AI applications are shifting from speculation to value return, with security attacks becoming more precise.
In this 2024 annual summary report, we focus on several technological directions: blockchain security, stablecoin payment solutions, AI applications, exchanges, and BTCFi.
We chose these directions not only because we believe they represent the future of the crypto industry, but also because they are areas we have deeply engaged in and built over the past year, and will continue to invest in research and development in the coming year. We will continue to allocate resources to explore and promote the development of these tracks.
TL;DR
The market is redefining the core competitiveness of exchanges, as Binance's market share has significantly dropped (50.9%→42.5%) while $TRUMP has reached a market cap of over $10 billion in 24 hours. Traditional scale advantages are giving way to efficiency-driven models, indicating a structural shift in the exchange landscape by 2025: a three-way competition among leading CEXs, innovative small and medium exchanges, and emerging DEXs.
In 2024, although the number of victim addresses only increased by 3.7%, losses surged by 67%, with the highest single loss reaching $55.48 million. Hackers have shifted from a "scattergun" approach to "sniper" attacks, precisely targeting high-value objectives, with attack methods becoming more professional and covert, significantly increasing the difficulty of defense.
Bitcoin L2 is undervalued. Bitcoin L1 lacks programmability, with all innovations and funds concentrated in L2, which differs from the co-development model of Ethereum L1/L2, ultimately opening up a trillion-dollar market. Additionally, all applications must be built on Bitcoin L2, including use cases with high security requirements, meaning that the security demands for Bitcoin L2 are much higher than those for Ethereum L2.
Stablecoins are undergoing a transformation from crypto asset tools to mainstream payment infrastructure. Stripe's acquisition of Bridge for $1.1 billion is a landmark event in this transformation, as payment technology giants begin to reshape payment infrastructure through stablecoins, reducing payment costs and expanding market coverage.
The deeper significance of Stripe's acquisition lies in its upgrade from a payment interface provider to an infrastructure operator. By acquiring stablecoin clearing channels, Stripe can bypass traditional payment intermediaries and achieve self-clearing.
The stablecoin payment market is being restructured. Full-service infrastructure providers like Bridge are gaining scale advantages through mergers and acquisitions, while regional API service providers are taking differentiated routes, competing on rates, service scope, and compliance levels; supporting infrastructure providers like Cobo will focus on providing customized digital wallet technology, risk control compliance management, and one-stop resource integration to help enterprises quickly build stablecoin cross-border payment capabilities.
Currently, there is a bubble in the AI track, but AI agents with practical value and execution capabilities will stand out in the future. The most successful AI agents will have their own decentralized payment solutions, just as a real business needs its own bank account.
The market opportunity for AI agents lies in creating actual value and having execution capabilities, with the key being to find the product-market fit (PMF). DeFi and gaming are the most promising application areas for AI agents, and dedicated decentralized payment solutions will become the key infrastructure for AI agents to operate independently.
AI infrastructure platforms need to possess speed, scalability, and unique features. Similar to leading projects on public chains, the success of the framework relies on the quality agents built on it. In the long run, the boundary between the framework and the launch platform may gradually blur, breaking through the limitations of single functionality.
Stablecoins and Crypto Payments
Stablecoins are undergoing a transformation from crypto asset tools to mainstream payment infrastructure. This shift is reflected on two levels: bottom-up market demand and top-down infrastructure innovation.
On the demand side, taking emerging markets as an example, a research report jointly released by Castle Island Ventures shows that in underdeveloped financial infrastructure regions like Brazil and India, stablecoins have surpassed their mere cryptocurrency attributes and are becoming key tools for solving livelihood issues. Local residents use stablecoins for value preservation, payments, remittances, and savings, effectively compensating for the shortcomings of traditional financial services and addressing challenges posed by local currency depreciation and inflation. This bottom-up adoption model demonstrates the value of stablecoins as foundational financial infrastructure.
On the infrastructure side, Stripe's acquisition of Bridge for $1.1 billion marks the beginning of payment technology giants reshaping payment infrastructure. Through Bridge's API services, Stripe has significantly reduced payment costs; for example, sending USDC on the Base network costs less than $0.01, compared to an average cost of $44 per transaction for traditional cross-border payments, showcasing a clear advantage. Additionally, Stripe has expanded its market coverage to regions with weak traditional financial infrastructure, such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
This acquisition is not just about cost efficiency for Stripe; it represents a transformation from a payment interface provider to an "infrastructure operator."
From Dependence to Independence
Before acquiring Bridge, Stripe was essentially a payment interface provider, relying on traditional financial systems like Visa and Mastercard for all fund flows. This dependence brought multiple layers of intermediaries (banks, payment networks, clearinghouses), each adding fees and time costs. After acquiring Bridge, Stripe gained its own "pipeline" (back-end infrastructure), allowing it to clear directly through stablecoins, bypassing traditional intermediaries and achieving a leap from "interface provider" to "infrastructure operator."From Complexity to Simplicity
Taking cross-border payments as an example, in the traditional model, a business sending stablecoin dollars to Latin American countries must handle complex issues such as cross-chain channels, fiat currency infrastructure, KYC verification, and multi-currency liquidity management. Bridge packages these complex infrastructures into simple APIs, allowing businesses to call the API to gain complete payment capabilities without delving into underlying technology and compliance issues.The market landscape for stablecoin payment infrastructure is being restructured. Full-service infrastructure providers like Bridge will gain scale advantages through integration with tech giants; API service providers focusing on specific regions and industries will compete on rates, service scope, and compliance levels; supporting infrastructure providers like Cobo will focus on providing on-demand customized digital wallet technology, risk control compliance management, and one-stop resource integration to help enterprises quickly build stablecoin cross-border payment capabilities.
The Rise of DEX and New Exchanges
The monopoly advantage of leading exchanges is being broken. In previous bull markets, leading exchanges almost monopolized the profits brought by market increments due to their scale effects. However, data shows that this monopoly position is being challenged.
Taking Binance as an example, its listing advantages have diminished. According to the recent "2024 CEX Market Report" released by 0xScope, Binance's spot market share has shrunk from 50.9% to 42.5% year-on-year, with its average listing return rate declining by about 10%, resulting in an average return rate of -36%. This is due to the inadequacies of Binance's listing strategy, such as the generally high market capitalization of listed projects and their late listing times, leading to weak prices. Meanwhile, the rapid rise of flexible small and medium platforms and DEXs is changing this landscape.
Further analysis reveals that the competitive advantage of exchanges is shifting from "scale effects" to "efficiency-driven" models. Especially in emerging tracks like meme coins and community-driven projects, exchanges that are quick to position themselves and keenly capture market opportunities (Alpha) often see explosive growth in trading volume within 24-48 hours. The positive cycle of "rapid positioning—word-of-mouth effect—user growth" is reshaping the competitive landscape of exchanges.
In addition to efficiency advantages, technological innovations are also continuously narrowing the gap between exchanges. The risks exposed by the FTX incident have heightened market concerns about the security of exchange assets. Notably, the current bull market is primarily driven by institutional funds, which are particularly sensitive to risks and security. Therefore, for security reasons, institutional users tend to prefer exchanges that hold compliance licenses.
However, with the emergence of technological solutions like Superloop, this assumption is being challenged. Even without a massive compliance budget, small and medium exchanges can achieve security guarantees on par with compliance through technological solutions. Superloop achieves complete asset isolation through an asset mapping system: users' actual assets are held by custodians, and exchanges can only operate equivalent "mapped amounts," allowing institutional users to enjoy the liquidity of centralized exchanges while their assets are always held by professional custodians, fundamentally eliminating the risk of asset misappropriation.
As the competitive landscape of traditional centralized exchanges changes, decentralized exchanges (DEX) are rising. With the maturation of on-chain trading infrastructure, more and more users and liquidity are flowing on-chain. DEXs not only have inherent advantages in transparency and asset self-custody but are also beginning to surpass traditional centralized exchanges in terms of trading costs and liquidity in practical usage experiences. Particularly, innovations like the hybrid order book-AMM model from HyperLiquid further blur the boundaries between CEX and DEX, driving the entire industry towards a more efficient and transparent direction.
In certain niche areas, such as meme coin trading, decentralized exchanges (DEX) have shown significant advantages. The explosive launch of the $TRUMP token issued by Trump is a vivid example. $TRUMP completely bypassed centralized exchanges, relying solely on decentralized platforms and community power, achieving a market cap of over tens of billions of dollars within just a few hours. The case of $TRUMP demonstrates that DEX can respond more agilely to rapidly changing market trends and provide users with a more convenient and efficient trading experience. The outflow of large amounts of SOL and USDC from CEX to on-chain DEX to purchase $TRUMP is the strongest evidence of this. This user behavior reveals the lagging nature of CEX in the face of emerging market trends and the operational advantages of DEX.
It is expected that by 2025, the exchange industry will form a competitive landscape with leading CEXs, innovative small and medium exchanges, and emerging DEXs coexisting, with each type of platform finding its unique value positioning in different market segments.
BTC Layer 2 is Undervalued
Bitcoin's Layer 2 network is undervalued, and BTCFi will be repriced. L2 is not only key to expanding Bitcoin's utility and driving its transformation from "digital gold" to a multifunctional currency, but it is also an important guarantee for the long-term security of the Bitcoin network. Unlike Ethereum L2, Bitcoin L2 has a larger market scale and capital volume ("All in L2") and higher security demands. These factors will fundamentally reshape its value assessment system, ultimately opening up a trillion-dollar market.
Although the native design of the Bitcoin protocol emphasizes security and decentralization, being merely "digital gold" is far from sufficient. Even for the store of value function, stronger privacy protection, self-custody, and scalability support are needed. These demands must be met through the Bitcoin Layer 2 network; otherwise, users will turn to centralized services (relying on centralized custody solutions, multi-signature custody, or wrapped tokens from other public chains), which goes against the original intention of Bitcoin.
More importantly, the Bitcoin network faces security challenges brought about by the reduction of block rewards, while the settlement and data availability demands of the Layer 2 network can naturally drive up transaction fees, thereby maintaining network security.
Compared to Ethereum Layer 2, Bitcoin Layer 2 has unique advantages:
- Greater market scale and capital volume:
As the largest crypto asset globally, Bitcoin currently has a foundational market cap over 4.9 times that of Ethereum. However, Bitcoin L1 lacks programmability and cannot directly support complex applications like DeFi and privacy tools, which means all innovations must occur on L2. This is in stark contrast to the situation in the Ethereum ecosystem, where innovation and capital are dispersed across both L1 and L2. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, incremental funds will flow entirely to L2, making the "All in L2" characteristic, combined with Bitcoin's significantly larger market cap, make "BTC L2 flips ETH L2" possible.
Shen Yu predicts that the total market cap of the BTCFi track is expected to reach tens of billions of dollars in the short term and may exceed one trillion dollars in the long term, even surpassing the historical peak of the Ethereum ecosystem.
- BTC L2 has higher security requirements
The development focus of Ethereum L2 and Bitcoin L2 differs. Ethereum L2 primarily aims to solve the issues of fast delivery and low transaction fees, while Bitcoin L2 places greater emphasis on security. Due to the lack of programmability in Bitcoin L1, almost all applications occur on L2, including large transactions that require high security. This means that Bitcoin L2 must accommodate all use cases with high security demands and bear all security responsibilities that come with it.
Especially for risk-sensitive traditional institutional users, they tend to choose solutions with fully validated security. To meet this demand, some companies are actively developing and deploying more robust security infrastructure to support the development of Bitcoin L2. For example, Cobo provides enhanced security guarantees for Bitcoin L2 through MPC multi-signature technology and the Babylon BTC Staking API, helping developers and users reduce risks and enhance trust in BTC L2 solutions.
Crypto Security: Attackers Shift to Large-Scale Precision Strikes
In 2024, the amount stolen in a single incident reached $55.48 million, highlighting the severe security situation in the crypto industry. Although the number of victim addresses only increased by 3.7%, total losses surged by 67% to $494 million. This indicates that hackers have shifted to precisely targeting high-value objectives, making security threats more targeted.
Scam Sniffer data shows, that in 2024, losses caused by Wallet Drainer (a type of malware deployed on phishing sites) reached $494 million, a year-on-year increase of 67%. Security threats have shifted from decentralized attacks to precision strikes, with 30 major thefts exceeding one million dollars occurring throughout the year, totaling losses of $171 million. The largest single theft amount reached $55.48 million, while the number of victim addresses only increased by 3.7% to 332,000 addresses, indicating that attackers are more inclined to lock onto high-value targets.
Attackers' methods have also become more specialized. They continuously innovate, using various means such as wallet normalization processes, legitimate contracts, and XSS vulnerabilities to bypass security detection. In terms of signature methods, they have expanded from a single Permit to include multiple methods, including setOwner. At the same time, the application of AI technology has made phishing content more deceptive. Notably, in the second half of 2024, the number of Wallet Drainer attacks decreased, possibly indicating that attackers are shifting to more covert attack methods, such as malware.
With the proliferation of new technologies like account abstraction and automated agents, especially the surge of on-chain agents in the EVM ecosystem, security architecture faces unprecedented challenges. Traditional incremental security solutions are struggling to cope with the increasingly complex threat environment. In this context, enterprise-level security standards are gradually becoming an industry trend, such as threshold signature technology based on Cobo MPC multi-party computation, which ensures asset security while maintaining high performance through intelligent risk control. This reflects that crypto security has shifted from static defense to a dynamic game with attackers, requiring a more proactive and comprehensive security system to address the evolving threats.
AI x Crypto: From Speculation to Value Return
The crypto market is undergoing a transition from meme coin speculation to AI agent applications. DeFi and gaming are the most promising application areas for AI agents, and dedicated decentralized payment solutions will become the key infrastructure for AI agents to operate independently. Although there is currently a bubble in the market, AI agents with practical value and execution capabilities will stand out in the future. The most successful AI agents will have their own decentralized payment solutions, just as a real business needs its own bank account. This will be a field full of challenges but also opportunities.
The crypto space is experiencing a paradigm shift from speculative meme coins to more practical AI agents, primarily driven by the realization of AI technology's potential to transform the crypto ecosystem. Although the market size of meme tokens remains substantial ($120.3 billion), the AI agent sector ($15.8 billion) is rapidly rising, attracting significant investment and innovation.
In the AI x Crypto field, competition mainly focuses on three categories:
• Agents: Similar to applications, executing specific tasks such as trading, analyzing data, or generating content.
• Frameworks: Providing tools and environments for developing and deploying agents, akin to a "factory." The success of a framework relies on the quality agents built on it.
• Launchpads: Providing funding and exposure opportunities for agent projects, akin to a "casino." In the long run, the boundaries between frameworks and launchpads may gradually blur.
However, there is currently a significant bubble in the AI industry, with most agents lacking practical value, and the markets for frameworks and launchpads are becoming saturated. It is expected that 99% of AI projects will ultimately fail. Many speculative AI agents will disappear, and the infrastructure will undergo a major reshuffle.
To succeed in the competition, AI infrastructure platforms need to possess speed, scalability, and unique features. Additionally, similar to leading projects on public chains, each successful framework may give rise to one or two leading agents, adding value to the framework and driving up its token price.
The market opportunity for AI agents lies in creating actual value and having execution capabilities, with the key being to find the product-market fit (PMF).
If practicality and value accumulation are considered as the criteria, DeFi may be the first AI application category to achieve PMF. DeFi agents can solve the complex issues of cryptocurrency operations by converting natural language intentions into executable commands, simplifying user interactions with DeFi protocols. The evolution of DeFi agents will go through three stages: from simple interaction to autonomous execution and then to intelligent research, ultimately becoming professional investment advisors that provide data-driven decision support.
Game NPCs also provide an ideal testing ground for AI agents. By endowing NPCs with independent economic identities, autonomous decision-making capabilities, and social interaction attributes, AI agents can enhance the immersion and playability of games.
From DeFi to game NPCs, AI agents are undergoing an evolution from simple execution to autonomous decision-making. Autonomous decision-making means that AI agents will operate independently in the real world with survival as their goal, such as bearing the cost of computing power themselves. This evolution can be achieved by introducing economic constraints to AI systems. For example, in the case of Nous Research, when an agent cannot afford reasoning costs, it will "die," prompting them to plan task priorities more effectively. This will challenge existing financial infrastructure and create a demand for decentralized payment solutions.
To support the autonomous decision-making and operation of AI agents, decentralized payments will become the next important infrastructure for AI agents. Existing financial infrastructure is designed for human users, and its strict identity verification requirements and complex compliance processes hinder the development of AI agents. The market needs specialized solutions that support efficient trading and asset management between agents. Companies like Coinbase, Skyfire, and Stripe have already begun to lay out in this field. This indicates that the decentralized payment track will welcome new development opportunities.
Finally, we recommend our "Exchange Owner's Insider," which provides two key pieces of information:
Daily AI-driven data analysis: Supported by GMGN API, it tracks wallet activity, meme coin trends, and which tokens are gaining traction in real-time. Automatically updated daily, so you won't miss any market dynamics.
In-depth insights from senior analysts: Our team (which has accurately predicted several early opportunities with over 200% returns) will periodically release exclusive research and analysis on emerging fields.
In the rapidly changing crypto market, information is an advantage. We hope this daily report can help exchanges better understand the market and seize opportunities.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
