LSDfi
LSDfi stands for Liquid Staking Derivatives Finance, referring to DeFi protocols built on top of LSDs. LSDfi allows users to flexibly use their LSD assets for many different purposes, improves LSD tokens’ liquidity, enhances capital efficiency, and generates profits in the DeFi ecosystem as well.
LSDfi started to gain a lot of attention from the crypto community in early 2023 when Ethereum launched the Shanghai update. The total value of ETH staked through Liquid Staking platforms reached $18.41 billion. According to Beconcha.ai, only 22.52% of ETH has been staked and this figure can absolutely continue to increase in the future and create more opportunities for LSDfi projects.
We can see that the LSDfi sector still has a lot of development potential and will likely continue to be the hot trend in Q4 2023. Some outstanding LSDfi projects: Pendle Finance, Lybra Finance, Curve Finance, etc.
RWA
Real World Asset (RWA) are real-life assets such as real estate, vehicles, precious metals, etc. that are encoded on-chain as tokens or NFTs to be used in DeFi. RWA has huge growth potential as RWA is accounting for the majority of global financial value. For example, the global real estate market is worth up to $326 trillion and the gold market is worth $11.5 trillion. If only a very small portion of this were tokenized and brought into DeFi, it could provide a powerful boost for the entire crypto market.
The MakerDAO lending platform is one of the pioneering projects entering the RWA sector by purchasing US corporate bonds. Last July, Avalanche also launched a $50 million investment fund in order to invest in RWA. Overall, RWA is an extremely potential sector and will continue to grow strongly in the near future. Some outstanding projects: MakerDAO, Maple Finance, and more.
SocialFi
SocialFi is a combination of decentralized finance and social platforms. SocialFi platforms provide a Web3 (decentralized) solution for creating, managing and owning social media accounts and content.
Friend.tech is the most notable SocialFi project at the moment. Friend.tech is a web3 social network built on Base and has only launched a limited beta version, which requires users to have an invitation code from another user to access and create an account. In just a few months after launch, friend.tech has generated revenue of up to $20 million.
Retroactive
Retroactive is an innovative approach to distribute tokens in the crypto sector. Projects that adopt this model often distribute their tokens at TGE directly to users who supported the project in the early stages of development, instead of selling to the market through Public Sale. There are currently some projects expected to distribute tokens in the form of Retroactive, of which LayerZero and zkSync are highly likely to issue tokens in Q4 2023.