We’re almost a quarter of the way through 2024, and it has become increasingly clear that it’s going to be a big year for the crypto industry. With the recent approval of the first Bitcoin Exchange Traded Funds in the U.S., the crypto markets have been running rampant. The world’s top crypto asset, BTC, is up more than 63% as of March 16, recently hitting a new all-time high of $73,750.07, according to CoinMarketCap. 

Bitcoin’s explosive gains have acted as a propellant for the rest of the crypto sector, and almost every digital asset has made similar increases over the course of the year. But this bull run is being driven by much more than just institutional investors, with strong narratives around tokenized real-world assets, blockchain security, crypto payments and decentralized finance all adding to the enthusiasm. 

The 2024 crypto bull run could well be the one that finally transforms the world of finance, and so it’s a prudent time to take a look at some of the most intriguing projects looking to do exactly that.

Ambire Wallet

Ambire Wallet isn’t a newer wallet on the scene, but it’s definitely one of the best thanks to its advanced features such as transaction batching, multisig security, stablecoin fee payments and simple sign-in capabilities, making life advantageous for its users. 

It was founded in 2021 by the Estonian creators of the blockchain-focused AdEx Network, and is designed to deliver a user-friendly experience with advanced functionality and strong security. It’s an approach that makes Ambire one of the most versatile wallets around, catering to both newcomers and experienced crypto natives. It was the first wallet in the industry to offer gas fee savings through its Gas Tank, which batches transactions together to lower gas costs. It was also the first to incorporate account abstraction techniques that allow users to sign-up with a traditional email and password, meaning no ugly seed phrases. 

Ambire Wallet can be described as a secure, universal wallet that’s easy-to-understand. Yet, it also provides advanced DeFi capabilities including an integrated token bridge for cross-chain swaps, earn and swap functionality, built-in staking, a dApp catalog and more. It supports more than 10 EVM-compatible chains and is constantly adding more. 

Users can download Ambire Wallet on Android and iOS devices, or access it through its Web-based application. There are also plans for a browser extension to launch in the not-too-distant future, which will complete the product lineup. 

MANTRA Chain

A blockchain built especially for tokenized real-world assets or RWAs, MANTRA Chain aims to transform the world of investing and bring billions of dollars’ of physical assets on-chain. 

RWAs are tokenized versions of basically everything, including real estate, foreign exchange, stocks and shares, commodities, invoices, debts, fine art, bottles of wine and basically anything someone might consider investing in. The advantages of RWAs include fractional ownership – thousands of people can be co-owners of a house – meaning increased accessibility and more liquidity. They also lower the costs of transactions by eliminating the middleman. 

MANTRA Chain is a fully-complaint blockchain network that wants to tokenize every financial market, and it’s doing so with a protocol that’s said to be compliant by design. It also offers tools for developers to easily tokenize any kind of asset. 

Its end game is to make investing more accessible and its focus on compliance is a big part of that, with transaction monitoring integrated as a basic primitive within its blockchain infrastructure. This ensures that any RWA hosted on MANTRA will be compliant with AML regulations. Moreover, developers can take advantage of decentralized identities, or DIDs, to ensure their users are KYC-compliant in a privacy-preserving way. Users simply pass KYC once using a third-party and receive a soulbound NFT they can use to prove their identity with any dApp. 

This year is shaping up to be a momentous one for MANTRA, as it recently closed on an $11 million funding round to make good on its promises. It has just launched its incentivized testnet, which will essentially serve as a trial run for its infrastructure. 

Ithaca

Ithaca is an intriguing DeFi project that’s working on the creation of a non-custodial and composable options trading protocol, in order to provide users with a permissionless and cross-chain infrastructure platform to optimize risk sharing in the options market. 

The protocol’s offerings include its flagship options trading protocol, a collateral optimization engine and an algorithmic market maker, and it is also planning to launch additional capabilities, such as a margin lending and liquidation mechanism. Decentralized governance is also on its roadmap. 

This may sound confusing to non-DeFi natives, but Ithaca is extremely ambitious, aiming to bring more options trading on-chain while meeting the industry’s rising demand for structured trading products. It has launched its testnet on Arbitrum, the Ethereum Layer-2, and relies on its AMM model to bootstrap liquidity across markets.  

Its founders say they want to support institutional-scale options trading volumes on blockchain-based exchange platforms, believing there’s a big demand for this due to the efficiencies provided by decentralized platforms. It’s doing this by fragmenting options contracts into various building blocks. Its infrastructure is fully permissionless, and paves the way for aggregated liquidity across markets, enabling risk transfer to be shared across various assets. 

Ithaca’s team has raised $2.5 million in support of this goal from investors including Cumberland / Wintermute Leads, Room40, Ghaf Capital, Andrew Keys, the co-founder and managing partner at DARMA Capital, and Georgios Vlachos, co-founder of Axelar. 

Ithaca recently launched an incentive-compatible reward system and is kicking into gear at a time when the DeFi markets are accelerating significantly. According to DappRadar, DeFi’s total value locked or TVL recently surged past the $100 billion mark, up from a low of just $38.4 billion in October 2023. 

Slash Finance

Crypto payments are a viable thing both online and in physical stores and we have startups like Slash Fintech to thank for it. The company is one of Japan’s top crypto payment service providers, taking advantage of the popularity of cashless purchases in that country. 

The company’s main product is Slash Payments, which supports an astounding 1,400 cryptocurrencies in its app. It offers an API to Web3 services and e-commerce sites, as well as QR code payments for brick-and-mortar stores, plus a convenient payments app for consumers. 

It can be thought of as a crypto version of something like Stripe or Paypal, and it provides significant advantages with low fees of between 0%-2% for consumers, and zero fees for merchants. With Slash, the merchant will receive payment in a stablecoin such as Tether, USDC or DAI, yet the consumer can pay in almost any cryptocurrency they desire. The asset swap is performed under the hood, using a network of DEX platforms to find the most advantageous rate each time, and the transactions are processed almost instantaneously. 

Slash has made exciting progress since launching its mainnet in August 2022, raising $1.5 million in funding in October of that year, and forging an alliance with SoftBank Payment Service and Zaif in March 2023. Other developments include partnerships with JPYC and Mantle Network. Moreover, it has processed more than $13.5 million in transactions since the beginning of the year, and boasts over 3,000 merchants signed up to its network. 

More recently, Slash announced that it now supports the blockchain gaming-focused blockchain Oaysys, which is one of the most popular Japanese blockchain platforms. The company has also been selected as a participant in the Uniswap-Arbitrum Grant Program, which is designed to foster growth and advance projects that build exclusively within the Uniswap-Arbitrum ecosystem. As part of that program, Slash will receive a grant of 10,000 ARB in order to promote business development in Asian markets. 

Slash is clearly emerging as the flag-bearer of crypto payment services in Japan and one of the most popular payment apps of any type in that country. 

Tidepay

Tidepay is making strides in the customer reward space, helping brands to offer greater value to their most loyal customers in the shape of tokenized rewards. 

Traditionally, customer loyalty programs have always been fairly basic, with consumers having very limited options to redeem the points they earn via their purchases. That’s no longer the case with Tidepay, as it gives brands the opportunity to offer blockchain-based rewards that can be redeemed for numerous products, services, experiences and more. As an example, brands can partner with other companies to offer multiple different products and services besides their own. 

The popular alcoholic drinks brand ATH Vodka is one of the most prominent brands using Tidepay. It has leveraged Tidepay’s infrastructure to create its own digital asset, the ATH token, which is distributed to customers when they buy one of its products. Customers simply download the ATH Rewards app, which gives them a digital wallet for storing their ATH tokens, as well as a catalog of various products and services that they can be spent on, not limited to its own alcoholic beverages. In addition, customers can also take their ATH tokens to a cryptocurrency and swap them for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, or simply gift them to a friend. 

Tidepay provides all of the infrastructure companies need to build a loyalty program such as this, making it simple for any brand to create a similar rewards app. In this way, it enables brands to devise far more rewarding and valuable loyalty programs for their customers.

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