Ahoy everyone! As the year comes to a close, I’m going to rest, recharge, and reflect so I’ll be taking a break from publishing for the rest of the year. I’ll be back in early January, so don’t miss me too much 😉
On the note of reflecting, I figured it would be a fun and informative exercise to review what I’ve published in 2024, identify themes, and extrapolate them into predictions of what to expect in 2025 and beyond.
Airdrop magnets
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Airdrops have been a tale as old as time in crypto and at this point, we’ve seen a wide range of requirements, qualifications, and token distribution strategies. One emergent approach has been around airdrop magnets, as a way to attract other communities and identify higher signal and higher quality users/wallets.
The first examples of this were within an ecosystem: Stake X amount of asset into the ecosystem, qualifying you for potential airdrops from other projects launching a token in the ecosystem.
This criteria has since expanded:
Hold a physical asset (which contains a nontransferable soulbound token) such as the Solana Saga Phone to receive future airdrops
Hold a NFT from a specific collection, such as Pudgy Penguins, which signals a higher quality user and potential social virality
Conducting actions across chains or holding assets in other blockchains. As cross-chain infrastructure makes conducting actions across ecosystems easier, teams will target users and wallets outside of their ecosystem for user and capital acquisition.
A couple of timely and relevant examples of this:
Aligned
Today Aligned (zero-knowledge proof verification platform) announced an airdrop to 891,322 qualified wallet addresses. The requirement?
Hold at least $50 USD worth of the following tokens at its all-time lowest price:
STRK (Starknet)
MINA (Mina Protocol)
ZK (ZKsync)
POL (Polygon)
SCR (Scroll)
TAIKO (Taiko)
EIGEN (EigenLayer)
PENGU (Pudgy Penguins)
Pudgy Penguins launched their token today and over 7 million wallets qualified to receive PENGU!
What are some communities that qualified for PENGU?
Memeland’s Stakeland: Any user who staked 690 MEME or more. Users who staked more than 222,222 MEME are eligible for a larger share after completing a few actions.
Clusters holders: I covered Clusters here early this year
Phantom: Wallets that swapped prior to 2024
Helius: A Solana development platform. Users who staked Solana on Helius or hold hSOL
Magic Eden: Users who used the NFT trading platform before 2023
Solana Saga: The phone keeps on giving rewards!
DRiP: Users of the digital collectible platform prior to 2024, droplet purchasers, and creators totaling 1.6 million eligible wallets 🤯
Abstract Discord Elite Chad role: Holders of Abstract partner communities who received the ‘Elite Chad’ Discord role and filled out a form also got a piece of the pie
These are all stackable and this list probably only covers a fraction of the 7 million.
One thing to note is the PENGU token launch strategy is focused on distributing the token as wide as reasonably possible, so it shouldn’t be blindly copy pasted. However, we now have an idea of what a consumer-facing token with a max distribution approach could look like.
PS: Here’s a great dashboard to track the progress of PENGU claims
Prediction
Airdrop magnets will continue to be a qualification for airdrops, token launches, and exclusive access to opportunities since they provide a helpful signal in a noisy environment.
The definition of what an airdrop magnet is will continue to expand and evolve based on a variety of factors as well (eg: vertical, wallet-level activity, ecosystem).
Did you qualify for the PENGU airdrop? If so, share or subscribe. And if you didn’t, you did in spirit so also share and subscribe!
SocialFi is still finding its footing but shows promise
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Fantasy Top
Since the friend.tech frenzy from late 2023, we have yet to see a socialfi app that has caught the space’s collective attention to the same degree.
One project I’ve been partial to in this vertical has been Fantasy.Top, a game that combining fantasy sports and social influencers. Last week the team announced a $4.25 million seed funding round and unveiled an updated V2 platform.
The V2 update is considerably cleaner, brings in a curated content feed from Fantasy Heroes, and features more game categories such as Hero vs. Villain or Left vs. Right. Fantasy is still focused on crypto influencers, and when the features are optimized it’ll be a matter of time before the categories expand beyond the social bubble that we’re in.
Kaito
Another recent example is Kaito’s Yapper Leaderboard, which gives users a new way to interact with the ‘information platform’ which costs $833 per month 🤑
There’s also a points system, and we know what that means…
Prediction
We’ll see a breakout socialfi app that will reach a mainstream audience with sustainable economics/tokenomics in 2025.
Memecoin Proliferation
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#326: Breaking Down Bags App and its Features on the Path to Mass Adoption
#344: Wow (!!!), dreamcoins, and the Integration of Meme Markets
Memecoins have undoubtedly been one of the leading topics of the year for better and worse, and they’re here to stay. We’re at a point where there are various categories of memecoins (culturecoins, artcoins, scenecoins, you name it), we have dedicated memecoin trading mobile apps like Moonshot, Bags, and Vector, and there is still at least one celebrity memecoin that’s going strong (props to you Iggy!).
Memecoin proliferation has been possible thanks to token launchpads like pump.fun and agents like clanker, allowing anyone to create one in a couple of minutes or with a social media reply.
Total memecoin market cap has grown from $23B from a year ago to $115B and will likely continue its upward trajectory.
Prediction
I’ll get spicy for this one. A Fortune 1000 company will launch a memecoin and it will fail spectacularly 😂
The chances are low, but the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.
The questing and airdrop claim process continues to get more complex
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In 2024, the term token ‘airdrop’ is often interchangeable with token ‘claim’, and most airdrops are actually claims. Instead of the token being directly sent to your wallet, users need to claim their token allocation, which now involve a long list of hoops to jump through including but not limited to downloading a mobile app, watching a video, staking for additional incentives, and more.
It’s natural for projects to leverage this unique moment to get users to conduct high friction actions, but there’s a delicate balance.
That said, people in web3 and crypto are a vocal bunch and love to complain even if there’s ‘free’ money involved.
One recent exception to this trend is Hyperliquid, a trading-focused blockchain that conducted a classic airdrop, making loyal users even more loyal as the token price has increased 7x since its launch a few weeks ago.
Prediction
As more airdrops and ‘claimdrops’ occur, we’ll see different varieties of requirements, actions, and retention incentives appear.
One category of factors that I believe will become more popular is multipliers and bonuses for calculating allocation. A good example of this is with airdrops in the Virtuals ecosystem, where ‘good behavior’ in a wallet such as holding various AI Agent tokens is a multiplier towards the allocation a user gets.
Multipliers and bonuses have a positive spin compared to penalties, so we’ll see things like ‘partner community bonus’ (holds an asset for X amount of time or longer), ‘holder multiplier’ (holds airdrops instead of dumping them immediately, aka ‘soft staking’), or ‘OG user’ (early community member defined by onchain or offchain actions) line items when tallying up token allocation.
Interactive gameshows
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Outside of financial windfalls like getting an airdrop or flipping a NFT for a 10x, interactive gameshows that incorporate onchain mechanics have been the most interesting and fun experiences I’ve had, and Crypto: The Game and Unlonely provide another wedge to onboarding the masses in a fun, friendly, and potentially viral way.
Another example is Pump Party, coming to MegaETH in February.
Prediction
We’ll see a gameshow app (mobile or desktop) that incorporates onchain components go viral.
Prediction Markets
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Thanks to Polymarket and the 2024 US election cycle, prediction markets have planted their flag in the ground as a reliable datapoint in additional to traditional tactics like surveys.
And the fear of Polymarket becoming irrelevant has been unfounded (so far). Volume has fallen off a cliff post-election as expected, but has been offset by an expanded set of categories and topics to place prediction wagers on along with an eventual token.
Polymarket has also begun a slow rollout of their Creators category, featuring prediction markets curated by large X accounts such as zerohedge, Jason Calacanis, and OSINTdefender.
Prediction
Polymarket will regularly cited in mainstream media as a datapoint for news stories and as a gauge of sentiment.
There will also be a flurry of prediction-derivative market platforms focused on sentiment instead of outcomes. One example is Noise, a platform for discovering and trading trends, launching on MegaETH.
As Qiao from Alliance describes, “the most powerful thing that crypto enables is the creation of new markets”, and we’ll see more of these sprout up next year.
AI Agents x Crypto
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This is the meta that has taken the industry by storm over the past couple of months and just like memecoins, will not be going away.
The pace of development and developments in this vertical is happening at a breakneck pace with implications that will start in crypto and reverberate beyond. Since my last post on this topic a couple weeks ago, we’ve seen more firsts. Agents are:
Getting X payouts like influencers, diversifying their revenue sources
Becoming brand ambassadors for projects
Changing their personalities without developer intervention
Prediction
We will be using or interacting with AI agents in some way, shape, or form in our onchain activities regularly. AI agents will become a requisite marketing channel for all projects as a key pillar in GTM strategy.
There you have it folks! It was a great personal exercise to review some of the themes I’ve covered this year, with plenty of holiday reading for those of you who want to dig in further.
See you next year! 🥳
