Bankless: Five predictions for the crypto industry in 2024

Author: David Hoffman, Bankless; Compiled by: Songxue, Golden Finance

It is the first week of 2024, so you will see a lot of predictions about the direction of cryptocurrencies this year. Of course, most of these predictions end up falling short, but in the heat of a bull market, it's so much fun to bet on that I couldn't resist making a prediction myself.

So, here are my top five cryptocurrency predictions for 2024!

1. EigenLayer breaks $10 billion in TVL

My first prediction is that the popularity around EigenLayer will continue to rise—only until 2024.

EigenLayer mainnet will launch in Q2 or Q3 of 2024, with billions of dollars worth of ETH deposited into its staking contract. Then, the AVS service will launch and start increasing ETH earnings. The additional ETH yields will be small at first, but they will only rise slowly over the first 24 months of EigenLayer's life. Secondary Prediction: If EigenLayer airdrops its token in 2024, it will be the largest airdrop ever in terms of the amount of funds airdropped to users.

2. 1 million ETH was burned

In the 461 days since the merger, Ethereum has burned 335,000 ETH.

In 2024, Ethereum will destroy 1 million ETH. We just haven’t seen the full effects of Proof of Stake + EIP1559 at the peak of the bull market.

3. The amount of airdrops in 2024 will exceed US$5 billion

Now is the airdrop season. By 2024, I believe $5 billion worth of tokens will be in the hands of early adopters of crypto protocols.

Airdrops will be available across all ecosystems; Solana, Ethereum, Ethereum L2, and newer Alt chains will attempt to leverage airdrops and incentives to attract new users.

4. ETH Layer2 turns to optimizing VM and parallel EVM

In 2024, there will be many first-layer (L1) projects optimizing virtual machines, including Monad and Sei. . Eclipse plans to introduce SVM to the Ethereum mainnet in 2024.

Meta-information about Layer 2 virtual machines (VMs) will move from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to more VMs that perform optimizations. The Ethereum community will implore Monads to transition to Layer 2, but Monads will reject this request.

What are the key things to focus on? How will Arbitrum, Optimism, and other EVM chains progress with their VM optimizations, and how far will they move away from EVM?

5. Solana Downtime

It doesn’t matter how well or how quickly Solana scales. If it attracts too many users too quickly, vulnerabilities will be discovered.