Most Popular Crypto Narratives

For the purpose of our research, we took 7 dominant narratives of 2023-2024:

• Crypto AI. Artificial intelligence and crypto are believed to have the best synergy, as decentralised AI can open up new horizons of efficiency and use.

• Meme coins. Meme coins show incredible performance and often manage to attract investors traders due to their bold and memorable branding. However, they are probably the most risky type of cryptos.

• Real World Assets. RWA is more about sustainable moderate gains, which is something TradFi guys like. Tokenisation is definitely going to play an important role in the future, that's why RWA projects have shown impressive performance over the past year.

• DeFi. Decentralised finance is now an integral part of crypto. That's why DeFi is always on trend.

• Layer 2. L2 scaling solutions for Ethereum open up new possibilities for users. That's why Layer 2 blockchains are so popular.

• Play to Earn. It basically represents GameFi, a top trend of the previous bull run, but now many new projects are emerging that represent a better version, ready for mass adoption.

• DePIN. Decentralised physical infrastructure networks are complex to understand for the average user, but the fact is that coins like AR have shown really nice performance over the past year. This narrative has many similarities to AI, but obviously less hyped.

We didn't include some other narratives like Restaking or SocialFi because there are only a few projects that have already released a token. Also, Google Trends data on these topics shows low interest, meaning that these narratives are of interest to non-crypto users. On the other hand, layer 1 blockchains are represented by a wide range of coins that emerged years ago, and many of them are already dead. Including them into analysis wouldn't be representative of our research.

Which Narrative Is The Most Popular?

We used Google Trends data over the last 12 months to find out which narrative is generating the most interest. This is particularly relevant to the mass adoption of crypto by non-web3 users. We analysed 7 trending narratives and here's what we found.

As you can see from the graph above, DeFi is the most popular narrative on Google. DeFi is now one of the core parts of web3, and it deserves high popularity, even if it's not a newborn narrative.

As mentioned in our previous article, RWA is probably the strongest narrative of this cycle, thanks to adoption by TradFi firms, including BlackRock. In particular, tokenisation is here to stay for a very long time and will outlive many of the crypto projects that exist today.

Layer 2 is showing surprisingly strong interest on Google, marking the significance of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Speaking of meme coins, AI and Play to Earn (GameFi), they showed surprisingly low performance compared to the other narratives. However, when it comes to token price gains, the picture is different. 

DePIN turns out to be the least popular narrative, but that's no surprise: the concept is quite difficult for the average person to understand.

Does It Correlate With Returns? 

The short answer is: not really. As we can see, Play to Earn is the best performer among the narratives mentioned, thanks to the outstanding gains of a few coins (which, from a certain point of view, makes the selection less representative). AI takes second place, with the majority of coins trading in the green zone over the past year. 

Surprisingly, DePIN is in third place, followed by RWA, meme coins (while some meme coins are skyrocketing, others are plummeting, so the average gains aren't that impressive as you may expect), and DeFi. Layer 2 projects showed quite modest performance, despite the high popularity of the query on Google.

The Bottom Line

Trends and narratives play a crucial role in crypto. That's why it's important to choose projects that fit well into the current narrative landscape. While the popularity of the narrative is not always related to the performance of the group of projects, it definitely influences the market and affects the longevity of the narrative.