2024 Crypto Startup Ideas

While I can't predict the future or provide real-time information, I can suggest some general ideas for crypto startup ventures based on trends and potential areas of interest in 2024. Keep in mind that the success of any startup idea depends on various factors, including market conditions, execution, and competition. Here are some potential crypto startup ideas :

NFT Platforms for Specific Niches:

• Create NFT platforms tailored to specific industries or interests, such as art, music, sports, or gaming. Specializing in a niche can help attract a targeted audience.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Services:

• Develop decentralized lending and borrowing platforms, decentralized exchanges (DEX), or other DeFi services. Focus on user-friendly interfaces and security.

Blockchain-based Identity Verification:

• Create a platform that uses blockchain for secure and decentralized identity verification. This could be applicable to various sectors, including finance, healthcare, and government.

Crypto Education Platforms:

• Develop platforms that provide comprehensive and user-friendly educational content about cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and trading strategies.

Sustainable and Green Cryptocurrencies:

• Explore eco-friendly cryptocurrencies or blockchain projects that address environmental concerns associated with traditional proof-of-work systems.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs):

• Build platforms that facilitate the creation and management of DAOs, enabling communities to govern themselves and make collective decisions.

Cross-Chain Solutions:

• Work on solutions that enhance interoperability between different blockchain networks, making it easier for users and developers to navigate and interact across multiple chains.

Privacy-focused Cryptocurrencies:

• Develop cryptocurrencies or blockchain protocols with enhanced privacy features to address growing concerns about data security and anonymity.

Blockchain in Supply Chain:

• Explore ways to integrate blockchain technology into supply chain management for increased transparency, traceability, and efficiency.

Blockchain-based Gaming:

• Create blockchain-based gaming platforms that utilize non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for in-game assets, enabling players to truly own and trade their virtual items.

Decentralized Social Media Platforms:

• Develop social media platforms that use blockchain to provide users with more control over their data and content, and reward them for engagement with cryptocurrencies.

Tokenized Real Estate:

• Explore the tokenization of real estate assets, allowing for fractional ownership and increased liquidity in the real estate market.

Before pursuing any startup idea, it's crucial to conduct thorough market research, understand the regulatory landscape, and assess the feasibility and sustainability of the project. Additionally, staying informed about the latest trends and technological advancements in the crypto space is essential for success.

“Real-World” Financial Applications

Crypto Payment

Stablecoins are the first and by far the largest non-speculative use case of crypto.

According to a Brevan Howard Digital report, “In 2022, stablecoins settled over $11T onchain, dwarfing the volume processed by PayPal ($1.4T), surpassing the payment volume of Visa, and reaching 14% of the volume settled by ACH.” It always baffles us that people think crypto still hasn’t found a killer use case beyond trading.

We don’t believe crypto payment startups should compete with the likes of Venmo or Revolut. Instead, they should identify and focus on underserved user segments such as traditionally underbanked industries (often taboo industries) or cross-border payment.

We are particularly interested, for instance, in stablecoin payment appplications for Latam, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, where fiat debasement and censorship are more prevalent. We have a lot of anecdotal data points from talking to startups that stablecoin adoption is hockey-sticking in these regions of the world.

“Binance P2P” or “Local Bitcoin” for Developing Nations

However, in order for crypto payment to be useful for consumers in these regions of the world, it needs to solve the last-mile problem, ie, onramp from local fiat and offramp into local fiat. Otherwise, the recipient wouldn’t be able to use the payment in “real life” and the sender would be restricted to crypto-natives.

One solution for this is similar to Binance P2P or Local Bitcoin, where a network of agents help facilitate on- and off-ramps in a peer-to-peer way.

Crypto Neobanks for Developing Nations

These neobanks were all the rage 2–3 years ago, but few focused on developing economies where demand for stablecoins and yield is disproportionately strong.

We are excited about the idea of offering yield on top of stablecoins to consumers in developing nations. Although in certain parts of Latam it’s fairly crowded, we still believe opportunities exist across the globe.

A further tailwind is the proliferation of onchain RWAs, such as US treasuries, which enable uncorrelated and often higher yields than crypto-native yields from Aave and Compound. These RWAs make high-quality assets from developed nations easily accessible to developing nations.

Real-World Asset (RWA)

There’s now $1.5T worth of onchain wealth. This onchain wealth seeks diversification.

• Ever since the 2023 banking crisis onchain treasury diversification became a hair on fire problem for many crypto-native organizations. MakerDAO, for example, leads the charge here.
• Crypto-native speculators are now wealthy enough that they too want to diversify their holdings beyond the highly correlated cryptoassets.
• Consumers in emerging markets want to own high-quality assets. Today they have USD stablecoins, which are better than their native currencies but still suffer from endless debasement.

The types of RWAs we are interested in include but are not limited to:

• Financial assets such as treasuries, stocks, corporate debt
• Hard assets such as real estate and commodities
• Collectibles such as watches and Pokemon cards.

RWA Collateral Lending

A different spin on RWAs. Allowing off-chain assets, such as real-estate, treasury bills, or other RWAs to to serve as collateral.

The obvious way is to tokenize the asset and treat it as collateral on-chain. An example is 4K tokenizing a watch, and using the watch NFT on Arcade to take out a USDC loan. With all asset classes in the world on a single ledger, we can dramatically improve lending/borrowing experience. Any asset can be collateralized to borrow any other asset. This is something not possible before crypto.

But there is also a possibility to forego the tokenization. Maybe just keep an oracle, or maybe even less. An example is Maker. They’ve effectively created a collateralized debt position, DAI, partially backed by RWAs (treasury custodians), but their RWA positions are not tokenized.

Another potential example is unlocking a fund’s RWA capital efficiency by making use of it in crypto, without having to fully tokenize it.

Crypto-Native Financial Applications

Continuous Prediction Markets

Most people want continuous, unlimited upside. They don’t want to be limited by discrete, binary outcomes, which is the case in traditional prediction markets. We believe truly crypto-native prediction markets are actually meme coins in the form of plain-vanilla fungible tokens, like $BIDEN and $TRUMP.

Under-Collateralized Lending

As on-chain reputation becomes more important, under-collateralized lending becomes possible. In fact, most corporate lending in TradFi is under-collateralized.

A number of developments in recent make under-collateralized lending increasingly more feasible:

• Offchain attestations like Coinbase or Clique
• Increasing adoption of ENS and other domain names
• Increasing number of people receiving regular onchain cashflows

A specific example of under-collateralized lending is to enable onchain individuals or organizations to borrow against future cashflow.

Privacy DeFi

Privacy finds PMF in unexpected places. For example, centralized exchanges are also used by whales to anonymize their transactions. We also suspect Thorchain, which is branded as a cross-chain swap, to be a de-facto privacy solution. It might be seeing usage that would’ve gone to Tornado which is now defunct, because tracking transactions cross-chain is much more difficult than tracking transactions on the same chain.

Regardless, we are interested in novel solutions to this old problem. For example, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) can be used for compliance (to prove the user is not a citizen of a sanctioned state or is accredited) without breaking pseudonymity.

Rari Reboot

We have learned that numerous projects across verticals and across the world have rolled their own lending platforms by forking and modifying Aave or Compound. This incurs substantial cost when it comes to development, audit, and maintenance. Reducing this cost at scale is the original thesis behind Rari Capital, which can be thought of “Aave/Compound fork as a service”. But now that Rari is defunct due to hacks, there are opportunities to fill this gap again.

M&A Investment Banking for DAOs

In 2021, Fei Protocol merged with Rari Capital. That will not be the last DAO merger we will see. More DAOs will be under distress, and more will want to acquire horizontally or vertically. There is an opportunity for somebody to build reusable tools (smart contract and legal structures) that will facilitate this process and make it more sophisticated.

NFT Derivatives

NFT options, perps, and futures can help NFT holders hedge their position or simply speculate on the prices of NFTs.

Index price is difficult to calculate and easy to manipulate due to illiquidity of the underlying. So perhaps physically settled derivatives are the right design.

Prime Brokerage

Capital efficiency is constrained by the fact none of the protocols talk to each other in terms of risk. Perp protocol A doesn’t care that you have a hedge on lending protocol B.

One approximation to this is to pool assets together into one giant account on each protocol. Create an accounting layer to handle risk for every clients’ account.