Q1 2025 Crypto Market Observation: Lack of Consensus, Real Returns Become the Focus

The Hong Kong Consensus Conference in February 2025 failed to reach a Consensus, and the crypto market in the first quarter of 2025 also lacks a clear main theme.

Looking back at 2024, Solana surpassed the Ethereum ecosystem in single-chain transaction volume by executing specific meme coin strategies, becoming the first L1 public chain to win in the competition for block space. However, the foundation of Solana's victory is not solid. Due to the decline of the holiday effect leading to a sharp decrease in on-chain transaction volume, coupled with liquidity pool sizes insufficient to support high valuations, a wave of large-scale withdrawal occurred in February 2025.

With the disintegration of the old pattern, the new market dominant forces have yet to be clarified. Standing at the historically unpredictable beginning of March, we can attempt to predict the main trends of the future.

In the current chaotic market structure, a new trend is gradually emerging: capital is shifting from purely narrative-based on-chain competition to Yield Farming projects supported by actual fundamentals.

These projects are mainly divided into three categories:

1. Neoclassical yield farming, such as the Sonic project, strengthens the Ve(3,3) mechanism;
2. New type ( model, such as some emerging public chain projects, will apply the ) mechanism at the entire chain level;
3. Represented by certain decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) projects, variant yield farming models with real income and positive externalities.

Although the first two types of projects have received a lot of attention in the market, the DePIN field has seen little discussion after a year of silence. However, the most promising aspect in a certain research institution's 2025 outlook report is precisely the DePIN track, even suggesting that a certain public chain should shift its strategic focus to DePIN in 2025.

As we all know, the key to obtaining excess returns lies in choosing less crowded tracks. The less attention DePIN receives, the more it is worth our in-depth layout.

According to data statistics, among the top five DePIN projects by revenue, in addition to several well-known projects, there are also two newcomers, Braintrust and GEODNET. Among them, a certain project ranks first in the DePIN project list with a revenue of 10 million USD in 30 days. This project has achieved an annual recurring revenue of 1.05 billion USD, provided 487 million hours of computing power, and distributed over 3.6 billion token rewards, with nearly 1 million on-chain transactions.

The reason this project is so successful is partly due to its differentiated competitive strategy, focusing on utilizing high-performance GPUs to build a decentralized cloud computing platform that provides enterprise-level GPU computing power for AI and game developers worldwide; on the other hand, the project team seized the opportunity of the combination of AI and encryption in the first quarter of 2024, successfully raised funds, and purchased a large number of high-end GPUs, establishing competitive barriers and promoting the formation of network effects.

Recently, there are opinions in the market that the rise of open-source low-cost models may reduce the demand for high-end graphics cards, leading some investors to worry about the sustainability of the project's revenue. However, this view is actually market noise. In fact, the rise of open-source models will not only not decrease the demand for high-end GPUs, but may instead stimulate demand growth. For example, after a certain open-source model went viral, the domestic model as a service (MaaS) inference market size surged, bringing new life to several struggling computing power centers.

In addition, innovation in the AI field continues. Besides large language models, embodied intelligence has also become a hot spot sought after by capital. The demand for low-latency, high-reliability computing power and a multi-layer network structure that collaborates edge devices with the cloud may become the engine that ignites the second growth curve of this project.

Therefore, from the demand side, the prospects for this project remain optimistic. The project team's current focus is on the supply side, aiming to attract more enterprise-level high-end GPU computing power suppliers to join the network. To this end, they have also launched a dedicated network to provide compliance support and waive the staking threshold for GPU computing power suppliers.

Overall, DePIN has evolved from being seen as a "scam" in 2023 to a physical device collaborative network with real income and positive externalities, but the market has yet to fully reflect this. This precisely provides a potential opportunity for investors.