Q1 2025 Crypto Market Observation: Main Line Disappears, Real Returns Become the Focus

The Hong Kong Consensus Conference in February 2025 failed to reach a consensus, reflecting the current lack of a clear main line in the crypto market. Looking back at 2024, Solana successfully surpassed the Ethereum ecosystem in the blockchain space war by implementing a Memecoin strategy, making history. However, this victory is not on solid ground. As the holiday effect fades, on-chain transaction volume has sharply declined, and the limited liquidity pools are struggling to support high valuations, leading to a massive retreat for Solana in February 2025.

The current market structure is chaotic, but a new trend has emerged: capital is shifting from purely narrative-driven on-chain PvP to yield farms supported by fundamentals. The projects worth paying attention to can be primarily divided into three categories:

1. Sonic represents a neoclassical yield farm, enhancing the Ve(3,3) mechanism.
2. The new model launched by BeraChain and Initia, (,3,3), is a chain-level version of the Olympus DAO (,3) mechanism.
3. DePIN projects represented by Aethir, feature real income and positive externalities.

Although Sonic, BeraChain, and Initia have attracted significant attention in the market, the DePIN sector has not seen much discussion after a year of quiet. However, the Messari 2025 Annual Outlook Report is particularly optimistic about the DePIN sector, suggesting that Solana should shift its strategic focus to this area.

The key to obtaining excess returns lies in focusing on overlooked areas. The current low attention on DePIN highlights its potential.

According to statistics from data platforms, the top five DePIN projects by revenue include Aethir, io.net, Akash, Braintrust, and GEODNET. Among them, Aethir leads with $10 million in revenue over 30 days. Aethir has achieved an annual recurring revenue of $105 million, providing 487 million hours of computing power, distributing over 3.6 billion ATH token rewards, and conducting nearly 1 million on-chain transactions.

Aethir's success stems from its differentiated strategy. Unlike other DePIN projects that focus on edge device networks, Aethir leverages NVIDIA's high-performance GPUs to build a decentralized cloud computing platform, providing enterprise-level GPU computing power for global AI and game developers. The Aethir team seized the AI x Crypto craze in Q1 2024 to successfully raise funds, acquire a large number of high-end GPUs, establish competitive barriers, and rapidly achieve network effects.

Recently, the market has circulated the view that open-source low-cost models like DeepSeek may impact the demand for NVIDIA high-end graphics cards, raising investor concerns about the sustainability of Aethir's revenue. However, this viewpoint may be exaggerated. In fact, the popularity of open-source models may stimulate growth in high-end GPU demand, a phenomenon known as the "Jevons Paradox." The popularity of DeepSeek has driven a surge in the domestic model-as-a-service (MaaS) market scale.

In addition, innovations in the AI field are constant, and Embodied AI( has become a new investment hotspot. The demand for low latency and high reliability computing capabilities, as well as the complex network structure requirements for cloud-edge collaboration, may drive Aethir's next round of growth.

The Aethir team is currently working to attract more enterprise-level high-end GPU computing power suppliers to connect to the network and launch the Aethir AVS network, providing compliance support and lowering the entry barrier for suppliers.

In the DePIN field, apart from AI-related projects, GEODNET also performs well in the niche market of geographic location information services, although the market size is limited.

Overall, DePIN has evolved from being labeled a "scam" in 2023 to a tangible device collaboration network with real income and positive externalities. The market has not fully reflected this change, providing potential opportunities for investors.

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