Beyond the Bear Market: A Comprehensive Review of Upcoming Top-Tier Public Chain Eco Projects Ready for TGE

By: blockbeats|2025/02/07 09:00:03
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Last night, Berachain went live on a mainstream trading platform, with the price briefly exceeding $15. The bulls and bears fiercely battled, and in less than 24 hours, the trading volume surpassed $2.2 billion. However, the price has since retraced 50% from its peak, leaving many to lament that this was yet another bearish feast.

Related Read: "Overview of Popular Ecosystem Projects on Berachain Mainnet"

According to Kaito's Mindshare ranking, today's top-ranking crypto projects include MegaETH, Monad, Story, Abstract, and more. These well-known projects have not yet conducted their Token Generation Events (TGE). BlockBeats has compiled a list of popular projects in their ecosystem for readers to reference.

Beyond the Bear Market: A Comprehensive Review of Upcoming Top-Tier Public Chain Eco Projects Ready for TGE

MegaETH

MegaETH has just announced the launch of a new NFT series called The Fluffle, with a total supply of 10,000. The whitelist price is set at 1 ETH, and holders are entitled to 5% of future token allocations. However, due to the high pricing, the community has accused the project of engaging in a liquidity grab. Moreover, the fact that it has not yet launched on the testnet has raised doubts about its delivery capabilities. Nevertheless, its ecosystem projects have garnered increasing attention from the community recently. Below are some popular projects in the MegaETH ecosystem.

GTE

Global Token Exchange (GTE) is the flagship exchange platform in the MegaETH ecosystem. On January 17, GTE announced that it had raised $10 million in three rounds of funding. This includes $1.5 million in pre-seed funding, $6.942 million in seed funding, and $2.5 million in community funding, the latter of which was carried out on the platform Echo founded by crypto trader Jordan Fish (aka Cobie).

GTE enables users to trade with the best prices by integrating features such as asset creation, spot, and leverage trading. The platform also provides fair Launchpad and Takeoff services for token issuance while ensuring that users always have control of their funds. Users can enjoy centralized exchange-like speed and liquidity while maintaining decentralized security and transparency.

CAP Labs

CAP is a stablecoin engine that provides on-chain yield through external revenue sources such as arbitrage, MEV, and RWAs. Unlike traditional internally collateralized designs, CAP offers a flexible yield strategy where users only need to choose the stablecoin denomination they wish to hold, behind which a continuously evolving strategy generates yield. CAP's stablecoins are redeemable on demand and fully decentralized, ensuring users always have control of their assets while avoiding the high risks and opacity of traditional finance. According to MegaETH team member Jin, CAP has completed a $1.9 million pre-seed funding round.

Euphoria

Euphoria is a derivatives trading platform that aims to redefine the derivatives trading experience, transforming the traditional complex and serious trading process into a relaxed, social, and fun interactive form. Through its mobile-first Tap Trading platform, Euphoria enables users to engage with the market in a more intuitive, gamified manner without worrying about complex technical details.

Founders Nathan and Casey have extensive backgrounds in the crypto industry. Nathan previously founded LocalCoinSwap and accumulated rich trading and product development experience in the crypto space, then established DeFi Cartel before ultimately founding Euphoria. Casey is an educator and business development expert in the crypto industry, fully immersing himself in DeFi upon discovery and exiting his crypto education company in 2024.

Noise

Noise is an innovative project within the MegaETH ecosystem dedicated to building a new trading paradigm in the crypto market called "Mindshare" trading. The platform isolates the implicit influencing factors of "mindshare" from traditional market analysis and transforms them into a tradable asset class. Users can trade not only the tokens themselves but also the market sentiment for a specific token or sector.

This mechanism provides a new dimension for market analysis, allowing traders to trade based on market sentiment fluctuations and changes in attention, thereby creating new investment strategies. Through this innovation, Noise may change the price discovery mechanism of traditional markets, shifting trading focus not only around asset prices but expanding it to the game of "market mind," bringing a more efficient and transparent pricing system to the market.

Monad

On February 4, the parallel EVM network Monad hinted that the testnet will launch sometime this month, and here are the currently popular projects in its ecosystem.

aPriori

aPriori is Monad's native MEV-driven liquidity staking platform, aiming to optimize Monad's network performance and user experience by developing a new MEV and liquidity staking architecture. Currently, aPriori has raised a total of $10.7 million, and its team members come from the high-frequency trading sector, with experience at top companies like Jump Crypto, Flow Traders, and Coinbase.

aPriori has proposed a new MEVA design paradigm: probabilistic valuation. This solution uses a partially block-sized auction, allowing builders to construct the top of blocks from the packages submitted by searchers, while validators append the remaining transactions from the public mempool. This approach significantly reduces latency, maximizing alignment with Monad's performance.

Kuru

Kuru is a fully on-chain order book platform that completed a $2 million seed round financing in July last year with support from the Monad blockchain. Kuru has achieved high throughput and low transaction costs, enabling market makers to frequently update quotes without the burden of high fees and slow block times, thus providing better prices and lower slippage. Kuru's design optimizes the EVM environment, allowing users to create and cancel limit orders with lower fixed gas fees, thereby enhancing market liquidity and spread.

Kintsu

Kintsu is Monad's native liquidity staking protocol, aiming to address the liquidity issue in traditional PoS staking, providing users with a more flexible and valuable staking method that allows users to securely lock up their funds while fully utilizing their assets. It completed a $4 million seed round financing in July of last year.

NFT Series

The Monad ecosystem places a strong emphasis on NFT culture, and the following are some of the NFT series that have garnered community attention:

Lil Chogstar

A characteristic PFP NFT based on the Monad ecosystem, inspired by the Monad ecosystem mascot "Chog".

Monadverse

An eagerly anticipated NFT project on the Monad chain, with its core product being the Monanimals NFT series.

Monadians

A futuristic-style PFP NFT project initiated by Monad community members @barrybutterhand and @edenwagmi.

Spiky Nads

An early NFT project in the Monad ecosystem, built by @andlfthegreat, @jakxpixel, and @0xkaya_.

Story Protocol

On February 4th, Story Protocol released its whitepaper for The Story, with the mainnet set to launch soon. It has also initiated a new round of incentives on Binance. Below are some popular projects in the Story ecosystem.

PiperX

PiperX is the native DEX of the Story Protocol ecosystem.

Spotlight Protocol

Spotlight is a platform that combines AI, crypto, and meme culture, aiming to transform "story" into an economy. Through Story Protocol, Spotlight enables intellectual property (IP) to become a tradable, stakeable, and self-protecting asset, addressing core issues faced by traditional meme coins such as lack of branding and creator benefits.

As a decentralized layer for IP verification and liquidity, Spotlight not only provides a new economic incentive system for IP creators, Token creators, and the community but also builds a unique IP governance mechanism through market trust weight. In this way, Spotlight truly turns Meme culture into a valuable economic engine, driving the comprehensive development of IP on the blockchain.

Benjamin

The first DeFAI-focused AI Agent in the Story ecosystem, supported by the IP management and lending marketplace Unleash Protocol on Story.

Abstract

On January 27, the Layer 2 network Abstract Chain, designed for on-chain culture and communities, has launched its mainnet. The project was developed by Igloo Inc., the parent company of the NFT project Pudgy Penguins, which previously acquired the on-chain creator economy platform Frame. According to community feedback, Abstract currently values user activity, and different roles have various ways to participate in the mainnet ecosystem. Below are some popular projects in the Abstract ecosystem.

Roach Racing Club: A gamified trading race universe where players control crypto-related roaches and compete for rewards.

Moonshot: A Memecoin launchpad provided by DexScreener, where users can quickly conduct a fair coin launch for less than $2 and receive a free enhanced token listing.

Witty: A player-versus-player puzzle (PvZ) gaming platform where players create puzzle challenges, set rewards, invite others to participate, and earn cryptocurrency.

Multiplier: A platform focused on earning above-average returns in the meme and metaverse space.

Vibes TCG: A hybrid digital and physical trading card game featuring the officially licensed Pudgy Penguins IP, where players can collect, trade, and compete with Pudgy Penguins of unique abilities and rarity to build their dream card deck.

Myriad: A prediction platform where users can predict various events, including the Super Bowl, presidential elections, Memecoin market cap, and more, and earn rewards.

Alphabot: A Web3 decentralized lottery platform that helps users discover new projects, win allocations, and support their favorite creators.

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$COIN Joins S&P 500, but Coinbase Isn't Celebrating

On May 13, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that Coinbase would officially replace Discover Financial Services in the S&P 500 on May 19. While other companies like Block and MicroStrategy, closely tied to Bitcoin, were already part of the S&P 500, Coinbase became the first cryptocurrency exchange whose primary business is in the index. This also signifies that cryptocurrency is gradually moving from the fringes to the mainstream in the U.S.



On the day of the announcement, Coinbase's stock price surged by 23%, surpassing the $250 mark. However, just 3 days later, Coinbase was hit by two consecutive events: a hack where employees were bribed to steal customer data and a demand for a $20 million ransom, and an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) into the authenticity of its claim of having over 100 million "verified users" in its securities filings and marketing materials. These two events acted as mini-bombs, and at the time of writing, Coinbase's stock had already dropped by over 7.3%.


Coincidentally, Discover Financial Services, being replaced by Coinbase, can also be considered the "Coinbase" of the previous payment era. Discover is a U.S.-based digital banking and payment services company headquartered in Illinois, founded in 1960. Its payment network, Discover Network, is the fourth largest payment network apart from Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.


In April, after the approval of the acquisition of Discover by the sixth-largest U.S. bank, Capital One, this well-established digital banking company of over 60 years smoothly handed over its S&P 500 "seat" to this emerging cryptocurrency "bank." This unexpected coincidence also portrayed the handover between the new and old eras in Coinbase's entry into the S&P 500, resembling a relay race scene. However, this relay baton also brought Coinbase's accumulated "external troubles and internal strife" to a tipping point.


Side Effects of ETFs


Over the past decade, cryptocurrency exchanges have been the most stable "profit machines." They play a role in providing liquidity to the entire industry and rely on trading fees to sustain their operations. However, with the comprehensive rollout of ETF products in the U.S. market, this profit model is facing unprecedented challenges. As the leader in the "American stack," with over 80% of its business coming from the U.S., Coinbase is most affected by this.



Starting from the approval of Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs, traditional financial capital has significantly onboarded users and funds that originally belonged to exchanges in a more cost-effective, compliant, and transparent manner. The transaction fee revenue of cryptocurrency exchanges has started to decline, and this trend may further intensify in the coming months.


According to Coinbase's 2024 Q4 financial report, the platform's total trading revenue was $417 million, a 45% year-on-year decrease. The contribution of BTC and ETH's trading revenue dropped from 65% in the same period last year to less than 50%.


This decline is not a result of a decrease in market enthusiasm. In fact, since the approval of the Bitcoin ETF in January 2024, the inflow of BTC into the U.S. market has continued to reach new highs, with asset management giants like BlackRock and Fidelity rapidly expanding their management scale. Data shows that BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) alone has surpassed $17 billion in assets under management. As of mid-May 2025, the cumulative net inflow of 11 major institutional Bitcoin spot ETFs on the market has exceeded $41.5 billion, with a total net asset value of $1214.69 billion, accounting for approximately 5.91% of the total Bitcoin market capitalization.


Chart showing the trend of net outflows for Grayscale among the 11 institutions


Institutional investors and some retail investors are shifting towards ETF products, partly due to compliance and tax considerations. On one hand, ETFs have much lower trading costs compared to cryptocurrency exchanges. While Coinbase's spot trading fee rate varies annually in a tiered manner but averages around 1.49%, for example, the management fee for IBIT ETF is only 0.25%, and the majority of ETF institution fees fluctuate around 0.15% to 0.25%.



In other words, the more rational users are, the more likely they are to move from exchanges to ETF products, especially for investors aiming for long-term holdings.


According to multiple sources, several institutions, including VanEck and Grayscale, have submitted applications to the SEC for a Solana (SOL) ETF, with some institutions also planning to submit an XRP ETF proposal. Once approved, this may trigger a new round of fund migration. According to a report submitted by Coinbase to the SEC, as of April, the platform's trading revenue from XRP and Solana accounted for 18% and 10%, nearly one-third of the platform's fee revenue.



However, the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs passed in 2024 also reduced the fees for these two tokens on Coinbase from 30% and 15% to 26% and 10%, respectively. If the SOL and XRP ETFs are approved, it will further undermine the core fee revenue of exchanges like Coinbase.


The expansion of ETF products is gradually weakening the financial intermediary status of cryptocurrency exchanges. From their original roles as matchmakers and clearers to now gradually becoming mere "on-ramps and off-ramps" for funds, exchanges are seeing their marginal value squeezed by ETFs.


Robinhood Takes a Stand, Traditional Brokerages Join the Fray


On May 12, 2025, SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins gave a keynote speech at the Tokenization and Cryptocurrency Working Group roundtable. The theme of his speech revolved around "It is a new day at the SEC," where he indicated that the SEC would not approach enforcement and regulation the same way as before but would instead pave the way for cryptocurrency assets in the U.S. market.



With signs of cryptocurrency compliance such as the SEC's "NEW DAY" declaration, an increasing number of traditional brokerages are attempting to enter the cryptocurrency industry. One of the most representative cases is the well-known U.S. brokerage Robinhood, which began expanding its crypto business in 2018. By the time of its IPO in 2021, Robinhood's crypto business revenue accounted for over 50% of the company, with a significant boost from the Dogecoin "moonshot" promoted by Musk.


In Q1 2025 earnings report, Robinhood showcased strong growth, especially in revenue from cryptocurrency and options trading. Fueled by Trump's Memecoin, cryptocurrency-related revenue reached $250 million, nearly doubling year-over-year. Consequently, Robinhood Gold subscription users reached 3.5 million, a 90% increase from the previous year, with the rapid growth of Robinhood Gold providing the company with a stable source of income.



Meanwhile, RobinHood is actively pursuing acquisitions in the cryptocurrency space. In 2024, it announced a $2 billion acquisition of the long-standing European cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp. Additionally, Canada's largest cryptocurrency CEX, WonderFi, which recently went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange, also announced its integration with RobinHood Crypto. After obtaining virtual asset licenses in the UK, Canada, Singapore, and other markets, RobinHood has taken a proactive approach in the compliant cryptocurrency trading market.



Furthermore, an increasing number of brokerage firms are exploring the same path. Futu Securities, Tiger Brokers, and others are also dipping their toes into cryptocurrency trading, with some having applied for or obtained the VA license from the Hong Kong SFC. Although their user bases are currently small, traditional brokerages have a natural advantage in user trust, regulatory licenses, and low fee structures. This could pose a threat to native cryptocurrency platforms in the future.



User Data Breach: Is Coinbase Still Secure?


In April 2025, security researchers discovered that some Coinbase user data was leaked on the dark web. While the platform initially responded by attributing it to a "technical misinformation," it still raised concerns among users regarding its security and privacy protection. Just two days before Dow Jones Indexes announced Coinbase's addition to the S&P 500 Index, on May 11, 2025, Coinbase received an email from an unknown threat actor claiming to have obtained customer account information and internal documents, demanding a $20 million ransom to keep the data private. Subsequent investigations confirmed the data breach.


Cybercriminals obtained the data by bribing overseas customer service agents and support staff, mainly in "non-U.S. regions such as India." These agents abused their access to Coinbase's internal customer support system and stole customer data. As early as February this year, blockchain detective ZachXBT revealed on X platform that between December 2024 and January 2025, Coinbase users lost over $65 million to social engineering scams, with the actual amount potentially higher.


Among the victims was a well-known figure, 67-year-old Ed Suman, an established artist in the art world for nearly two decades, having been involved in the creation of artworks such as Jeff Koons' "Balloon Dog" sculpture. Earlier this year, he fell victim to an impersonation scam involving fake Coinbase customer support, resulting in a loss of over $2 million in cryptocurrency. ZachXBT critiqued Coinbase for its inadequate handling of such scams, noting that other major exchanges have not faced similar issues and recommending Coinbase to enhance its security measures.


Amidst a series of ongoing social engineering incidents, although there has not been any impact on user assets at the technical level so far, it has raised concerns among many retail and institutional investors. Especially institutions holding massive assets on Coinbase. Just considering the U.S. BTC ETF institutions, as of mid-May 2025, they collectively hold nearly 840,000 BTC, and 75% of these are custodied by Coinbase. If we price BTC at $100,000, this amount reaches a staggering $63 billion, which is equivalent to the nominal GDP of two Iceland in the year 2024.


Visualization: ChatGPT, Source: Farside


In addition, Coinbase Custody also serves over 300 institutional clients, including hedge funds, family offices, pension funds, and endowments. As of the Q1 2025 financial report, Coinbase's total assets under management (including institutional and retail clients) reached $404 billion. The specific amount of institutional custodied assets was not explicitly disclosed in the latest report, but it should still be over 50% based on the Q4 2024 report.


Visualization: ChatGPT


Once this security barrier is breached, not only could the rate of user attrition far exceed expectations, but more importantly, institutional trust in it would undermine the foundation of its business. Therefore, after a hacking event, Coinbase's stock price plummeted significantly.


CEXs are All in Self-Rescue Mode


Facing a decline in spot trading fee revenue, Coinbase is also accelerating its transformation, attempting to find growth opportunities in derivatives and emerging assets. Coinbase acquired a stake in the options platform Deribit at the end of 2024 and announced the official launch of perpetual contract products in 2025. This acquisition fills in Coinbase's gap in options trading and its relatively small global market share.



Deribit has a strong presence in non-U.S. markets, especially in Asia and Europe. The acquisition has enabled Coinbase to gain a dominant position in bitcoin and ethereum options trading on Deribit, accounting for approximately 80% of the global options trading volume, with daily trading volume remaining above $2 billion.


Meanwhile, 80-90% of Deribit's customer base consists of institutional investors, with their professionalism and liquidity in the Bitcoin and Ethereum options market highly favored by institutions. Coinbase's compliance advantage, coupled with its already robust institutional ecosystem, makes it even more suitable. By using institutions as an entry point, it can face the squeeze from giants like Binance and OKX in the derivatives market.



Facing a similar dilemma is Kraken, which is attempting to replicate Binance Futures' model in non-U.S. markets. Since the derivatives market relies more on professional users, fee rates are relatively higher and stickiness is stronger, making it a significant source of revenue for exchanges. In the first half of 2025, Kraken completed the acquisition of TradeStation Crypto and a futures exchange, aiming to build a complete derivatives trading ecosystem to hedge the risk of declining spot transaction fee income.


With the surge of Memecoin in 2024, Binance, OKX, and various CEX platforms began massively listing small-market-cap, highly volatile tokens to activate active trading users. Due to the wealth effect and trading activity of Memecoins, Coinbase was also forced to join the battle, successively listing popular tokens from the Solana ecosystem such as BOOK OF MEME and Dogwifhat. Although these coins are controversial, they are frequently traded, with fee rates several times higher than mainstream coins, serving as a "blood-boosting" method for spot trading.


However, due to its status as a publicly traded company, this practice is a riskier endeavor for Coinbase. Even in the current crypto-friendly environment, the SEC is still investigating whether tokens like SOL, ADA, and SAND constitute securities.


In addition to the forced transformation strategies carried out by the aforementioned CEXs, they are also starting to lay out RWAs and the most talked-about stablecoin payment fields, such as the PYUSD launched through a collaboration between Coinbase and Paypal, Coinbase's support for the Euro stablecoin EURC by Circle that complies with EU MiCA regulatory requirements, or the USD1 launched through a collaboration between Binance and WIFL. In the increasingly crowded trading field, many CEXs have shifted their focus from just the trading market to the application field.


The golden age of transaction fees has quietly ended, and the second half of the crypto exchange platform game has silently begun.


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