The Bitcoin Ecosystem in 2024: A Year of Regret

As 2024 comes to an end, people in the crypto space have their own year-end summaries: first, to see if the investment returns this year have outperformed the market

2024 is coming to an end, and people in the crypto space are making their year-end summaries. For some, it's about checking if their investment returns this year have outperformed the market (just a reminder, BTC has risen over 130% this year), and for others, it's about summarizing the development of the sectors/ecosystems they are concerned about over the past year.

The Solana ecosystem, Base ecosystem, TON ecosystem, and AI Agent sector have all had their shining moments this year. But for the Bitcoin ecosystem, although many things have happened this year, including ecological infrastructure and application innovation, it has not yet met the expectations people had at the beginning of 2024.

As a result, some have summarized this year’s silence in the Bitcoin ecosystem as a "failure," while others, steadfast OGs of the ecosystem, continue to choose to "believe." And as an ordinary player in the Bitcoin ecosystem from the beginning, I choose to conclude this year with the word "regret."

2024 Actually Has a Good Start

2024 actually has a good start for the Bitcoin ecosystem. At the beginning of the year, people held expectations for the Bitcoin ecosystem, believing that 2024 would be the year of its complete explosion and entry into the mainstream, much like the current belief that 2025 will be the year of the AI Agent ecosystem's explosion.

Why did we have such high expectations for the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2024? Perhaps it is because since the birth of the Ordinals protocol in December 2022, the Bitcoin ecosystem has undergone a year of growth and consensus-building, transitioning from the "barbaric era" to the "industrial era." Project teams, VCs, and mainstream exchanges have all entered the space, forming three main tracks: asset issuance protocols, L2, and Bitcoin staking.

From the perspective of asset issuance protocols, influenced by Binance's launch of BRC 20 tokens ORDI and SATS spot trading at the end of 2023, the concept of inscriptions became popular again at the beginning of 2024. Not only did this heat inspire other chains to follow suit and start their own inscription modes, but it also drove up the tokens of other asset protocols such as ARC 20, SRC 20, PIPE, etc. Meanwhile, the rune pre-mining and airdrop play initiated by RSIC and Runestone in January 2024 also filled people with anticipation for the upcoming Runes protocol.

From the development of L2, Bitcoin L2 experienced explosive growth at the beginning of 2024. With the hot asset issuance and trading, the congestion issues on the Bitcoin mainnet and players' demand for increased playability of mainnet assets made Bitcoin L2 a popular entrepreneurial direction. By early 2024, it was reported that over 100 Bitcoin L2 projects had emerged in a short period. Although many of these projects were poorly constructed and aimed at "making a quick profit," overall, domestic and foreign VCs began to invest heavily in Bitcoin L2, hoping that Bitcoin L2 could replicate the glory of the Ethereum L2 ecosystem in 2024.

69 Bitcoin L2 projects summarized by @Bitvmclub in March 2024

In terms of Bitcoin staking, the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon announced in December 2023 that it had completed a $18 million financing round, officially kicking off the narrative of Bitcoin staking and re-staking. With the Ethereum ecosystem's top-tier project EigenLayer as a model for re-staking narratives, people believe that with Bitcoin's stronger consensus foundation and security compared to Ethereum, the prospects for Bitcoin staking and re-staking in 2024 will be very broad. This will not only awaken dormant Bitcoin whales to participate in the Bitcoin ecosystem but also form a re-staking ecosystem comparable to Ethereum's.

In addition to the overall positive trends exhibited by the three main tracks at the beginning of 2024, the general infrastructure of the Bitcoin ecosystem (such as wallets, cross-chain bridges, and trading markets) has also gradually improved during this period. Unisat and OKX Wallet have technically supported multiple asset protocols, becoming major wallets and trading markets in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The approval and listing of the Bitcoin spot ETF on January 11, 2024, marked Bitcoin's formal integration into traditional finance. At the same time, this further strengthened people's expectations for the Bitcoin ecosystem, as a network worth trillions of dollars would inevitably develop into a market scale of hundreds of billions of dollars.

However……

Regrettably, the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2024 did not welcome the attention and development that surpassed previous bull market peaks, and instead entered a long period of silence.

Mainnet