The issuance of new tokens has slowed down, but I believe everything will soon accelerate because:

• The market is gradually recovering.

• Many projects can no longer delay their launches.

These projects will serve as test cases, paving the way for others to follow.

In this post, I would like to focus on several protocols that frequently appear in my Twitter feed. However, it seems not everyone is familiar with what they actually do.

So, if you are one of those "followers" on Twitter who are only interested in posting watered-down content and waiting for token airdrops without understanding what these projects are about, then this post is for you.

Initia: The "Eden" of a Multi-Chain Ecosystem

Initia completed its first sale within the Echonomist Group on Cobie's Echo fundraising platform.

Cobie's Echo platform has only completed three project financings to date, which makes Initia worth paying attention to. Additionally, the mainnet launch and airdrop plan could be initiated at any time (although it seems to have been postponed until April).

If I had to choose one word to describe Initia, it would be "interwoven."

Initia is an L1 network that integrates different L2s to build a modular application chain ecosystem.

This may sound like Ethereum, but Initia aims to address the issues that ETH maximalists have with Ethereum.

Unlike Ethereum's isolated L2s, Initia deeply integrates the L1 and L2 networks, creating an interwoven ecosystem. These second-layer networks are referred to as "Minitias." This design is somewhat similar to the subnet of the Avalanche protocol (recently renamed to L1).

Like Avalanche but unlike Ethereum, the OPinit stack supports three major virtual machine architectures: EVM, MoveVM, and WasmVM. This means developers can choose the programming language they are most familiar with.

This feature might make ETH bulls drool. Initia's on-chain liquidity mechanism allows for staking INIT tokens individually or using approved INIT-X liquidity pool tokens (with INIT tokens as the trading pair) to earn rewards through a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) mechanism.

The built-in liquidity is a good Ponzi economics mechanism, forcing 50% or more of INIT to be used as trading pairs. These LP tokens must be authorized through a whitelist.

Similar to Berachain, Initia also has a native decentralized exchange: InitiaDEX, built on Layer 1 using the Move programming language. It is the liquidity hub of the Omnitia ecosystem, and as far as I understand, most of the liquidity will flow through InitiaDEX (as well as the mandatory INIT liquidity pool) even between different L2s.

Initia also has many other features, such as a native cross-chain bridge (called Minitswap) and the Vested Interest Program (Rollups can earn rewards by creating DAPPs and expanding new use cases for INIT tokens). However, in my opinion, the four core features mentioned earlier are still the most outstanding highlights of this project.

Initia integrates the demands of Ethereum native users into a single product, creating an interwoven ecosystem.

Token and Financing Situation

The details of the token economics have not yet been fully disclosed. Initia has only shared four relevant details:

• 50% of the supply is allocated to VIPs and reserved liquidity pools.

• No unlocked staking rewards for insiders.

• The community round enjoys a discount of about 30%.

• 15% is allocated to investors.

We can expect that the Initia project will use an airdrop with vesting, as its co-founder Zon once wrote, "Vesting is a gift. It prevents you from selling too early and forces you to maintain faith."

In September 2024, Zon also revealed to The Block that Initia completed a $14 million Series A funding round at a $350 million fully diluted valuation, with investors including Theory Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, and other institutions.

The testnet has an incentive mechanism, so feel free to interact with the official testnet website, claim test tokens, and participate in the ecosystem construction. All detailed information can be found on its testnet-related page.

As usual, I do not hold high expectations for testnet activities.

Overall, the Initia ecosystem is well-constructed, but the key question remains: Will builders and users choose to deeply engage in it?

Fogo: The Fastest Layer 1 Blockchain

Fogo is another project that conducted a token sale on Cobie's Echo platform, raising $8 million in funding at a $100 million valuation.

Fogo uses a highly optimized version of the Solana validator client, Firedancer, developed by Jump Crypto, as the sole execution client on its network.

Firedancer has not yet been enabled on the Solana network. Solana will soon benefit from the Firedancer client, but not all validators will immediately switch to using it. This means that the speed of the Solana network will be limited by the slowest node.

Fogo's co-founder Doug Colkitt once said, "It's like having a Ferrari, but you can only drive it on the congested streets of New York City."

They revealed that Fogo's theoretical speed can reach up to 1 million transactions per second (with a block time of 20 milliseconds) under ideal conditions, but the developer network currently running on Fogo has only achieved about 54,000 TPS. In comparison, Solana's current theoretical upper limit is 65,000 TPS, but its actual processing speed at this stage is 4,300 TPS.

The MegaETH testnet achieved a high throughput of 20,000 TPS with a block time of 10 milliseconds.

In contrast, traditional financial systems can handle about 100,000 operations per second, with latency controlled at the sub-second level.

The Fogo team believes that decentralized networks must reach the level of traditional institutions to meet the use cases for high-frequency trading and instant payments.

It runs the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), which means developers can easily migrate Solana applications, tools, and infrastructure to the Fogo chain without any modifications. A wave of forking is expected, and "shiny" new tokens (such as Jupiter, Kamino, Pumpfun, etc.) will emerge on the Fogo chain.

Clearly, not all participants in the Solana ecosystem are happy about this.

Notable Contributors of Fogo

It is worth noting that Fogo's contributors include members from Douro Labs, the team behind the oracle network Pyth, which is closely associated with Jump Crypto.

Other notable features of Fogo:

• Multi-local consensus ("solar revolution"): Fogo divides validators into geographical "regions" that can operate semi-independently. Network control will regularly rotate to the next "region," preventing any single validator from gaining a dominant advantage. This means that consensus can be reached faster during normal operation, as information does not always have to travel around the entire "globe."

• At network launch, it will initially be equipped with a set of validators (20-50 people).

• Gas fee abstraction: Allows payment of network fees using any token.

Token and Financing Situation

Fogo raised approximately $5.5 million in a seed round led by Distributed Global and followed by CMS Holdings. Previously, the company had already obtained $8 million in financing from the Echo platform.

The developer network went live at the end of 2024, the testnet is about to be launched, and the mainnet is expected to start in the middle of 2025. There is not much information about tokens or airdrops at present.

Succinct: Building True World Software

"Cryptocurrency has failed to fulfill its mission."

"We were promised a transparent, verifiable, and trustless global coordination system. Instead, what we got were: cross-chain bridges hacked, multi-signature L2 networks without fraud proofs, and a committee of 21 validators controlling billions of dollars."

(Note: This is a veiled reference to EOS developed by Blockone.)

This is the main problem that Succinct is addressing.

"ZK zero-knowledge proofs are one of the most critical technologies for blockchain scalability, interoperability, and privacy protection, but their complexity currently makes them difficult for most developers to grasp."

It is hard to be excited about the progress of zero-knowledge proofs at the moment, but Succinct has successfully caught my attention with their brilliant marketing campaign: they designed their testnet and official website dashboard in a MacOS style interface.

You can play games and earn points.

Token and Financing Situation

Succinct has completed a $55 million financing round led by Paradigm, with participation from Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Geometry, and other institutions.

When the mainnet officially launches, a TGE is expected to take place soon.

Resolv: A Truly Effective Delta-Neutral Stablecoin

Many people now believe that the next altcoin boom will be accelerated by institutional capital inflows, especially stablecoins.

The current challenge is that the main beneficiaries of stablecoins seem to be institutions and stablecoin issuers, while retail investors may only get the leftovers.

Another round of retail exploitation?

Token and Financing Situation

I have written about some protocols that may benefit from stablecoin adoption, but I would like to add another protocol here: Resolv.

If you understand how Ethena works, then you already have the basic knowledge to learn about Resolv.

Ethena and Resolv share the same core concept, which is to create stablecoins through a combination of crypto-asset collateralization and perpetual contract short hedging. However, Resolv's uniqueness lies in its architectural design and implementation approach:

Dual-Token Model vs. Single-Token Model

Ethena uses a single-token model (USDe), where all risks and rewards are borne by the stablecoin holders and managed by the protocol's reserve fund in the background.

Resolv, on the other hand, employs a dual-token model (USR + RLP), which achieves risk separation by clearly isolating risks into separate tokens.

USR, similar to USDe, maintains its peg through a delta-neutral strategy by shorting futures to hedge against ETH price risk. Users can stake USR to earn rewards, which can then be converted to stUSR, functioning like a savings account.

RLP serves as an insurance mechanism for USR, absorbing losses to maintain USR's stability (for example, when the funding rate is negative). RLP holders take on higher risks for potentially higher returns. Its value fluctuates based on the protocol's performance, essentially acting as a dynamic buffer mechanism: it grows in value when the protocol is profitable and contracts when it incurs losses.

This mechanism allows risk-tolerant users to earn higher returns while protecting stablecoin users from market risks. As of the time of writing, USR (Stable Yield Reserve) offers an annual interest rate of 4.3%, while RLP (Risk Liquidity Pool) provides an annual yield of 6.7%.

While not extremely high, Resolv's strategy of earning airdrops through points mining has led to a total value locked (TVL) of $637 million, which is already a commendable achievement.

Collateral Asset Differences

Resolv's core philosophy is to be fully backed by cryptocurrencies. All collateral is ETH (recently announced to include BTC support) and does not involve any real-world assets (RWA).

Initially, Ethena also only supported cryptocurrencies, but later introduced a sub-stablecoin, USDtb, with 90% of its reserve backed by BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, BUIDL.

In a sense, USDtb is an insurance-like token, similar to the USR token in the Resolv project, aimed at maintaining the stability of USDe's value during bear markets by providing traditional asset yields when crypto yields decline.

Therefore, it can be said that Resolv is essentially more "crypto-native" and adheres to a decentralized philosophy, while Ethena's strategy of introducing centralized assets may provide additional stability.

Token and Financing Situation

Resolv has not officially announced its financing details, but its investors include Delphi Labs, Daedalus, and No Limit Holdings. In addition, the project is planning to raise funds through the Legion platform, with a community round about to start.

Since September 2024, Resolv has officially launched a points reward program. Users can still earn points by depositing stablecoins.

After depositing, you can maximize points acquisition through Pendle pools or other strategies.

The $RESOLV token is expected to be issued in early 2025.

Snapchain: Potentially the Largest Consumer-Grade Layer 1 Blockchain

My biggest concern about emerging blockchains like Fogo and Initia is whether they will truly gain market adoption and what killer applications will be born on these chains. As Kyle said, "General-purpose blockchains will die. Each chain must have a clear use case, and these use cases will be defined by what is built on the chain."

Snapchain: A Layer 1 Blockchain Tailored for the Farcaster Social Network

This is where Snapchain, a Layer 1 blockchain specifically designed for the Farcaster social network, comes into play.

Snapchain was born out of the pain points faced by decentralized social networks when scaling, such as difficulties in data synchronization and delays in real-time updates. While the Lens protocol opted for zkSync technology, the Farcaster team is developing its own solution tailored to its ecosystem.

"Take Twitter as an example. The platform has 200 million daily active users, processes 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), and its state data grows by 1TB to 10TB per day."

Farcaster's current system works well on a small scale, but it crashes when the number of users and nodes increases. Snapchain will solve this problem in a decentralized manner.

At mainnet launch, it should be able to achieve over 9,000 TPS and support 2 million daily active users (currently around 50,000 daily active users).

Two Exciting Highlights

First is data deletion (i.e., data pruning). Lol.

On blockchains, most data needs to be permanently stored, but what if you just posted an emoji and immediately regretted it? It has to disappear! Forever!

Therefore, on Snapchain, old data (such as posts, likes, follows) can be deleted once it is no longer needed.

Users can pay $2 or $3 per year to get a processing speed of 500 transactions per hour and a storage limit of about 10,000 transactions, which is crucial.

So, if you delete old transactions, you can free up storage space for new transactions (or choose to pay more to keep old transactions).

The second cool thing is sharding technology. You know, Ethereum considered sharding technology to achieve scalability before turning to Layer 2 scaling solutions.

Imagine recording all social media interactions (likes, posts, etc.) on a blockchain. Millions of data points every day. If every node has to store and process all the content, it will cause latency. Each full node has to handle every transaction, even if these transactions are irrelevant to them. This model can still work for currency transfers and smart contracts, but it is clearly insufficient when facing high-scalability real-time social applications.

Snapchain solves this problem by making each user completely independent (when you register on Farcaster, you get an ID number, and the smaller and earlier the number, the more it becomes a status symbol). Your posts do not affect my account.

Snapchain disperses users across multiple shards (BTW, this design is inspired by Near's model). Each shard only handles the transactions of its own users. This means that as the number of users grows, the number of shards increases, and the system's throughput is also enhanced.

To ensure that all shards stay in sync, there is also a final layer: a main chain that packages and publishes global blocks from each shard.

Ethereum cannot easily do this. Its transactions rely on shared state - smart contracts, tokens, and balances. This makes account-level sharding difficult to achieve.

Snapchain works because social behavior is simple enough. These behaviors only affect the sender themselves.

There is more information about Snapchain available here. But I am optimistic about Farcaster and Snapchain because they are adopting an "application-first, chain-later" strategy, which means building real-world applications first and then adding the blockchain infrastructure.

Hyperliquid has achieved significant results with this strategy. Although Farcaster only has 50,000 daily active users and 900,000 total users, it is still one of the top consumer applications.

Launch Date and Token

In short: The genesis block has been successfully activated, and the mainnet is scheduled to officially launch on April 15, 2025. It's almost here!

I believe that once Snapchain is officially launched and Farcaster is ready to scale, this social ecosystem will be integrated into the Coinbase wallet.

Token Launch

The integration of social media feeds into the Coinbase wallet is a big deal.

However, I am not sure exactly when the token will be launched. The team has been tight-lipped about it, but recent rumors and funding news may suggest that it is imminent.

Financing

Snapchain itself is a technical component, not an entity that raises funds independently. The development of Snapchain is funded by Merkle Manufactory, the company building the Farcaster protocol.

Most notably, in May 2024, Merkle Manufactory announced a $150 million funding round led by Paradigm, with participation from other major investors including a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, USV, Variant, and Standard Crypto.