HTX Ventures 2024 Year in Review

Within this report, HTX Ventures highlighted five key sectors that showed encouraging progress in 2024 - the Bitcoin Ecosystem, Infrastructure, Meme Coins, AI, and the TON Ecosystem - and will continue to closely monitor these areas in 2025.

HTX Ventures highlighted five key sectors that showed encouraging progress in 2024 and will continue to be closely monitored in 2025.

Bitcoin Ecosystem

With Bitcoin dominance reaching 56.81% and Bitcoin spot ETFs now accounting for 5.3% of the total Bitcoin supply, a new market trend has emerged. Bitcoin has solidified its position as the core asset, with spot ETFs acting as liquidity channels, and U.S. listed companies such as MicroStrategy (MSTR) serving as the vehicles to absorb unlimited dollar liquidity.

As a result, it is increasingly essential to further develop Bitcoin's ecosystem and enhance capital utilization efficiency. It has driven infrastructure projects, including Layer 2s, execution layers, interoperability solutions and security layers, to continuously emerge.

With strong support from macro markets and infrastructure support, HTX Ventures anticipates a further surge in Bitcoin demand over the next two years.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure remained a cornerstone in this year's crypto investments and funding. The synergy between capital and technology has driven the rapid development of Layer 1, Layer 2, and middleware projects, among others.

Through ongoing upgrades and construction, the Ethereum ecosystem has improved Layer 2s' performance and reduced network fees. Other Layer 1s, such as Solana and TRON, achieved active on-chain transactions, attributable to the development of meme coins, and infrastructure like Pump.fun and Sunpump. Layer 0 and cross-chain middleware have made breakthroughs in interoperability, expanding the multi-chain landscape. Modular public blockchains, like Celestia and Monad, offered exceptional performance and flexibility, thus attracting diverse applications. Restaking projects, which aim to enhance network security and capital efficiency, has seen speedy development and gained market attention. Bitcoin Layer 2 has emerged as a new focus in the primary market for its attempt to combine Bitcoin's security with high-performance scaling solutions.

As HTX Ventures stated, infrastructure is still imperative in this year's crypto investments and funding. Layer 1 solutions, in particular, now represent the focal point of technical development and exploration within the crypto space, and it is expected to remain a priority for development resources and capital investment in the future.

Meme Coins

The Meme coin sector emerged as a hotspot in the crypto market in 2024, fostering community consensus while integrating with fields like DeFi and GameFi to create new use cases. For example, Solana has actively championed the innovation and growth of meme projects, successfully energizing its ecosystem. As the crypto market environment grows increasingly favorable, more retail investors are expected to enter the market, positioning Meme projects as vital channels for capital inflows.

The Meme coin fair launch sector has gained significant market attention and attracted substantial participants this year. Infrastructure projects such as Pump.fun and SunPump have emerged as top-performing cash flow generators, injecting fresh momentum into Meme coin development. As multi-chain ecosystems mature and real-world use cases expand, Meme coin infrastructure will continue injecting more vitality into this sector.

AI

In 2024, the intersection of Crypto and AI sector has been driving the exploration of several segmented fields such as ZK/OPML for enabling AI on-chain, AI data crowdsourcing, decentralized computing power rental, AI data trading, AI games, and AI agents.

One of the hottest segmented fields is AI agents, which are put on chains to take advantage of the token mechanism to incentivise and bootstrap certain behaviors with the agents, including interacting with smart contracts, trading and querying on behalf of users. In the future, AI agents will gradually become personal butlers and assistants for users, serving them with comprehensive capabilities, such as independent asset issuance, initiation of viral marketing campaigns, formation of DAOs, and even fund management and investment decision-making. Over time, they may develop unique cultures and religions. This deep integration of AI and encryption technology is a groundbreaking evolution that is unattainable within Web2 and cannot be achieved by Web3 relying solely on encryption technology.

TON Ecosystem

Attributable to Telegram's hundreds of millions of users and robust technical support, the TON (The Open Network) ecosystem has progressively developed into a multi-layered blockchain ecosystem. In 2024, it experienced a full-scale boom in its ecosystem and market presence. From DeFi and meme coins to NFTs and gaming, TON leveraged its massive user base to achieve significant milestones in various fields, pioneering the monetization of Web2 social applications through crypto.

One standout success was the adoption of "tap-to-earn" games with token airdrop incentives, which effectively onboarded a large number of Web2 users. However, as the TON ecosystem moves into 2025, it must explore and find new business models to improve user retention and identify its next growth curve.

2025 Outlook

Donald Trump's expected repeal of SAB 121 after his inauguration on January 20, 2025, would allow traditional financial institutions