The post below has also been posted on Twitter by the CEO & Co-Founder of Delphi Digital, Anil Lulla. You can read the thread on Twitter here: https://x.com/anildelphi/status/1873817754484002869
People love to say that crypto has no PMF, but from my perspective, this reveals them as cynics who don’t take the time to explore the different apps that devs worldwide are continuously shipping.
I wanted to highlight some of my favorite crypto apps that I used this year and hopefully inspire a few of you to try some of them out. These teams work hard to create useful products, and the least we can do is take the time to test their efforts.
Before we dive in, some disclaimers and disclosures. Either through Delphi Ventures, an angel check, or just aping the token personally, I have exposure to some of these products and/or their tokens. I’ll put a * for any that I have exposure to in any way. None of this is financial advice—it’s simply me thinking out loud about the projects I enjoyed this year. These are in no particular order.
HyperLiquid
To get it out of the way, @HyperliquidX is awesome. You’ve probably read over 1,000 tweets in the past month about it, so I’ll keep my thoughts on it short. Anyone who uses the product frequently loves it. I actually haven’t heard many complaints – and you can’t say that about many crypto apps so far.
I try not to use leverage often anymore, so I was not the target HL user. I actually first used the app to buy $HYPE* when it launched. Quickly, I saw what its fans had been raving about all year. More than just the UI/UX being very CEX-like (yes, I know it only has four validators rn), it’s been inspiring to see how quickly the team has been responding to critiques, concerns, and feedback from users within their discord.
Since its inception in 2023, HyperLiquid has amassed a cult-like community with over 200K users and nearly $450B in cumulative volume traded. Current open interest on the platform exceeds $2.5B. It’s been so successful that it currently accounts for over 60% of all USDC on Arbitrum.
The excitement around HYPE since its launch is not solely due to its clean UI/UX as a perps exchange. There are promises of its own L1 and it has already seen an impressive ecosystem form around it despite its early stages. It’s a project that not only promises an exciting future but has already delivered on an ambitious vision.
Polymarket
Ever since getting into crypto in 2017, prediction markets have been a use case that I was excited about and thought would be one of the first to really take off, with early projects like Augur. Obviously, that was not the case. It took almost 7 years – but 2024 was officially the year prediction markets went mainstream thanks to Polymarket. It worked flawlessly on election night and called the winner of what I consider to be the most important election of our generation, early. For context, Polymarket handled $3.6B in election bets and called Trump’s win six hours before AP.
It single-handedly created a new form of media and provided the world with other data points to consider when being told about the future by other potentially biased sources. A lot of people called for its death post-election, but to be honest it’s been holding up pretty well. Down from November’s highs, but still above mid-October levels. I still visit it frequently to see what markets are active, seems like sports have started gaining share there.
Also, we should give credit where credit is due. http://Fun.xyz built a great Checkout product for Polymarket that enables users to deposit with any token on any chain, a card, or CEX (Binance, Coinbase, etc). My normie friends even used it
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