Celestia Launch Outside of native USDC deployment and the migration of dydx into the Cosmos, the major story for the wider Cosmos ecosystem was the launch of Celestia in Q4. Although the modular thesis continues to play out on Ethereum, Celestia offers much cheaper data availability for rollups and has already seen promising projects like Eclipse, Movement, and Manta Pacific announce plans to leverage it over Ethereum. While it remains to be seen if network effects can coalesce around a data availability layer, the crypto space has yet to see a DA-specific project launch with a liquid asset, so speculation for TIA will likely continue throughout 2024 and will create secular tailwinds for Osmosis as the major onchain venue for TIA trading. Solana In the wake of the FTX collapse, 2023 proved to be an exciting year for the Solana ecosystem as market participants slowly began to understand the vision and utility for a

Blockworks 2024 Year End Review 26 monolithic, high performance, and low fee L1. Being tied to the hip with Alameda and FTX, SOL experienced heavy sell pressure going into 2023. Serum, Solanas native orderbook, which powered essentially all DeFi activity on the network, was deprecated due to program update authorities residing in defunct FTX wallets. Our report from February more deeply covers the contagion of these market dynamics. Despite these hurdles, Solana experienced a redemption arc, primarily through UX improvements, a flourishing ecosystem of dApps, and user onboarding.

A Refined UX Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs, opened sales for Saga, an Android-based smartphone optimized for Solana, in April of 2023. To ramp up device sales, the company reduced the price from $1,000 to $599 in August. Saga is an ambitious product vertical to execute in the crypto industry. Alongside the launch of Saga, Solana Lab bootstrapped a $10M grant program to incubate promising dApps for the Solana Mobile Stack (SMS). While most of the crypto UX happens on PCs, Solana Labs bet big on a mobile experience. Other industry titans, such as Coinbase, also went for this same approach with Coinbase Wallet and in-app browser capabilities. Another major UX unlock was seen in the launch of Backpack, a wallet that supports executable NFTs (xNFTs), which essentially serve as tokenized in-wallet dApps. For example, a user could lend or borrow funds on MarginFis money market directly from

This serves as a major innovation in the crypto wallet design space, where for the first time a wallet can be seen as more of an operating system than a browser add-on. To top it off, Backpack announced that it will launch Backpack Exchange, a centralized exchange, for the public in the first quarter of 2024. While initially it will only offer spot crypto markets, the team plans to introduce derivatives and margin trading later in the roadmap. The exchange plans to utilize zk proofs and multiparty computation (MPC) to secure customer assets. Ecosystem Development After a complete shakeout in the DeFi sector, Solana saw several dApps rise from the ashes and continue to ship new features for users. The list below is by no means all encompassing, but instead shows some of the dApps that generated the most buzz throughout the year.