2024 encryption industry review and outlook: The rise of Stable Coin payments, great potential for BTC L2

AI applications go from speculation to value regression, and security attacks are more accurate. This article is derived from the article written by Exchange Internal Reference, compiled and compiled by TechFlow. (Synopsis: 22 mainstream public chains 2024 performance overturn: half of the activity declined, Hyperliquid a number of data ranked first) (Background supplement: Review of the encryption madness in 2024: the little fart child made money on meme coins, Ke Wenzhe was accused of hiding 1500 BTC.. What are some monster moments in the past 1 year? In this 2024 annual summary report, we focus on blockchain security, Stable Coin payment solutions, AI applications, exchange, and BTCFi. We chose these directions not only because we believe they represent the future of the encryption industry, but also because this is an area in which Depth has been involved and built over the past year and the focus of continued R&D investment in the coming year. We will continue to invest resources to explore and drive the development of these tracks. TL; DR has fallen sharply from its market share (50.9% →42.5%) to $TRUMP to hit a market cap of more than 10 billion US dollars in 24 hours, and the market is redefining the core competitiveness of exchanges. Traditional scale advantages give way to efficiency-driven, which heralds a structural shift in the exchange landscape in 2025: a three-way competition between top-tier CEXs, innovative small and medium-sized exchanges, and emerging DEXs. In 2024, although the victim Address rose only 3.7%, the loss soared by 67%, and the maximum loss of a single loss was $55.48 million, and hackers have shifted from "casting a wide net" to "sniper" attacks, accurately targeting high-value targets, more professional and stealthy attack methods, and greatly increasing the difficulty of defense. BTC L2 is undervalued. BTC L1 lacks programmability, and all innovation and funding is concentrated in L2, which is different from the Ethereum L1/L2 co-development model, which will eventually open up a mega-market. At the same time, all applications must be built on top of BTC L2, including high-security use cases, which means that BTC L2 has much higher security requirements than Ethereum L2. Stable Coin is undergoing a transformation from an encryption asset tool to a mainstream payment infrastructure, and Stripe's $1.1 billion acquisition Bridge is a hallmark of this transformation, with payment tech giants beginning to reinvent payment infrastructure with Stable Coin, drop payment costs and expand suite market coverage. The deeper significance of Stripe's acquisition lies in the promotion from a payment interface provider to an infrastructure operator. By gaining access to Stable Coin clearing channels, Stripe can bypass traditional payment intermediary and achieve self-clearing. The Stable Coin payment market is being restructured. Full-service infrastructure providers represented by Bridge gain scale advantages through mergers and acquisitions, while regional API service providers take a differentiated route and will compete differently through rates, service scope, and compliance levels. Supporting infrastructure service providers like Cobo will focus on providing customized digital Wallet technology, risk control compliance management and one-stop resource docking to help enterprises quickly build Stable Coin cross-border payment capabilities. There is currently a bubble in the AI track, but AI agents with practical value and execution will stand out in the future. The most successful AI agents will have their own Decentralization payment schemes, just as a real business needs its own banking account. The market opportunity for AI agents lies in creating real value and having the ability to execute, and the key is to find the product-market fit (PMF). DeFi and gaming are the most promising application areas for AI agents, and dedicated Decentralization payment solutions will become critical infrastructure for AI agents to operate autonomously. AI infrastructure platforms need speed, scalable suites, and unique capabilities. Similar to the top projects on the public chain, the success of the framework depends on the high-quality agents built on it, and in the long run, the boundary between the framework and the launch platform may gradually blur, breaking through the limitations of a single function. Stable Coin and encryption payments Stable Coin is undergoing a transformation from an encryption asset instrument to a mainstream payment infrastructure. This shift manifests itself on two levels: bottom-up market demand and top-down infrastructure innovation. On the demand side, taking emerging markets as an example, the research report jointly released by Castle Island Ventures shows that in Brazil, India and other areas with less developed financial infrastructure, Stable Coin has surpassed the simple cryptocurrency attribute and is becoming a key tool to solve people's livelihood problems. Local residents use Stable Coin for value preservation, payment, remittance and savings, effectively making up for the shortcomings of traditional financial services and coin depreciation and inflation challenges. This bottom-up adoption model proves the value of Stable Coin as an underlying financial facility. On the infrastructure side, Stripe's $1.1 billion acquisition Bridge marks the beginning of a reinvention of payment infrastructure by payment tech giants. Through Bridge's API services, Stripe significantly reduces payment costs, such as sending USDC on the Base network for less than $0.01, which is a significant advantage over the average cost of traditional cross-border payments of $44 per transaction. In addition, Stripe has used this to extend its market coverage to regions with weak TradFi infrastructure, such as Asia, Africa and Latin America. For Stripe, this acquisition is not only a cost-effective improvement, but also a transformation from a payment interface provider to an "infrastructure operator". Before acquisition bridge, Stripe was essentially a payment interface provider, and all money flows needed to rely on TradFi systems such as Visa and Mastercard. This dependency comes with multiple layers of intermediary (banks, payment networks, clearing houses), each layer stacking fees and time costs. After acquiring Bridge, Stripe obtained its own "pipeline" (back-end infrastructure) that could be cleared directly through Stable Coin, bypassing the traditional intermediary system and making the leap from "interface provider" to "infrastructure operator". From complex to simple Taking cross-border payments as an example, under the traditional model, enterprises need to deal with complex issues such as on-chain channels in various countries, Fiat currency infrastructure, KYC audits, and multi-coin Liquidity management to transfer Stable Coin dollars to Latin American countries. Bridge packages this complex infrastructure into simple APIs, allowing businesses to get full payment capabilities by simply calling APIs, without having to deal deeply with the underlying technology and compliance. The market landscape of Stable Coin payment infrastructure is being restructured. Full-service infrastructure providers represented by Bridge will gain scale advantages through integration with tech giants; API service providers focused on specific regions and industries will compete differently in terms of rates, scope of services, and level of compliance; Supporting infrastructure service providers such as Cobo focus on providing on-demand customized digital Wallet technology, risk control compliance management and one-stop resource docking to help enterprises quickly build Stable Coin cross-border payment capabilities. The rise of DEX and new exchanges The monopoly advantage of top exchanges is being broken. In each round of Bull Market in the past, the top exchanges almost monopolized the profits brought by market increments by virtue of scale effects. However, the data shows that this monopoly position is being challenged. Taking coin security as an example, the advantage of coin is reduced, according to the "2024 CEX Market Report" recently released by 0xScope...