks and a lack of collaboration. However, the DePIN project, which focuses on the AI field, can effectively solve these two problems. Gensyn can provide sufficient decentralized computing power support for AI model training, and Bittensor can enable individuals to participate in open-source AI model training. DePIN has a natural combination scenario with AI.

Aside from DePIN, Messari is also paying attention to the DeSoc and DeSci tracks. Similarly, creators have contributed $230 billion in revenue in the social media field, but only a small percentage of creators are able to receive corresponding revenue sharing. However, Friend.tech has shared $50 million in revenue with its creators just a few months after its launch. Messari believes that DeSoc has the potential to replicate the wave of DeFi Summer in 2020.

Regarding DeSci, blockchain can effectively optimize key processes such as peer review and funding in scientific research, and can promote the development of critical scientific fields through DAOs and token sales.

Although DeSoc and DeSci have not yet achieved the same level of popularity as DePIN, Messari still maintains a positive outlook on them and looks forward to the emergence of Mass Adoption applications in the DeSoc and DeSci fields.

AI & Crypto：

Messari believes that the advancement of AI will increase the demand for cryptocurrency solutions, and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are naturally suitable as payment currencies for AI.

AI and Crypto have the following integration scenarios:

1. AI Agent can use encryption infrastructure for payments and autonomous access to digital resources.

2. Innovations such as zkML enable smart contracts to securely schedule AI models, thereby supporting more complex application logic.

3. Token provides a way to reward individuals for fine-tuning models and collecting valuable real-world data, which is naturally suitable for integration with DePIN.