Alpha Hunter: A review of the latest 5 potential projects and token trends

The rate of new token issuance has slowed down, but I believe it will speed up soon, as the market is slowly recovering.

Many projects can’t delay any longer.

These projects will test the waters and pave the way for others. In this post, I want to highlight the protocols that frequently appear in my X feed. However, it seems that not everyone is familiar with what they do.

I once wrote a similar blog post about the top 7 projects a year ago, and plan to publish these more frequently, so feel free to subscribe.

So if you are one of those followers on X who are waiting for hyped projects to launch tokens and airdrops (but don’t really understand what they do), this post is for you.

Initia - Multichain Eden

Initia is the first sale conducted by Cobie’s Echonomist group on its Echo fundraising platform.

The team at Cobie has only conducted three project funding rounds, which may make the situation bullish. The mainnet and airdrop should be live soon (although it seems to be delayed until April).

If there is one word you should know about Initia, it is “interwoven”. 『Interwoven.』

Initia is L1 that integrates L2 to create a modular network of application chains.

It sounds like Ethereum, but Initia solves the problem that ETH maxis don’t like about Ethereum.

Unlike Ethereum L2, which operates in isolation, Initia fuses Layer 1 with Layer 2 to create an intertwined ecosystem. They call these L2s Minitias. Also similar to Avalanche subnets (recently renamed L1).

Unlike Ethereum but similar to Avalanche, OPinit Stack supports EVM, MoveVM, and WasmVM. So developers can use whatever language they feel comfortable with.

This may make ETH bulls salivate. Initia’s Enshrined liquidity allows INIT tokens or approved INIT-X LP tokens (paired with INIT) to be staked alone to earn rewards in the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) mechanism.

Fixed liquidity is a good representation of Ponzi tokenomics, forcing 50% or more of INIT to be used as a pairing token for all ecosystem tokens. These LP tokens must be whitelisted by governance.

Like Berachain, Initia has a native dex: InitiaDEX on L1 built with the Move programming language. It is the liquidity hub for the Omnitia ecosystem, and from what I understand, most liquidity flows through InitiaDEX (and through the mandatory INIA pool) even between L2s.

There are more features to Initia, such as native bridging (confusingly named Minitswap) and a vested interest program (aggregators are rewarded for creating applications and new use cases for INIT), but the above 4 features stand out to me.

Initia really takes what Ethereum natives want for Ethereum and puts it into one product, making it an intertwined ecosystem.

Tokens & Fundraising

Tokenomics is not fully launched yet. Initia only shared four details about it:

50% of the supply is for VIP and Enshrined Liquidity

No unlocked staking rewards for insiders

Community round discount of about 30%.

15% for investors.

We can expect airdrops, as Initia co-founder Zon said, "Vesting unlock is a gift. It prevents you from giving up too early and forces you to believe."

In September 2024, Zon also shared with the Block Initia's last round of Series A financing, raising $14 million from companies such as Theory Ventures, Delphi Ventures and Hack VC, with a FDV of $350 million.

The testnet is incentivized, so you are welcome to visit the official testnet website, get testnet tokens and play a role in its ecosystem. All information can be found on the testnet page here.

As usual, I don't expect much from the testnet activities.

Overall, the ecosystem is well built. The key question remains: Will builders and users choose to participate?

Fogo — The Fastest L1 Blockchain

Fogo, another project that held a token sale in Cobie’s own Echo Group, raised $8 million at a $100 million valuation.

Fogo uses Firedancer, a highly optimized Solana validator client created by Jump Crypto, as the only execution client on the network.

It’s not even live on Solana yet. Solana will soon benefit from the Firedancer client, but not all validators can switch to it right away. This means the network speed is limited by the slowest node.

As Fogo co-founder Doug Colkitt put it, “It’s like owning a Ferrari but driving it in New York City traffic.”

Under optimal conditions, their theoretical speed is up to 1 million transactions per second with a block time of 20 milliseconds, but Fogo’s live developer network has reached about 54,000 TPS. By comparison, Solana currently has a theoretical limit of 65k TPS, but is currently hitting 4.3k.

The MegaETH testnet pushes 20k TPS with a 10ms block time.

By comparison, the TradFi system can handle over 100,000 operations per second with sub-second latency.

The Fogo team believes that decentralized networks must match institutional-grade use cases like high-frequency trading and instant payments.

It runs the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), which means developers can easily migrate Solana applications, tools, and infrastructure to Fogo without making any changes. Expect a series of forks with new shiny tokens (Jupiter, Kamino, Pumpfun, etc.).

Apparently, not everyone in the Solana ecosystem is happy about this.

Notably, Fogo’s contributors include members of Douro Labs, the team behind the Pyth oracle network, which itself is closely associated with Jump Crypto.

Other notable features:

Multi-Local Consensus (“Follow the Sun”): Fogo groups validators into geographic “regions” that work semi-independently. Control rotates to the next region periodically, preventing any single location from dominating. This means consensus can be reached faster during normal operation because messages don’t always have to travel across the entire planet. You can read more about it here.

It will initially have a select group of validators (20-50) at launch.

Fee abstraction: Transaction fees can be paid in any token.

Tokens & Fundraising

Fogo has raised around $5.5 million in a seed round led by Distributed Global, with participation from CMS Holdings. This is the top of the $8 million round raised by Echo Group.

Devnet is due to go live in late 2024, testnet will follow soon, and mainnet will launch in mid-2025. Not much information is available about the token or airdrop at this time.

Succinct — Software to Prove the World

“Cryptocurrencies have failed in their mission.

We were promised transparent, verifiable, trustless global coordination systems. Instead, we got bridge hacks, multi-signature L2s without fraud proofs, and committees of 21 validators controlling billions of dollars.”

This is the main problem Succinct is solving.

"ZK proofs are one of the most critical technologies for blockchain scaling, interoperability, and privacy, but are too complex for most developers today."

It's hard to get excited about ZK proofs right now, but Succinct caught my attention with its great marketing campaign and testnet/website dashboard as a MacOS interface.

You can play games and earn points.

Anyway. The problem we face now is:

Each project has to build its own proof system (e.g. zkSync and Scroll use zero-knowledge to scale, but the infrastructure is fragmented.)

Many rely on centralized providers to generate proofs.

This is not only costly, but also slows down innovation.

As a result, concise ZKPs (a technique for cryptographically proving authenticity without leaking data) are difficult to implement due to fragmented infrastructure and high costs.

Instead of every project reinventing the wheel, Succinct provides a shared proof generation marketplace. Developers can focus on building applications (rollups, bridges, oracles) while outsourcing proof creation to the network.

But the use cases are more diverse, such as private voting systems or anonymous transactions. Or you can prove that you have money in your wallet, but not actually show how much money.

This is a technical project, but it may become the glue that decentralizes and protects the most fragile crypto projects.

Their testnet "Level 1: Trust Crisis" was launched two months ago. You can earn stars by generating zero-knowledge proofs. You need a $10 USDC deposit to cover the proof generation cost. But to get an invite code, you need to farm it on platforms such as X, Discord, etc.

I think this will be standard for airdrops, but details about the token are not public yet.

Succinct raised $55 million, led by Paradigm, and joined by Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Geometry and many other companies.

When the mainnet is launched, the TGE is expected to come soon.

Resolv - A truly effective Delta neutral stablecoin

Now many people believe that the next round of altcoins will be driven by increased institutional adoption, especially stablecoins.

The problem is that the main beneficiaries of stablecoin adoption appear to be institutions and stablecoin issuers, while retail investors may only benefit a little.

I’ve written a few thoughts on protocols that could benefit from stablecoin adoption, but I’d like to add one here – Resolv.

If you know how Ethena works, you already have a good basic understanding of Resolv.

The core idea is the same for both – using crypto collateral plus a short-term perpetual hedge to create a stablecoin. However, Resolv’s architecture and approach differ:

First, the dual-token model vs. the single-token model: Ethena has a single-token model (USDe) where all risk and reward flows to stablecoin holders and is managed behind the scenes by the protocol’s reserves.

Resolv uses a dual-token model (USR + RLP) that explicitly isolates risk into separate tokens.

USR: Like USDe, USR hedges the ETH price by shorting futures, using a delta-neutral strategy to maintain its peg. You can stake USR to earn yield, converting to stUSR, similar to a savings account.

RLP acts as insurance for USR, absorbing losses to keep USR stable (such as when funding rates are negative). RLP holders take on risk to gain higher returns. The value of RLP fluctuates with the performance of the protocol, acting as a buffer: it grows with profits and shrinks with losses.

This setup allows risk-tolerant users to earn more while protecting stablecoin users from market risks. As of this writing, the APR for USR is 4.3% and RLP is 6.7%.

While not too high, the airdropped points farming has earned Resolv a TVL of $636.9 million. Not bad.

Second, Resolv's philosophy is to remain 100% crypto-backed. All collateral is ETH (BTC support has just been announced), and there is no RWA involved.

Initially, Ethena also only supported cryptocurrencies, but later launched a secondary stablecoin USDtb, which is 90% backed by BlackRock's tokenized money market fund (BUIDL).

For Resolv, USDtb is somewhat of an insurance token similar to USR, designed to stabilize USDe during bear markets by providing traditional asset yields when crypto yields fall.

So you could say Resolv is more "crypto-native" and decentralized in spirit, although Ethena's strategy could gain additional stability by introducing centralized assets.

Tokens & Fundraising

Resolv has not officially announced funding details, but backers include Delphi Labs, Daedalus, and No Limit Holdings. They are preparing to launch community funding through Legion soon.

Since September 2024, Resolv has been running a points program. You can still join by depositing stablecoins and earning points.

After depositing, you can maximize your points through Pendle pools or other strategies.

The token $RESOLV is expected to be launched in early 2025.

Snapchain - Probably the largest consumer L1

My biggest concern is whether Fogo, Initia and other chains being launched will be adopted? What killer apps are being launched on them. As Kyle said:

“General purpose blockchains will die. Each blockchain needs a specific use case and they will be defined by what is built on them”

This is where L1 Snapchain built for Farcaster social network comes in.

Snapchain is necessary because decentralized social networks have trouble staying in sync and providing real-time updates as they scale. Lens will use zkSync technology, but Farcaster is developing its own.

“For example, Twitter has 200 million users per day and processes 10,000 messages per second, the state of data could grow by 1TB - 10TB per day.”

Farcaster’s current system works at a small scale, but breaks down as users and nodes grow. Snapchain will fix that in a decentralized way.

At launch, it should support 9k+ TPS, thus supporting 2 million daily users (currently DAU is around 50k).

I won’t go into too much technical details, but there are two exciting parts:

First, there’s deleting data (pruning), haha. On a blockchain, most data needs to be kept forever, but what if you post a meme and immediately regret it? It has to be gone! Forever.

So on Snapchain, old data (posts, likes, follows) can be deleted once it’s no longer needed.

This is important because users pay a $2 or $3 fee per year to get 500 tx/hour and a storage limit of around 10,000 tx.

So if you delete old transactions, you open up storage space for new transactions (or you pay more fees).

The second cool part is sharding. Remember, Ethereum considered sharding before it moved to layer 2 scaling.

Imagine putting all social media transactions (likes, posts, etc.) on-chain. There are millions of transactions per day. If every node had to store and process everything, it would lag. Every full node needs to process every transaction, even if it doesn't affect them. This is fine for money and smart contracts, but it doesn't scale well for real-time social.

Snapchain solves this by making each user completely independent (when you sign up on Farcaster, you get an ID number, and if you have the lowest ID number, it's just bragging rights). Your post won't affect my account.

So Snapchain spreads users across multiple shards (which is inspired by the Near model, by the way). Each shard only handles its users. This means more users = more shards = higher throughput.

To keep everything in sync, there's one final layer: the main chain that ties the shards together and publishes global blocks.

Ethereum can't do this easily. Its transactions rely on shared state - smart contracts, tokens, balances. This makes account-level sharding difficult.

Snapchain works because social actions are simple. They only affect the sender.

There is more to it, which you can read here, but I am bullish on Farcaster and Snapchain because it is building the use case first and then adding blockchain to it.

It worked well for Hyperliquid, and even with 50k DAU and 900k total users, Farcaster is still one of the top consumer apps.

Tokens & Funding

TLDR: Genesis block is live, mainnet expected to be live on April 15, 2025. So soon.

I believe that after Snapchain is live and Farcaster is ready to scale, Coinbase x Farcaster will start announcing integrations with Coinbase Wallet.

That is a really big deal. Social media info on Coinbase Wallet? I am serious.

I am not sure when the token will be live though, the team has been keeping quiet about it, but some rumors and funding announcements could mean it is coming. Snapchain itself is a technology component, not a separate entity raising funds. Snapchain’s development is funded by Merkle Manufactory, the company that built the Farcaster protocol.

Most notably, in May 2024, they announced a $150M funding round led by Paradigm, with participation from other major investors like a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, USV, Variant, and Standard Crypto.

Bonus 2 projects for you: Eclipse and Atlas

I originally planned to write about the 7 major TGEs and protocols, but this post got too long. I always get carried away (often deleting 30% of the content before posting!)

Eclipse and Atlas are two other SVM (Solana VM) chains on Fogo.

Eclipse is an Ethereum L2, but it uses SVM instead of EVM, and uses Celestia for DA. It’s live, but has only $57M in total locked value. As Kyle (tweet above) said, this shows how hard it is to differentiate from other general purpose chains.

SVM alone is not enough to differentiate other L2s.

The token seems to be confirmed as ticker ES:

E - Ethereum

S - Solana

Atlas is another L2 SVM based on Ethereum, but built for on-chain order books, margin systems, and high-frequency trading. So it needs speed! Testnet is live.

Because I know you want to get back to surfing on X, here’s some more information on Eclipse and Atlas from Blockworks.