Q1 2025 Crypto Market: Lack of Consensus, Seeking New Directions

The Hong Kong Consensus Conference in February 2025 failed to reach a Consensus, which coincides with the current state of the crypto market. The crypto market in the first quarter of 2025 also seems to lack a clear dominant trend.

Looking back at 2024, Solana surpassed the Ethereum ecosystem in single-chain transaction volume by implementing specific token strategies, becoming the first Layer 1 public chain to succeed in the competition for blockchain space. However, the foundation of Solana’s success is not solid. Due to the holiday effect causing a sharp decline in on-chain transaction volume, coupled with insufficient liquidity pool size to support high valuations, a large-scale withdrawal event occurred in February 2025.

The old market leaders have exited, and new leaders have yet to emerge. Standing at the traditionally unpredictable beginning of March, we might as well boldly predict the future market trends.

In the current chaotic market structure, a new trend is emerging: funds are shifting from purely narrative-driven on-chain competition to yield farming projects with substantial fundamental support.

These projects are mainly divided into three categories:

1. The new classical yield farming model strengthens the voting custody mechanism;
2. The new (,3,3) model applies the early (,3) mechanism to the entire blockchain;
3. DePIN projects represented by Aethir have a yield farming variant with real income and positive externalities.

The first two types of projects have gained considerable attention in the market, while the DePIN field has seen low discussion after a year of silence. However, a research institution’s outlook report for 2025 highlights the DePIN track as the most promising and suggests that Solana shift its strategic focus to DePIN in 2025.

As is well known, the key to obtaining excess returns lies in choosing less traveled paths. The DePIN field is currently not receiving much attention, which is precisely why it deserves our in-depth study.

According to data statistics, among the top five DePIN projects by revenue, in addition to the familiar Aethir, io.net, and Akash, there are also two new projects, Braintrust and GEODNET, making the list.

Among them, Aethir ranks first in DePIN projects with a 30-day revenue of $30 million. According to Aethir’s GPU dashboard data, the project has achieved an annual recurring revenue of $105 million, providing 487 million hours of computing power, distributing over 3.6 billion token rewards, and nearly 1 million on-chain transactions.

This growth trajectory indicates that the crypto market’s recognition of real income models may come faster than expected.

Aethir’s success stems from its differentiated competitive strategy. Unlike other DePIN projects that focus on edge device networks and long-tail market demands, it has chosen to leverage high-performance GPUs to build a decentralized cloud computing platform, providing enterprise-level GPU computing power for AI and game developers worldwide. Additionally, the Aethir team successfully raised funds by capitalizing on the trend of merging AI and encryption in the first quarter of 2024, purchasing a large number of high-end GPUs, establishing competitive barriers, and rapidly achieving network effects. This network effect, in turn, attracted more enterprise-level GPU computing power providers to join.

Recently, there is a view in the market that the emergence of open-source low-cost models may reduce the demand for high-end graphics cards, thereby affecting Aethir’s revenue sustainability. However, this concern may be unnecessary. Industry experts have publicly refuted this viewpoint, and the “Jevons Paradox” is also at work. In short, open-source models will not only fail to reduce the demand for high-end GPUs but may actually stimulate demand growth.

In addition, innovation in the AI field is still ongoing. Besides large language models, embodied intelligence has become a new investment hotspot. Embodied intelligence requires low-latency, high-reliability computing power and a multi-layer network structure that collaborates edge devices with the cloud, which may become the driving force for Aethir’s second growth curve.

Therefore, from the demand side, Aethir’s prospects remain optimistic. The Aethir team’s current focus is on the supply side, aiming to attract more enterprise-level high-end GPU computing power suppliers to join the network. To this end, Aethir has also launched a dedicated network to provide compliance support and lower the barriers to entry for GPU computing power suppliers.

In addition to AI-related projects, GEODNET also performs well fundamentally, but due to its focus on geographic location information services in this niche market, its growth potential may be limited.

Overall, DePIN has evolved from being regarded as a “scam” in 2023 to a physical device collaboration network with real income and positive externalities, but the market does not seem to have fully reflected this yet. This could be an investment opportunity worth paying attention to.