The original title: "What Multicoin Is Excited About For 2024"

The original author: Multicoin Capital

The original translation: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's note:

Multicoin Capital's investment partners discuss their outlook for 2024, covering a wide range of topics from technological innovation in the blockchain industry to deep insights into future trust mechanisms and business models for the internet, from decentralized advertising exchanges to blockchain-based KYC and AML compliance systems, and the application of blockchain technology in advertising, privacy protection, finance, and other fields. BlockBeats has translated the original article as follows:

Shayon Sengupta: Theory of Attention Value

Assets used for trading and pricing on exchanges, such as stocks, commodities, and interest rates. There are standardized methods for measuring these assets (for example, for stocks, it is the discounted cash flow function - DCF; for the price of a barrel of oil at the border; for the willingness to pay 1.05 USD in the future). This is what is known as price discovery in liquid markets.

However, there is a type of commodity whose price discovery is purely based on attention. Sports shoes, art, sports collectibles, vintage furniture - these are essentially less liquid than stocks or commodities, and their value comes purely from social consensus rather than the DCF model.

In recent years, due mainly to the internet, the theory of value attention has permeated traditional markets. TSLA, GME, AMC, DOGE, and CryptoKitties have all experienced meaningful price discovery under this model. The primary pricing mechanism for these assets used to be cash flow and settlement prices, but now the main mechanism comes from the attention they receive.

In the theory of value attention, cryptocurrencies play two important roles: first, the ability to quickly create new assets, and second, the ability to trade them. If attention is the core pricing factor, then the role of cryptocurrencies is to provide an infinite canvas for issuing and trading assets that track attention. The more general pattern of "financialized attention" requires the two most important properties of cryptocurrencies to achieve its natural ultimate state: permissionlessness and composability.

· No permission required: Anyone can issue any type of asset.

· Composability: Anyone can trade these assets anywhere.

This design experimental space:

· Increase the surface area of new asset issuance (i.e. creator tokens, LP positions in prediction markets, meme coins)

· Embedding issuance and trading into new venues (such as historical communication robots like bonkbot or Bananagun, leaderboard platforms like friend.tech, in-game markets, etc.)

· Facilitating coordination among asset holders (i.e., historically pooling funds to purchase copies of the Constitution, establishing radio footprints for operators to unload)

The short-term impact of this is that the next major exchange will no longer be like a traditional exchange. It may be more like a live streaming platform, where creators and viewers can bet with each other, or a group chat, where friends and communities can immediately launch crowdfunding campaigns to raise millions of dollars to establish a network status. Alternatively, it could be a forum similar to Stack Exchange, where top contributors are not only rewarded with platform-specific reputation points, but also with substantial financial returns.

Vishal Kankani: Social Network for NFT Collectors

In 2024, I am excited about collectible NFTs, with more people participating in collecting and providing social experiences for collectors.

Collection has ancient origins, accumulating unique treasures from monarchs in Egypt and Chinese civilization, to the curiosities cabinets of Renaissance Europe. Essentially, museums developed from these private collections.

In psychology, besides speculative opportunities, collecting is also a means of self-expression. In some circles, collectibles can become a symbol of status, closely linking the act of collecting with personal identity, signifying commitment, professional knowledge, and erudition. The internet has amplified this behavior, connecting previously isolated enthusiasts and cultivating a new sense of belonging in their respective tribes.

Despite this progress, there are still some obstacles that plague collectors:

· Fraud related to authenticity and source· Trade and exchangeability· Security, Damage, and Loss· Space and storage issues

The blockchain, by definition, has broken through the above barriers by orders of magnitude, attracting more people to collect. The blockchain is particularly attractive to the younger generation who have already ventured into digital item collection - imagine Pokemon Go, virtual sneakers, and in-game appearances. These collectibles are the precursors of digital native collectibles, which exist on public blockchains.

Spencer Applebaum: Stablecoin-Driven Remittances in Emerging Markets

After interning at Bitspark, I became deeply involved in the world of encryption. Bitspark is one of the earliest companies to use Bitcoin for remittances, mainly operating in Southeast Asia and Africa. Since being introduced to cryptocurrency, cross-border payments powered by encryption have been one of the most exciting use cases for me.

In some low-income countries, the remittance industry is one of the biggest driving forces of GDP and a way for many economies to sustain themselves.

Source: Based on data from World Bank Development Indicators

Historically, the challenges faced by remittances have mainly been high costs and only a few legal currencies can be exchanged and traded outside their country of origin (such as USD, EUR, JPY, GBP), which makes many remittance channels slow and difficult to access. According to World Bank data, on average, remittance costs are around 6.2%, but for long-tail foreign channels, this gap increases significantly. For example, the cost of remitting from South Africa to China exceeds 25%!

Against this backdrop, I am excited about two opportunities: 1) remittance applications for consumers, and 2) companies that provide B2B SaaS services for physical remittance operators (MTOs), especially those MTOs that use stablecoins in traditionally difficult to enter or expensive channels - these opportunities will emerge in 2024.

These products achieve the following functions: 1) exchange local currency ABC for USDC/USDT through local payment methods in a P2P manner (such as oRamp or El Dorado), 2) send USDC to another country, 3) either hold USDC or exchange it for local currency through another broker or liquidity provider using familiar domestic payment methods.

· IEOs—2019 IEO—2019

As shown in these two examples, the greatest opportunity for rebuilding trust on the internet and leveraging zk to build new business models exists on the client side.

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