Fifteen investors share crypto's highest-potential projects featuring Cosmos, Toucan, Farcaster, Maple Finance, Axelar, and many more.

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If you only have a couple of minutes to spare, here's what investors, operators, and founders should know about the most exciting crypto trends right now.

• Cosmos picks up momentum. Though it receives much less attention than other ecosystems, investors see opportunities in Cosmos. “The internet of blockchains” offers tooling to launch interoperable blockchains and may be more decentralized, resilient, and customizable than larger alternatives. Trading platform dYdX’s move from Ethereum to Cosmos indicates the latter’s advantages.
• Institutional lending takes off. Individuals may have adopted DeFi’s first lending products, but recent offerings target corporate customers. Projects like Maple Finance provide institutional-grade lending pools with the necessary information and compliance safeguards.
• Rethinking user authentication. Using web3 applications remains difficult. Consumers sign in with crypto wallets that don’t link to other forms of identity. Not only does that complicate consumer usage, it impedes developers from speaking with their customers. Notifi and Portabl are tackling the issue from different angles.
• Crypto breaches need addressing. This year has demonstrated crypto’s vulnerabilities, featuring rampant fraud, outages, and breaches. Investors are aware of the space’s failings and are backing projects seeking to improve the status quo. Blowfish, which makes complicated transactions readable, is one example.
• Web3’s social moment may be coming. For some time, prognosticators have suggested crypto will disrupt social media. So far, there has been little to bolster such a prediction. That may be changing. Investors see promise in projects like Farcaster, along with other tailwinds.

No sector moves at the pace of crypto. Nor does any other space match its volatility. Projects that seem invulnerable one month are beaten down the next. Technologies that appear underbaked one moment can suddenly flourish.

Because of these dynamics, predicting the sector’s progress is tricky, requiring significant knowledge, immaculate timing, and no little boldness. Last year, The Generalist kicked off a series designed to give our readers a headstart in spotting the path ahead. “What to Watch in Crypto” asks some of the sharpest investors in the world what they think is worth keeping an eye on over the next six months. Previous contributors highlighted Solana, Ceramic, THORchain, Uniswap, Helium, and others before meaningful momentum. They also shared provocative thoughts on wallets, collateralizing NFTs, and crypto’s multi-chain future.

It is an apposite time for our third edition. In a month, Ethereum is expected to transition to a more energy-efficient “proof of stake” consensus mechanism – an event referred to as “the merge.” If successful, it will represent a meaningful and impactful moment in crypto’s history. Already, positive advance tests have breathed life into the downtrodden markets, improving the price of ether by 66% over the last thirty days. Further down the food chain, entrepreneurial interest in crypto continues, with new projects attracting talent and funding.

Perhaps because of those dynamics, I think today’s entry is our best. It features fifteen ideas from many of the sector’s most thoughtful voices spanning social media, lending, privacy, NFTs, and beyond. If you’d like to read our earlier editions, you can find Part 1 and Part 2 here.

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