Throughout the bear, our research team worked tirelessly to uncover opportunities we thought would stand out when crypto markets finally turned around.

We're starting to drop our 2024 Year Ahead Reports, so here's a glimpse at some of our analysts' hard work this past year. 🧵 Please note that reports are linked in the pictures. Links pop-up by hitting ALT in the bottom left corner.

🚨Disclaimer 🚨

The Monolith: @solana

Solana radically diverts from blockchain norms: low latency, affordable fees, unified layers, and strategic hardware use.

Here's the 𝐓𝐋𝐃𝐑 for our deep-dive report released in March 🧵👇 Don't miss out on the deep-dive!

The full report detailing Solana's philosophy, technology, and ecosystem is now unlocked for everyone: 👀

Now, let's unravel the key takeaways👇delphi.link/Solana1

7 crypto gaming ecosystems to watch in 2024: 🧵

(bookmark this) 🎮 Fresh from two of Asia’s largest crypto-focused conventions, Korean Blockchain Week and Token 2049, we wanted to take the time to highlight some of the most promising blockchain gaming projects from the region that we have been tracking.

Enjoy These 7 Ecosystems to Watch:

WTF are Intents?

If you’re wondering what the newest buzzword “intents” are, look no further.

There's no better way to understand intents than by starting with @anoma, an intent-centric architecture that has been in stealth development for years ⬇️🧵 Anoma Intents are declarative, enabling users to focus on the "what" instead of the "how".

Users authorize a state for a transaction to occur, and third-party "solvers" match these intents with other intents to abstract away on-chain complexities.

https://twitter.com/CannnGurel/status/1663292583550803969

1/ Yesterday, several @CurveFinance pools were exploited.

Curve founder, Michael Egorov, currently has a ~$100M loan backed by 427.5m $CRV (about 47% of the entire CRV circulating supply).

With $CRV down 10% over the past 24 hours, the health of Curve is in jeopardy. 🧵⬇️ 2/ On @AaveAave, Egorov has $305m CRV backing a 63.2m USDT loan.

At a liquidation threshold of 55%, his position is eligible for liquidation at 0.3767 CRV/USDT.

This would only require a ~33% drop in CRV price for this to occur. He is also paying ~4% APY for this loan.

LSD finance, or LSDfi, is a term that is used for LSD-related DeFi protocols.

This includes mature DeFi protocols such as Aave, Balancer, and Curve, but also new and upcoming protocols that help increase the utility of LSDs.

LSDfi is classed into five different utilities: 🧵⬇️ 1/ Interest Rate Swaps

Interest-rate swap protocols like @Flashstake and @pendle_fi allow LSD holders to trade their yields.

In addition to this, they can also earn incentive rewards by providing liquidity.

1/ The SEC is suing Coinbase and Binance.

While responsibility should scale with power, a lack of guidance de-correlates the two.

Public permissionless networks can advance existing financial infrastructure if they are willingly embraced by regulators 🧵⬇️ 2/ Exchanges are a sensitive topic, particularly for an industry still recovering from the FTX collapse.

You can read more about the full extent of FTX's implosion in the thread below.

https://twitter.com/Delphi_Digital/status/1595105480615071747

Decentralized "Social Protocols" are in the innovation trigger phase of the hype cycle:

🔹Users own their data
🔹Usage hitting all-time highs
🔹Early adopters are having new experiences

A thread on how @LensProtocol is positioned to disrupt traditional social media. 🧵⬇️ Lens Protocol is an open-source social media graph that enables users can to own their data.

Users mint profile NFTs that record all of their content and engagement and leverage Content URIs that point to data storage services.

Next week, Ethereum's Shanghai hard fork will enable more than 18M $ETH to be un-staked.

Some validators have been waiting more than 2 years to access to their locked-up ETH.

Prepare yourself for this monumental event with a simple guide to Ethereum's Shanghai Upgrade: 🧵⬇️ Ethereum's deposit-only PoS Beacon chain launched in Dec 2020, running in parallel with ETH mainnet before the two merged last year.

Next week's Shanghai hard fork will enable validators to withdraw their staked ETH & staking rewards, representing 15% of Ethereum's supply.

1/ Layer-2 activity has gone parabolic in March:

🔹@arbitrum Token Launch
🔹@zksync Era Mainnet Alpha
🔹@0xPolygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta

While Optimistic rollups have the spotlight, zk-rollups are gaining market share in a thriving L2 ecosystem. 🧵⬇️ members.delphidigital.io/reports/zkevms… 2/ There are two types of roll-ups: Optimistic rollups and zk-rollups.

L2s "roll-up" multiple transactions into a single transaction that ultimately gets settled on Ethereum.

L2s differ in the way they process, settle and verify transaction bundles to Ethereum.

1/ In less than 24 hours, @arbitrum may inject billions of dollars into the crypto ecosystem:

🔹625,000 wallets are eligible
🔹Transactions + TVL are at all time highs
🔹It's closest competitor is valued at $11B

Arbitrum's airdrop is a case study in how to decentralize: 🧵⬇️ 2/ Arbitrum is decentralizing by launching its governance token $ARB to transition towards self-executing DAO governance.

12.75% of its supply, or 1.275 billion tokens will be distributed to Arbitrum community members and DAOs in the Arbitrum ecosystem.

1/ Public permissionless networks can advance existing financial infrastructure via:

🔹Transparency
🔹Disintermediation
🔹Decentralization

Guest authors @SH_Brennan @lex_node @MarcGoldich propose a regulatory framework that embraces these principles: 🧵⬇️members.delphidigital.io/reports/policy… 2/ This is the first in a series that explores a new regulatory framework for public, permissionless blockchain-based networks.

The premise is that an ideal regulatory system should be globally adaptable, rules-based, disclosure-focused, and decentralization-compatible.

We discuss how the banking crisis impacts #Bitcoin in our PRO member macro live stream that covers:

🔹Bank liquidity
🔹Bitcoin's chart
🔹A return to Quantitative Easing 👀

Here are 13 crucial takeaways of our unlocked special edition of Bull vs. Bear 🧵⬇️members.delphidigital.io/media/bull-v-b… We don't normally do this but... since this topic is crucial and the discussion was so good, we wanted to share Tuesday's episode of Bull vs. Bear with as many people as possible. 🫡

1. How we got here:

"You can see lending activity really picking up mid 2021 and into 2022."

1/ Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse is the largest bank failure since 2008.

The bank run has made its way into the crypto ecosystem with the 2nd largest stablecoin $USDC de-pegging to hit a low of $0.85.

Here is our MEGA-thread that is following the situation LIVE: ⬇️🧵 2/ Our story begins with a recent massive increase in unrealized losses for banks holding bonds.

Long term bonds on bank balance sheets are decreasing in value as interest rates rise.

Bonds designated as Held-to-Maturity don't get marked down to their Fair Market Value (FMV).

Checks by @jackbutcher are up 40,000% in just 7 weeks following their mint.

Now, checks are being burnt by the community to create rarer and rarer editions.

An $8 open edition has made it's imprint in NFT history as on-chain art gets gamified: 🧵⬇️ Checks launched via an open edition, allowing participants to mint an unlimited number of Checks NFTs within 24 hours.

It closed with 16,031 NFTs minted at $8 each.

The floor price is now 2.08 ETH or roughly $3330.

In 2016, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote his "Master Plan" for a global open financial system.

Today, Coinbase is home to 110 million users with $80 Billion in assets on the platform.

Coinbase is launching BASE, an attempt to bridge their users to the crypto ecosystem 🧵⬇️ 1/ The master plan has 4 parts:

1. Develop the protocols
2. Build an exchange
3. Build interfaces for dApps
4. Build dApps to power an open financial system

BASE falls in between stages 3 & 4, and no player is better suited than Coinbase to achieve this mission.

.@blur_io has surpassed OpenSea to become the largest NFT marketplace.

Its airdrop has fueled an incentive flywheel to create real network effects.

Blur has achieved 53% market share within a few months of launch, here's how they did it: 🧵⬇️ Blur is a hybrid platform that combines a marketplace and an aggregator.

Blur was in closed beta for nearly a year before going live in October 2022 and has now reached 53% volume market share within a few months of launch.

The SEC has alleged that $BUSD is an unregistered security.

Following the news, the NYDFS directed the issuer of BUSD (Paxos) to stop issuing BUSD tokens.

The stablecoin market is heating up, here's some quick data that shows what's going on 🧵⬇️ Stablecoins are one of crypto’s most impactful innovations, providing countless use cases.

Despite last year’s bear market, the total stablecoin market cap is down only -18% while the total crypto market cap is down -55%.

.@solana is the second largest NFT ecosystem:

🔹14% of all NFT sales volume
🔹Average trade sizes are rising
🔹Buyers outnumbering sellers recently 👀

The FTX collapse left Solana NFTs with an existential crisis - one it seems to have survived. 🧵⬇️

members.delphidigital.io/reports/deep-d… Today, Solana NFTs rival Solana DeFi in terms of interest and activity.

We could even say that NFTs are carrying the ecosystem.

Over 2 million dollars has been spent playing @yugalabs latest game, Dookey Dash.

Professional gamers are climbing the leaderboard and tweeting out high scores to millions of followers.

Dookey Dash is onboarding gamers to Web3: 🧵⬇️ Dookey Dash is a skill-based, endless runner game.

Player score is determined by how long you survive during the endless run, types of fragments you pick up along the way, and the obstacles you destroy.

1/ @fraxfinance has an ultimate vision to be "The Holy Trinity of DeFi":

🔹An exchange
🔹A lending market
🔹A protocol controlled stablecoin

Frax Finance: A simple breakdown ⬇️🧵
members.delphidigital.io/reports/protoc… 2/ Fraxswap is the first constant-product automated market maker with an embedded time-weighted average market maker (TWAMM) for trustlessly conducting large trades over long periods of time.

Total liquidity on Fraxswap is ~$160M, with $6.3M average daily volume in January.