AI, RWA: Two token classes to watch next after meme coin and staking market drive rally

• Crypto markets rallied on the back of DeFi and NFT narratives in 2022 before recent meme coin and staking mania.
• The focus is expected to change soon as Santiment identifies rising crowd interest for AI and RWA tokens.
• AVAX, LINK, ICP, FET and AGIX are possible candidates for expected rallies amid changing climate of trader interest.

Cryptocurrency markets are known to be driven by different themes that help influence customer investment behavior. Asset prices run on these narratives, and a sector’s tokens can generally outperform the rest of the community for a period of time. A behavior analytics platform now says a new narrative may be setting in soon.

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AI and RWA tokens likely to drive markets soon

Data, according to analytics platform Santiment, points to increasing attention for AI and Real World Assets (RWAs). The behavior analytics tool detected growing crowd interest over the last six months, recorded as spikes in social volume. This means the amount of mentions on crypto-related social media has increased significantly relative to a pool of other cryptocurrencies.

AI tokens to look out for include The Graph (GRT), Fetch.ai (FET), SingularityNET (AGIX), Ocean Protocol (OCEAN), and Bittensor (TAO) among others. On the other hand, the RWA sector tokens to look out for include Avalanche (AVAX), Chainlink (LINK), Internet Computer (ICP), Maker (MKR), and Synthetix (SNX). Notably, MKR led RWA tokens on transaction volume metrics only recently, according to on-chain aggregator IntoTheBlock.

RWAs are established commodities from traditional finance, tokenized, and brought over into the DeFi space using blockchain technology.

The news comes after meme coins, specifically the ones running on the Solana blockchain, have dominated markets since December. It started with Bonk Inu (BONK), whose rally was associated with the Solana Saga phones before Myro (MYRO) and Wen (WEN) tokens began making headlines.

Besides the meme coin asset class, staking has also been a recent theme driving markets as investors chase annual yields or returns for assets locked. The Lido DAO (LDO) staking platform is expected to drop details on rewards, penalties, staking allocation, and validator exit soon, ahead of the mainnet debut of the module planned for the second half of 2024. 

These are some of the narratives that have provided trading opportunities for traders over the months after the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) era in the pre-2022 period. 

While the NFT theme may have topped out, the DeFi narrative remains at the core of the crypto revolution, with DeFi yields becoming increasingly attractive as alternative investment forms. It comes as new ecosystems and new generations of protocols continue to introduce fresh financial primitives into the space.