I regularly curate a list of things across the crypto space that I personally find quite interesting as part of my hunt for early narratives. Thought I’ll share a few of them this week:

• I’m been thinking that prediction markets (e.g. Polymarket) could become a new kind of consumer behavior that is enabled by crypto. It’s one of those things that the industry has been working on for a while and hasn’t yet reached its 0-to-1 consumer moment, but could explode quickly when it does — just like OpenSea did in 2020. One challenge: finding investable opportunities outside of private rounds.
• Perp DEXs are quite interesting and our DeFi team wrote in deep detail about them in a July report (https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/dydx-valuation-analysis-dex-perps-comparison). I’m keeping an eye on Vertex particularly: as a user I like the UI and it has an airdrop planned in October (based on trading volume). Vertex added stop market orders this week, bringing it closer to feature parity with CEXs and one more reason to shift off CEXs.
• Optimism has been stealing the limelight lately. Base — Coinbase’s L2 built on the OP stack — is officially launching this week (9 August) and kicking it off with a whole series of NFT mints from over 50 leading brands, artists and creators (https://onchainsummer.xyz/).
• Tensor, the #1 NFT marketplace on Solana, is launching its Tensorian mint today. Shards were airdropped to Tensor users last week. In the mint, users can take 10 shards + 1.69 SOL to mint 1 Tensorian. Anticipation is high and shard prices have been pretty much up only so far (chart below), now at 1.7 SOL floor price.

• Pixel Vault’s Supernova event begins on 8 August. While there are no official details yet, speculation is that there will be an announcement about a new fungible token and its distribution. And also how various Pixel Vault NFTs, particularly planets, can be burned to receive the new token. It is also expected that reboot.gg and Battle Plan (3v3 strategic auto-battler game) will be released a few weeks later.
• Pixel vault was one of the early NFT projects in 2021, with >$100M in funding raised, but it was plagued by a major oversupply of tokens and a complicated NFT ecosystem. I’m still skeptical that it will be able to revive an ecosystem that has lost the plot, but I’m holding my breath for what the announcement entails and how the market reacts to it.