Decentralised finance, layer-2 platforms, and blockchain games have trailed behind the current memecoin fever and newly developing sectors.

The cryptocurrency industry's most lucrative segments for the first half of 2024 have been identified, with newly emerging and memecoin-focused industries taking the majority of earnings.

Memes, with their astounding 1,834% returns since 2024's beginning, have beaten the competition, according to data from BitEye, CoinGecko, and Wu Blockchain.

The real-world asset tokenization industry came in second, giving investors a 214% return. Blockchain initiatives centred around artificial intelligence generated a robust 72% return, whereas decentralised physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) yielded a 59% return.

staples of digital assets Bitcoin kept up its strong performance, regaining almost 45% and ETH showing year-to-date gains of 50%.

Furthermore, layer-1 platforms yielded an average return of 43%, while industries such as decentralised banking and gaming underperformed the market but yet managed to post respectable returns of 3% and 19%, respectively. But the layer-2 industry saw a significant downturn, with average total losses of almost 41%.

Memecoin frenzy

Part of the reason for memecoins' explosive growth is the Solana network. On the Solana blockchain alone, 541,000 new token projects were created in May.

To introduce their memecoins, celebrities and internet influencers such as musician Lil Pump, Iggy Azalea, and Andrew Tate flocked to the network. Insider trading allegations have been made against numerous of these projects.

The network has been dubbed the MacOS of blockchain by Pantera Capital, thanks to Solana's user-friendly features and architecture that make token and smart contract development easier.

Tokenization of real-world assets

The growing real-world asset tokenization market, which has drawn interest from banks and institutional investors, must be included in any industry research.

Real-world asset tokenization, which is widely regarded as the next frontier for digital assets, has the potential to tokenize $874 trillion in value when all investment funds, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and even real estate go onto blockchain.

Initiatives such as Chainlink are making progress in linking the world's assets to the blockchain, and new collaborations are emphasising the distributed ledger technology-based digitalization of wealth.