The issuance of new tokens has slowed down, but I believe things will soon accelerate because:
The market is slowly recovering.
Many projects can no longer delay their launches.
These projects will act as test cases, paving the way for others.
In this post, I want to focus on a few protocols that have been frequently mentioned in my Twitter feed. However, it seems not everyone is familiar with what they actually do.
So, if you are one of those people on Twitter who just reposts content and waits for token airdrops without really understanding what these projects are about, then this post is for you.
Initia: The “Eden” of Multichain Ecosystems
Initia completed its first sale within the Echonomist Group on Cobie’s Echo fundraising platform. Cobie’s Echo platform has only hosted three project fundraisings to date, making Initia worth paying attention to. Additionally, the mainnet launch and airdrop plan could be initiated at any time (though it seems to have been postponed until April).
If I were to choose one word to describe Initia, it would be “interwoven.”
Initia is an L1 network that builds a modular application chain ecosystem by integrating different L2s. 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 to build an interwoven ecosystem. These second-layer networks are referred to as “Minitias.” This design is somewhat similar to the subnet concept of the Avalanche protocol (recently renamed to L1).
Similar to Avalanche but different from 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 alone might make ETH holders drool. Initia’s on-chain liquidity mechanism allows for staking INIT tokens individually or using approved INIT-X liquidity pool tokens (paired with INIT tokens) to earn rewards through a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) mechanism.
Built-in liquidity is good Ponzi economics; this mechanism forces 50% or more of INIT to be paired as a trading pair. These LP tokens must be whitelisted.
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 I understand it, most liquidity will flow through InitiaDEX (and the mandatory INITA liquidity pools) even across different L2s.
Initia also has more features, such as a native cross-chain bridge (called Minitswap) and a Vested Interest Program (where rollups can earn rewards by creating DAPPs and expanding new use cases for INIT tokens). However, in my view, the four core features mentioned earlier are still the most prominent highlights of the project.
Initia integrates the demands of Ethereum-native users into a single product, creating an interwoven ecosystem.
Token and Funding
The token economics details have not been fully disclosed yet. Initia has only shared four relevant details:
50% of the supply is allocated to VIP and reserved liquidity pools.
Insiders have staking rewards without unlocking.
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 stay faithful.”
In September 2024, Zon also revealed to The Block that Initia completed a $14 million Series A round at a $350 million fully diluted valuation, with investors including Theory Ventures, Delphi Ventures, and Hack VC.
The testnet has an incentive mechanism, so feel free to interact with the official testnet website, claim test tokens, and participate in ecosystem building. All details can be found on its testnet-related page.
As usual, I don’t have 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 with it?
Fogo: The Fastest Layer 1 Blockchain
Fogo is another project that conducted a token sale on Cobie’s Echo platform, raising $8 million 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 hasn’t even been enabled on the Solana network yet. Solana will soon benefit from the Firedancer client, but not all validators will switch to it immediately. This means Solana’s network speed will be limited by the slowest nodes.
Fogo co-founder Doug Colkitt once said, “It’s like having a Ferrari but only being able to drive it on the gridlocked streets of New York City.”
They revealed that Fogo’s theoretical speed could reach up to 1 million transactions per second (with a block time of 20 milliseconds) under ideal conditions, but the developer network that Fogo has launched 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 comparison, traditional financial systems can handle about 100,000 operations per second, with latency controlled at sub-second levels.
The Fogo team believes that decentralized networks must reach the level of traditional institutions to meet the use cases of 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. There is expected to be a wave of forking, with “shiny” new tokens (such as Jupiter, Kamino, Pumpfun, etc.) emerging on the Fogo chain.
Obviously, not all participants in the Solana ecosystem are happy about this.
Notable Contributors
It is worth noting that Fogo’s contributors include members from Douro Labs, the team behind the oracle network Pyth, which itself is closely associated with Jump Crypto.
Other Significant Features of Fogo:
Multi-local Consensus (“Solar Orbit”): Fogo divides validators into geographical “regions” that can operate semi-independently. Network control rotates regularly to the next “region,” preventing any single validator from dominating. This means faster consensus in normal operation, as information doesn’t always have to travel around the entire “globe.”
Initial Validator Set: At launch, it will initially be equipped with a set of validators (20-50).
Gas Fee Abstraction: Supports paying network fees with any token.
Token and Funding
Fogo raised approximately $5.5 million in a seed round led by Distributed Global and followed by CMS Holdings. Previously, the company had also secured $8 million in funding 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 go live in mid-2025. There is not much information about tokens or airdrops at the moment.
Succinct: Building True World Software
“Cryptocurrency has failed to fulfill its promise.”
“We were promised a transparent, verifiable, and trustless global coordination system. Instead, what we got were: hacked cross-chain bridges, 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’s really hard to get excited about the progress of zero-knowledge proofs at the moment, but Succinct has successfully caught my attention with its brilliant marketing campaign: they’ve designed their testnet and website dashboard in a MacOS style interface.
You can play games and earn points.
The Problem We Face Now:
Each project needs to build its own proof system (for example, zkSync and Scroll achieve scalability through zero-knowledge proof technology, but the infrastructure is fragmented).
Many people rely on centralized service providers to generate proofs.
This approach is costly and hinders innovation.
Therefore, Succinct ZKPs is a technology that can cryptographically verify authenticity without revealing data. However, due to fragmented infrastructure and high implementation costs, it faces significant challenges in practical application.
Succinct provides a shared market for proof generation, so that each project does not have to “reinvent the wheel.” Developers can focus on building applications (such as Rollup, cross-chain bridges, oracles) and outsource the proof generation to network nodes.
Notable Partners: Polygon, Celestia, Avail, Gnosis.
But the use cases are actually more diverse, such as private voting systems or anonymous transaction scenarios
