According to Foresight News, Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to be one of the strongest narratives in the crypto market in the first and second quarters of 2024. In 2023, AI was a dominant narrative, occupying 30-50% of the narrative heat for most of the year. This suggests that the AI vertical will continue to exist with the exponential growth of the entire AI field, not limited to the crypto bubble.
Since January 2024, the narrative heat of SocialFi (financial social) has changed the most, driven by the revival of friend.tech, the popularity of fantasy.top, and other well-known projects.
Meme coins have become one of the strongest narratives in the first and second quarters of 2024. The heat of BRC20 has dropped the most, possibly due to narrative fatigue after Bitcoin halving and recent reduced interest in Ordinals / Runes. Notably, BRC20, as a vertical, occupied a lot of heat at the end of 2023.
Decentralized social media (DeSoc) is also expected to become a strong competitor for narrative dominance, with projects like Farcaster, friend.tech, and DeSo attracting attention.
Compared to the beginning of the year, the heat of the GameFi narrative has declined. Many discussions suggest that it only takes one breakout game to revive the entire GameFi field, but so far this year, we have not seen any major game releases.
With the announcement of the EIGEN token, the narratives of LSD and LRT have slightly declined since the beginning of the year, while major LRT protocols like Renzo and Etherfi have already ended their point plans or first and second phase activities.
Since the beginning of the year, AI and memes have been the dominant narratives. The question is whether the heat of these two fields can continue. For AI, the theory is very clear, as there are many external factors, such as the continuously iterating ChatGPT model of OpenAI, AGI discussions, NVIDIA, etc., which may have a positive impact on the AI vertical field throughout the year. Memes usually have no upper limit, completely dependent on market trends and culture.
The Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) as a vertical field has also been steadily growing this year, similar to AI, we see continuous interesting experiments in this field.
The discussion of Ethereum ETF will heat up again, and Ethereum ETF will continue to be a hot topic.
ZK (Zero Knowledge Proof) is also a potential narrative that has not yet been widely adopted but may revive in the zkSync TGE token generation event (hopefully soon).
Comparing the narrative heat now with the beginning of the year: