2024 was crypto's year of mainstream adoption and absolute degeneracy

Crypto told three different stories in 2024.

The first story started with the approval of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs in the U.S., resulting in $53 billion of inflows and $600 billion of cumulative trading volume. This was swiftly followed by more ETFs in Hong Kong and Ethereum ETFs in the U.S., albeit with much lower volumes. Crypto then became an important talking point in the U.S. election, showing this was the year it truly reached mainstream adoption.

Among all of this, however, there was an overarching concern that crypto was simply selling out. For an industry founded on libertarian ideals and anti-government rhetoric, it became obsessed with anyone willing to prop up the prices — whether that was funds investing in the ETFs, MicroStrategy leveraging itself to buy bitcoin or even the potential of a bitcoin reserve set up by the actual U.S. government. Ultimately, it didn’t matter as long as number go up.

But there was a second story in 2024. At the same time as bitcoin and ether suited up to walk down Wall Street, the rest of the ecosystem had its own memecoin-fueled frat party. Who were the hosts? Well, Pump.fun of course.

Launched at the start of the year, Pump.fun made it easy for anyone to create a token in just a few clicks. And unsurprisingly, it became a smash hit.

Since inception, people have created 4.8 million tokens on the platform, according to The Block Research, with 866 tracked on CoinGecko at a combined $6.8 billion market cap. It was the creator of tokens named after Peanut the Squirrel and a hippopotamus called Moo Deng. Plus many AI-themed tokens and its second-biggest success story at present: fartcoin. The tokens that have graduated from the platform and made their way to decentralized exchange Raydium have seen as much as $2.5 billion in daily trading volume . It's a wildly successful platform.

But Pump.fun didn’t stop there. It also created the ability for the creator of each token to run a live stream next to the price chart. This swiftly led to people doing all manner of crazy things — from people locking themselves in cages to a guy staying permanently on his toilet — to try to pump their token price, before sometimes selling too early . It quickly got way out of hand and live streams were removed.

So in the same year that institutional investors became able to buy cryptocurrencies through regulated investment wrappers, people were committing heinous acts on camera to pump their own tokens. You can’t make this stuff up.

Progress among the madness

The third story was that, among the buzz of memecoin mania, there were also signs of technology innovation — with newer projects providing better UX and faster transactions or trades.

One of the key winners this year was Hyperliquid, a high-performance exchange that's a hybrid of decentralized and centralized elements. It used a points program to incentivize volume, which cumulated in an airdrop that saw its token price rise considerably after launch — a relatively rare result. Yet unlike many airdrops, traders haven’t abandoned the platform; instead, its volumes have continued to rise.

Another success story was the emergence of games on the messaging platform Telegram. What started with Notcoin turned into a raft of clicker games trying to replicate its success and sizable airdrop. While successive airdrops like Hamster Kombat were largely received with disappointment by their communities, Telegram has continued to build out mini-apps and there remains a lot of potential for onboarding more people who are new to crypto.

Beyond these, we had ZKsync move toward decentralization with the launch of its own token , a proposed plan to reinvent Ethereum’s consensus layer and early signs of Ethereum scaling through MegaETH . Other events included Bitcoin’s halving in April, the beginning of Monad’s testnet and airdrops from projects like Magic Eden and Pudgy Penguins .

So did crypto sell out in 2024? Maybe a bit, but it also did some of the hard work and had fun at the same time.