Big crypto trends we could observe in the future

Hello everyone! While Bitcoin and Ethereum always remain the safest choice when it comes to investing in crypto, hundreds of new protocols are developed every day and some of them are really interesting to study. So I've decided to write a list of trends I think will continue to grow and will attract more attention in the future.

- DEXs: This is an easy one, as decentralized exchanges continued to attract a lot of funds even during a prolonged bear market. According to Defi Llama, Uniswap generated 33 million $ in fees in the last month, which is a huge sum considering that volumes are generally low during summer and that overall prices moved sideways. In particular, I think we will see an even bigger performance by DEXs that allow you to trade derivatives, like GMX or DYDX. For example, GMX was born just a year ago and has already surpassed many older DEXs in terms of trading volumes and generated fees (this month GMX generated 5x the fees of Sushiswap for example).

- Liquid Staking and Liquid Staking Derivatives: With the Shanghai update, Ethereum staking became much easier and safer. Consequentially, platforms like Lido or Rocket Pool exponentially increased their TVL. Lido went from 5 billion $ of TVL in January 2023 to the current 14 billion. Despite Lido being the market leader though, I personally prefer Rocket Pool as it is much more decentralized. Liquid Staking Derivates will also attract more attention, as many protocols are now experimenting with ways to further utilize your staked ETH (Pendle Finance seems to be the main example).

- Real-World Assets: We often read about the idea of tokenizing everything, thus creating a virtual economy for real-world assets like houses, lands or bonds. I think this sector has a lot of potential but also needs time to develop properly. Currently, crypto is not properly regulated and we are miles away from having rules about this kind of protocol specifically. Interesting platforms to study are for example Ondo Finance, Spark and XDC. These allow you to hold a stablecoin that passively generates yield due to the peg with US treasury bonds. Further time is needed to establish the safety and value of these protocols but the idea is surely fascinating.

Do you currently use any of these protocols? Which trends do you think will be more relevant in the future?

Thank you for your answers!