BSC Ecosystem Drives Meme Wave, Exploring New Opportunities | Frontier Lab Crypto Weekly

9 min readFeb 16, 2025

Market Overview

Market Summary

The cryptocurrency market remained in a volatile trend this week, with the market sentiment index rising from 2% to 22%. The market cap of stablecoins continued to grow (USDT reached $141.9B, USDC $56.1B, with increases of 0.49% and 0.89%, respectively), indicating continued institutional inflow. However, the rate of inflow slowed compared to last week. The low market sentiment was primarily driven by the higher-than-expected U.S. January CPI and inflation concerns tied to aggressive tariffs under the Trump administration. Overall, altcoins performed slightly better than the benchmark index.

Next Week Predictions

Bullish Targets: BNB, BNX, CAKE, HYPE, BERA

BNB: With the BSC ecosystem booming, Binance has released its 2025 tech roadmap. Positive news like the SEC-Binance lawsuit pause and CZ’s mentions of MEME tokens have made BNB perform strongly this week. The rise of the Meme wave in the BSC ecosystem is expected to further drive up BNB’s value as BNB holders benefit from Binance’s Launchpool.
BNX: The popularity of the BSC ecosystem is partly due to Four MEME, a platform that allows users to launch Meme tokens. As one of the developers of Four MEME, BinaryX stands to gain from the Meme trend, raising its revenue and positively impacting BNX’s price.
CAKE: As the main DEX of BSC, PancakeSwap is likely to see a surge in trading volume and token value, similar to what happened with Solana during its Meme wave. Expect continued strong performance from CAKE while the Meme trend persists.
HYPE: Hyperliquid, a major Perp DEX, has quickly added trading pairs for popular tokens like LAYER, TST, and BERA. The platform’s ability to respond to market trends gives it an edge, and with more users turning to contract trading, HYPE is positioned to benefit.
BERA: Despite recent price declines, Berachain’s TVL in DEX, lending, and LSD projects has increased significantly. The growing interest in Berachain suggests that BERA may see a price recovery, particularly as its initial post-launch slump was largely driven by market sentiment and early airdrop sell-offs.

Bearish Targets: APE, IMX, TAO, IP

APE: ApeCoin has focused on NFTs, but the market has largely shifted to Meme tokens. The upcoming release of 15.38 million tokens may cause a short-term price drop, especially as ApeCoin lacks market innovation to capture attention.
IMX: Immutable’s focus on gaming via Ethereum’s Layer 2 hasn’t generated significant market interest. The market’s skepticism about L2 projects, coupled with an upcoming 24.5 million token release, suggests a potential price decline for IMX.
TAO: Bittensor, an AI-focused project, has experienced a significant pullback, and with 210,000 tokens unlocking next week, a further decline in price is expected.
IP: Story Protocol’s tokenomics, with a large portion of its initial token release allocated to airdrops (40%), could weigh down the price in the short term. The market’s reaction to $IP on exchanges like OKX suggests that most airdrop users may wait for Binance listing before selling off.

Market Sentiment Index Analysis

The market sentiment index has risen from 2% last week to 22%, moving out of the extreme fear zone.

Hot Sectors

BSC Ecosystem Brings Meme Wave Back

Current Situation

Recently, the price surge of the MEME token TST has attracted widespread market attention, and the popularity of BNB Chain has surged as well. The various tokens within the BNB Chain ecosystem have generally shown an upward trend. At the same time, BNB Chain released its 2025 technical roadmap. Coupled with the pause of the SEC lawsuit against Binance and CZ’s repeated mentions of MEME tokens, these positive developments have contributed to the strong performance of the BNB Chain ecosystem.

Reasons Behind the Surge

The rapid growth of the BSC ecosystem in recent times can be attributed to several factors. First, CZ reignited market confidence in BNB Chain through social media promotion and the release of future plans. Second, hot events like the popularity of the TST token and the rise of Meme coins have injected energy into the ecosystem. Finally, given the recent weak market conditions and lack of wealth effect, BSC has provided a sector with profit potential, making it a natural focus of market attention.

Future Outlook

Looking at the reasons behind BSC’s recent surge, we can draw parallels to the previous Solana ecosystem boom, which was similarly driven by the rise of Meme coin projects. Therefore, it is expected that as Meme coins continue to thrive within the BSC ecosystem, the revenue of decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, particularly decentralized exchanges (DEX), will increase, leading to a rise in DEX token prices. The core token of the BSC ecosystem — BNB — will also likely perform strongly in the coming period. Moreover, since BSC is backed by the largest centralized exchange — Binance — this will provide support for token listings, which could extend the Meme wave in the BSC ecosystem longer than it did for Solana. However, if no other sector emerges to pick up the wealth effect left by the Meme wave, it is likely that the BSC ecosystem will cool down as the Meme trend wanes.

Berachain

Current Situation

After launching last week, the price of Berachain’s token, BERA, has fallen significantly, from a peak of $8.12 to its current price of $5.63, a drop of 41%. Currently, there has been a 23.56% recovery. While Berachain’s price performance has been disappointing, its ecosystem has seen positive developments, with Total Value Locked (TVL) growing rapidly by 217.16% in the last 7 days, reaching $2.467 billion.

Reasons Behind the Surge

Several factors have contributed to Berachain’s recent success. First, the TVL of the leading DEX, lending, and LSD projects in the Berachain ecosystem has grown significantly this week. For example, the TVL of DEX project Dolomite increased by 823.65%, lending project Beraborrow saw a 123.17% rise, and the TVL of LSD project Kodiak grew by 80.11%, all of which have had a significant impact on Berachain’s overall TVL. Second, after the initial FUD surrounding its first airdrop, Berachain launched a second airdrop this week, attracting more community support. Through the RFB (Berachain Foundation) plan, tokens were distributed to developers and community members, with 70% of the tokens required to be used for mainnet rewards and liquidity incentives, ensuring the healthy development of the ecosystem and drawing more users. Finally, while Berachain’s post-launch performance was underwhelming, this is a common issue for newly launched projects, and the team quickly adjusted, demonstrating their strong focus on market trends and their determination to improve the project.

Future Outlook

The recent surge in Berachain’s popularity can ultimately be attributed to its recent launch, the establishment of an early user base via the Rebase mechanism, and the team’s prompt adjustments following the initial underperformance, such as the second airdrop. However, the true measure of a public chain’s success lies in whether its on-chain ecosystem remains active and whether it can capture market attention. At this stage, Berachain is not focusing on the Meme sector, and its innovation primarily revolves around mechanisms like Infrared to create an economic flywheel. One of the potential risks for Berachain is that its BGT staking rewards may be lower than the returns from converting BGT to BERA, which could affect the token’s price.

Hot Project

Story Protocol: A Pioneer of IP Innovation in the Web3 Era

Project OverviewStory Protocol is a Layer 1 blockchain focused on intellectual property (IP) management, aiming to completely transform the traditional creative economy through on-chain transparency and programmability. It introduces the Agent TCP/IP framework, allowing multiple AI agents to autonomously trade IP, including training data, creative styles, and investment strategies.

Key Features:

Technological Innovation:

Story Protocol has created the first decentralized IP management network in the industry. Its technological innovation is reflected in three key areas:

The three-layer architecture (execution, storage, and consensus layers) modularizes network functions and enhances efficiency.
The unique multi-Core design in the execution layer, including IP Core for asset management, Sync Core for off-chain data synchronization, and Comm Core for cross-chain interoperability, significantly improves system performance and scalability.
The integration of AI Core and ZK Core addresses rights management for AI-generated content and privacy protection, showcasing the project’s forward-thinking approach. The use of CometBFT consensus ensures the network’s security and transaction finality.

Storage System Innovation:

Story Protocol has made breakthroughs in storage architecture across three dimensions:

A layered storage strategy that enables fast data access (milliseconds), intermediate cache layers (hybrid storage), and long-term distributed storage (cold data).
A hybrid on-chain and off-chain storage solution, where critical transaction data is stored on-chain for security, and large data is stored off-chain via IPFS and Arweave, with an intelligent caching system for efficiency.
Data optimization through dynamic compression, smart sharding, and redundancy management to ensure both storage efficiency and data security.

Tokenomics:

Story Protocol’s tokenomics feature a comprehensive ecosystem incentive system. The total supply of the $IP token is 1 billion, with an initial unlock of 25%. The unique “Singularity” and “Big Bang” mechanisms ensure a fair launch. The token’s functions include securing the network via PoS, serving as the primary medium of exchange, and providing governance rights for holders. The 48-month linear token release schedule emphasizes long-term value, earning the support of top investors like a16z, with $140 million raised in funding. Additionally, staking rewards and transaction fee distribution further support the ecosystem’s sustainability.

Reasons Behind Its Popularity:

Market Positioning: Story Protocol addresses three major pain points in content creation: IP rights protection, revenue distribution transparency, and cumbersome licensing processes. Its solution to tokenize IP assets, enabling rights confirmation, automatic revenue sharing, and smart licensing, has been well received by the market.
Technological Advantages: The project built a specialized L1 blockchain that combines the strengths of EVM and Cosmos SDK, introducing innovative protocols like “Proof of Creativity” and programmable IP Licenses (PIL), which ensure high-performance operations and establish significant technical barriers.
Strategic Layout: Story Protocol plans to establish the AI-driven IP trading market and has already partnered with leading projects like a16z’s Eliza and Virtual’s GAME framework. It has attracted over $134 million in investments, demonstrating significant development potential.
Timely Entry: The project has capitalized on the growing demand for innovative IP management in the AI and Web3 era, filling the gap in decentralized IP management solutions and digital transformation in traditional IP sectors.

Short-Term Risks: Despite its advantages in design and technology, Story Protocol faces some risks from its tokenomics. The large 40% airdrop proportion may cause price volatility in the short term, as these low-cost tokens enter circulation, potentially affecting the token’s immediate market value.

Market Sector Overview

Weekly Return Rate Analysis

Best Performing Sector: CeFi Within the CeFi sector, BNB, HYPE, and BGB dominate with a combined market share of 91.01%. Their weekly price fluctuations were 22.86%, 4.86%, and -19.36%, respectively, which drove the sector’s strong overall performance.
Worst Performing Sector: SocialFi The leading project in the SocialFi sector remains TON, which accounts for 90.06% of its market value. However, TON’s performance was weak this week, dropping by -2.59%, causing SocialFi to be the worst-performing sector.

Upcoming Major Crypto Events

Monday (February 17th)

Solana DeFi and MEV Summit
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Tuesday (February 18th)

OKX Web3 Consensus Night Consensus Hong Kong 2025

Thursday (February 20th)

U.S. Federal Reserve Releases January Monetary Policy Meeting Minutes
AI in the Skyline

Summary

This week, the cryptocurrency market showed signs of divergence amidst market fluctuations. Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) had relatively flat performances, while the BSC ecosystem emerged as the focus of the market, driven by the Meme coin surge and CZ’s efforts. Tokens like BNB, BNX, and CAKE performed strongly within the BSC ecosystem.

Berachain’s ecosystem, despite the pressure on its token BERA’s price, saw a rapid increase in Total Value Locked (TVL). The second airdrop and the active development of ecosystem projects have injected new vitality into the network. While the AI sector has experienced a notable pullback, Story Protocol has captured market attention with its technological innovations and forward-looking IP management strategy.

Overall, while market sentiment has rebounded, investors should remain cautious about inflationary pressures and the short-term volatility caused by token unlocks. Moving forward, investors should focus on the development of public blockchain ecosystems and projects with technological innovations while exercising caution in their investments.