Hayes also mentioned his tendency to invest in crypto assets. "I would rather invest in a token with a success rate of 0.01% with a unique and viral backstory, than a token with a success rate of 50% but has no story whatsoever," he wrote.

Based on the above, here are the five altcoins mentioned in Hayes' article.

  • dYdX$DYDX

The story that Hayes told about DYDX was the shift in derivatives trading volume from CEX to DEX. The problem with CEX is that the management of user assets involves third parties. On a DEX, the user's assets remain in the user's own control.

Still with the same story as DYDX, GMX is also a DEX derivatives platform. The difference between the two is the chain on which the platform is built. DYDX is built on the Cosmos Hub ecosystem in version 4, while GMX is built on the Arbitrum ecosystem.

Hayes highlighted Pendle's potential to generate significant trading volume in the DeFi market due to its unique yield trading innovation. In fact, the trading volume on this platform has increased rapidly since the beginning of 2024.

  • Flare Network (FLR)

Hayes wrote about the importance of on-chain oracles that provide price feeds for settlement and liquidation on DEXs. Flare Network (FLR) is one project that offers an oracle solution for DEX. A well-known oracle project is Chainlink (LINK), but its valuation is already very large.

  • Axelar (AXL)

In his writing, Hayes mentioned completing cross-chain asset crossings without building a bridge. Projects like Axelar (AXL) have a role in facilitating interoperability between different blockchains without the need for traditional bridge infrastructure.

Axelar has a cross-chain protocol called Satellite, allowing users to transfer assets from EVM-based chains to the Cosmos Hub ecosystem and vice versa.