DWF Ventures Toasts a Record Year for Crypto and Looks to 2025

Even those who don’t pay much attention to crypto know that it was a good year for crypto. As for those at the epicenter of it all, it was a great year. Yes, everything went up. A lot. But there were also a host of reasons to mark 2024 down as a milestone for crypto. The spate of innovation, pushing the boundaries of what can be built and delivered onchain, was staggering as sectors spanning DeSci, AI, and RWAs all made their mark.

Web3 has now mushroomed into a multi-faceted industry so large that it’s no longer possible to be an expert on all spheres. Spend too much time in one ecosystem and there’s a good chance you’ll miss out on something happening elsewhere. While no industry player has a 360º view of what’s going on in crypto right now, the company best placed to have a handle on things is DWF Ventures, the VC arm of DWF Labs.

Thanks to the deal flow that comes its way coupled with the aggressive and diverse investments it’s made over the last 12 months, its team are plugged into what’s happening from TON to Tron and from the memecoin trenches to the big brain laboratories where decentralized science is flourishing. Its end-of-year thread captures the highlights of a remarkable year for crypto.

A Year in Crypto: Memecoins, Institutional Flows, and Everything In Between

In past cycles, crypto has swung violently between greed and despair. This year, though, the narrative has been more diverse. Bitcoin cracked six digits after ETF approvals led to a long line of institutional in-flows, but that’s just the mainstream media headline. Beneath it, a wave of new participants, ranging from institutional custodians to retail communities enthralled by dogcoins, demonstrated that crypto is hitting an inflection point.

DeFi has evolved into a rich environment where stablecoins move trillions of dollars, onchain perps take a serious chunk of CEX market share, and real-world assets transition from whitepaper fantasies to real, tokenized deals. After years of speculation that we’d soon see everything from government bonds to gold bars turned into tokens, the dream materialized into something concrete this year.

Protocols launched to facilitate T-Bill-backed stablecoins, tokenized corporate bonds, and even commodities. The result is a RWA sector that looks set to become the first truly stable, sustainable yield-generating corner of DeFi. On course to grow TVL by between 10 and 50x by 2030, RWAs are now a multi-billion dollar industry whose next stop will be in trillion territory.

Institutional Money and the Bitcoin ETF Moment

For many, the big story was the arrival of institutional-grade ETFs, both for Bitcoin in January and Ethereum in July. After years of regulatory back-and-forth, these ETFs emerged as official evidence that crypto is no longer magical internet money but a recognized asset class. Spot ETFs opened the door for wealth managers and pension funds to inch into digital assets, pushing the “blue chip” coins to new levels of legitimacy. The market’s response was immediate: inflows soared, fueling a rally that extended well beyond BTC and ETH, as capital found its way into altcoins, L2 ecosystems, and memecoin mania.

This year, stablecoins continued their unstoppable climb, processing around $5.9 trillion in volume, with a total supply that’s nearing the $200B mark. Lest there was any doubt, 2024 cemented stables’ place as the de facto medium of exchange in crypto, bridging centralized finance (CeFi) and DeFi, and making onchain settlement frictionless. Led by tokens like USDT, USDC, and a handful of other mostly fiat-backed offerings, stablecoins have become an indispensable tool for hedge funds, yield hunters, and casual crypto users, fueling everything from cross-border payments to lending protocols.

Memecoins Surprise Everyone – Again

Once considered a side gig for degenerate traders, memecoins had a mammoth year. In the process, they revealed a truth about crypto culture: speculation isn’t merely about gambling. It's also about curiosity, community-building, and the raw thrill of permissionless finance empowering anyone to launch anything and instantly get eyeballs on it. Blockchains such as Solana, Base, and TON saw surging user activity driven by the memecoin wave, with DWF Labs launching a Meme Fund to support the next wave of creators.

There was an explosion in onchain activity across L2s such as Arbitrum and Base, not all of which can be attributed to memecoins: there were “legitimate” use cases in there also fighting for block space. DeFi is no longer the sole territory of Ethereum, whose gas fees and throughput concerns have pushed users onto cheaper, more scalable layers. This shift spurred the growth of new DEXes offering advanced features like onchain perpetual contracts. Meanwhile, aggregator protocols and advanced order-matching systems popped up, proving that DeFi could replicate – and arguably improve upon – CeFi’s user experience.

AI and the Next Frontier

If RWAs redefined stable yield, and memecoins redefined community-driven speculation, AI began to redefine everything else. This year, AI and blockchain found synergy through GPU-based networks intent on drastically lowering compute costs for advanced machine learning. The ability to train AI models for real-time financial or supply-chain analytics on decentralized frameworks has vast potential, the surface of which has scarcely been scratched.

The final months of 2024 saw global macro tensions persist, but crypto seemed to waltz past traditional risk sentiment. Bitcoin soared above six figures, stablecoins hit record usage, and institutional inflows remained consistent. The combined forces that DWF Ventures highlighted – memecoins, stablecoins, RWA tokenization, growing institutional appetite, AI synergy – paint a picture of an industry no longer content with restating old narratives. Instead, it’s forging multiple new threads.

Whether it’s bridging legacy and onchain finance, or launching a thousand mini-apps that reshape how we recreate, 2024 has shown that crypto is more than just a cyclical hype machine – though naturally it still has its share of shillers and moonboys. Where there’s money, there will always be greed.

The stage is now set for crypto to push on into 2025, with a pro-crypto US administration among the favorable tailwinds giving the industry major momentum. As for where we’ll be 12 months from now, no one – DWF Ventures included – can say for sure. If 2024’s taught us anything, it’s that crypto is capable of confounding your wildest expectations.