The Future of Digital Assets: An In-Depth Look

The digital asset ecosystem is undergoing continuous and unexpected evolution, with new fundamental elements, behavioral patterns, and coordination tools emerging. What was considered experimental a year ago may now be an integral part of the infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

  • Accelerating evolution of digital asset infrastructure.
  • Innovations in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and risk management.
  • Expanding scope of digital asset applications to include consumers.
  • The importance of clear regulations in supporting sustainable growth.

Infrastructure

BuilderNet for Solver Solutions

Over 50% of 'non-toxic' retail order flow on EVM is routed through intent aggregators utilizing a solver model. However, solvers often face delays in integrating new routes due to the intensive work required to fully understand their logic, prevent rollbacks, and maintain low simulation latency.

Opportunity: Applying a similar idea to BuilderNet in the solver market, where solvers can collaboratively share information such as intent order flows, RFQ (Request for Quote) integrations, analytics/liquidity metrics.

High-Performance, Private Computing with Hybrid Cryptography and Hardware Security

While TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) promise 'private AI in the cloud,' recent attacks have revealed that they are still susceptible to data leakage. On the other hand, pure cryptography (MPC/FHE) is extremely secure but too slow and complex for most practical AI workloads.

Opportunity: A secure AI runtime environment that runs models by default in high-speed TEEs but automatically routes the most sensitive steps to small MPC clusters, recording verifiable 'proofs of correct execution'.

Unified Stablecoin Liquidity Layer

A stablecoin liquidity layer provides shared infrastructure for stablecoin trading and settlement across multiple blockchains. Instead of maintaining separate liquidity pools on each network, liquidity providers collectively contribute to create a unified reserve accessible to any chain.

Opportunity: This infrastructure solves one of DeFi's core inefficiencies: the fragmentation of stablecoin liquidity.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Risk Management and Smart Underwriting

Risk management in DeFi remains a significant and not fully addressed problem. There are various approaches to risk management, from governance mechanisms within the protocol to outsourcing to risk management agencies.

Opportunity: A way to more clearly delineate risk, such as introducing structured tranches or other mechanisms to more precisely allocate risk exposure among participants.

Transparent Market Maker Protocols

Market maker (MM) protocols remain one of the most opaque parts of the industry, and the actual terms of agreements are rarely disclosed. Project teams often lack understanding and control over these deals, leading them to overpay for MM services due to a lack of full understanding of the market.

Opportunity: A simple aggregation front-end where projects or market makers can post trading quotes and the parameters they are willing to meet.

DeFi Smart Advisor 2.0 (LVR Capture)

Current automated investment tools cannot capture on-chain microstructure alpha at scale.

Opportunity: Leveraging LVR capture opportunities from AMMs can generate yield for our portfolio while maintaining asset allocation balance.

Consumer Applications

LLM ⇋ Prediction Market Interface

Prediction markets have been widely accepted, but discovering the right markets remains a problem. There is currently no intuitive way to express a prediction and act upon it.

Opportunity: The prediction market discovery problem can be solved through an LLM-based interface.

Scaling On-Chain Capital Formation

On-chain funding tools like Echo.xyz, pump.fun, and Zora have proven the effectiveness of community-driven on-chain funding models, but current participants are mainly limited to crypto-native users.

Opportunity: Embedding these fundamental features into mass-market platforms.

Cryptocurrency Discovery Layer

The cryptocurrency space still lacks a unified 'landing page' or search engine. There is no platform that aggregates all relevant information (price, on-chain metrics, news, social dynamics, yield, governance).

Opportunity: Building a well-curated, AI-powered landing page (a 'Google for crypto') that aggregates on-chain data, news feeds, and social signals into a coherent search/discovery information flow.

Regulation

Clear Protocol Rules and Open Access for Banks

Despite significant progress, regulatory frameworks still play a significant role in shaping the pace of crypto's next stage of growth. Decentralized protocols lack clear and applicable rules.

Opportunity: Clear, globally unified regulatory standards will unlock innovation and foster institutional participation.


Risk Warning: this article represents only the author’s views and is for reference only. It does not constitute investment advice or financial guidance, nor does it represent the stance of the Markets.com platform.When considering shares, indices, forex (foreign exchange) and commodities for trading and price predictions, remember that trading CFDs involves a significant degree of risk and could result in capital loss.Past performance is not indicative of any future results. This information is provided for informative purposes only and should not be construed to be investment advice. Trading cryptocurrency CFDs and spread bets is restricted for all UK retail clients. 

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