Written by Zhou Zhou, Foresight News
Crypto remains an industry that is changing at an accelerated pace.
There is a thought that has been lingering in my mind: "Except for policy changes such as ETFs, there seems to be no actual technological innovation in cryptocurrency in this cycle." But after attending the Foresight 2024 conference, one of the most intuitive feelings I had was that Crypto is still an industry that is iterating and changing at a high speed.
Organizing an annual industry summit is a good opportunity to review the overall crypto industry of the year . Unlike Foresight 2023 held in April last year, this year's Foresight conference has too many differences, from the guests, roundtable topics, topics discussed by participants, to the details of the summit organization.
The key guest has changed. Solana Foundation President Lily Liu attended the meeting. In the past year, Solana has once again become the brightest ecosystem in this cycle. It has repeatedly shaken the industry through innovations such as Saga (Solana mobile phone), pump.fun (meme coin platform), and blinks (blockchain links). "Solana has three advantages: high performance, capital liquidity, and talent liquidity, and has the world's second largest (blockchain) developer ecosystem." Lily Liu mentioned the three reasons why Solana can succeed again at the roundtable meeting.
Steve Yun, Chairman of TON Foundation, also attended the summit. In the first half of this year, the TON ecosystem suddenly exploded, and many small games in the TON ecosystem became popular. Steve Yun mentioned some astonishing statistics about the TON ecosystem at the meeting: "Hamster Kombat has 239 million users 3 months after its launch, and Catizen has 400,000 active on-chain users, with a profit of 20 million US dollars in 5 months."
How attractive is TON to project owners? Ming, the PR director of HashKey Global, revealed to me a set of latest data: "HashKey's TON ecological mini-game large MC memecoin was launched on July 2. As of August 20, the cumulative number of registered users (accounts) has reached 3.5 million." In just over a month, it can bring millions of traffic to the project owners, which is enough to make many Web3 project owners interested in TON.
Steve Yun at the Foresight conference
The topics discussed privately by the participants have also changed. Entrepreneurs who came to Hong Kong to attend the conference were eager to discuss the team on the other side of the ocean - Base.
From Friend Tech, Farcaster, to the meme craze, Base has broken through the circle again and again and has received native users in the crypto industry. As the public chain of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, it is regarded by many entrepreneurs as one of the most noteworthy blockchain ecosystems in this cycle. In the exchanges with the entrepreneurs attending the conference, Base has become their latest battlefield of choice.
Two conferences, two worlds
"We are preparing to migrate from Blast to the Base ecosystem," the founder of a project told me.
At the Foresight 2024 conference, several project founders from different ecosystems told me that they are preparing for or have already entered the Base ecosystem. Some of them are working on DeFi, some are working on AI+Crypto, and some are working on stablecoins, but the common point is that they are all considering or have already entered the Base ecosystem.
"Base has more traffic and provides more support to project owners," said the project leader.
Currently, Base has become one of the largest traffic gathering places in Web3. The cumulative number of addresses on the Base chain has exceeded 100 million, and the number of new addresses added daily has exceeded 500,000 in the past month. And this momentum has not stopped. Base founder Jesse said that the number of active addresses on the Base chain reached 4 million last week, once again setting a new record high.
Image source: IntoTheBlock
In the past half month, the number of active addresses of Base has exceeded the sum of the number of active addresses of Arbitrum and Optimism. Base has become one of the most popular ecosystems and has attracted many entrepreneurs to join. Of course, there are also practitioners who have already entered this ecosystem and will share the difficulties they encountered when entering this new ecosystem.
"Base doesn't seem to pay much attention to the Asian market at the moment," a crypto practitioner told me. He had previously communicated with the head of the Base ecosystem in Singapore.
“We want to enter the Base ecosystem, but the KOLs in the Base ecosystem are from a completely different circle than the ones we looked for before. This is a difficulty,” said a project founder of the Blast ecosystem.
These discussions are completely different from what happened at last year’s conference. At the Foresight 2023 Web3 conference in April last year, Base had just been established. There were thousands of people at the conference, but almost no one in the industry talked about it, either positively or negatively. However, today, no one is not talking about Base.
Two Web3 conferences, two completely different worlds . The hotly discussed crypto track in April last year is very different from what people are talking about in August this year.
The five hottest tracks in the cryptocurrency industry at present are also the ecosystems that are expected to give birth to a large number of super applications: Solana, TON, Base, Blast and Bitcoin ecosystem. At last year's conference, almost no one paid attention to them . However, now they have become the future trend that many people believe will become mainstream.
Blast, also has a similar experience to Base.
During the Foresight 2023 Web3 Summit in April last year, Blast had not yet been established and no one mentioned it. However, in just over half a year, Blast has grown rapidly from being controversial at the beginning to becoming a hot ecosystem and the top five Ethereum L2. Everyone knows Blast, and countless projects have poured into the Blast ecosystem. Although Blast's popularity has dropped rapidly with the end of the airdrop event, the overall fundamentals have been initially formed.
The Foresight team was also fortunate to invite Pacman, the founder of Blast and Blur, to be a guest of the Foresight conference and have a conversation with us in the form of an online fireside chat.
In response to the question of "Will the NFT craze return?", he said that although there have been some new attempts in the NFT field in the past, such as ERC-404, he believes that there is nothing truly innovative in this cycle. In response to the question of "Will popular projects in the Blast ecosystem migrate to the Solana ecosystem?", Pacman said that he respects their decision and that the migration of projects is normal in the industry.
Solana, TON, Base, Blast and the Bitcoin ecosystem… During the last Foresight conference in April last year, almost no one discussed these topics, but now they have become real concerns for practitioners and naturally became the roundtable topics of this year's Foresight Summit.
Comparing the different topics of the two annual summits, we can see how fast the crypto industry is changing. Some crypto institutions have not been established or have just been established, such as Base and Blast; some are considered to have become a thing of the past, such as Solana; some are questioned whether they have the opportunity to grow, such as TON; and some are not considered a track by the market at all, such as the Bitcoin ecosystem. However, they are the hottest ecosystems today and they represent the direction of the future.
In more than a year, the crypto industry has changed a lot and has a new look.
Change and constancy
Change is the daily routine of Crypto; constancy guides the future of Crypto.
At the Foresight conference in April last year, there were two hot topics, one was "Hong Kong + Crypto" and the other was "AI + Crypto".
These two tracks were just getting started at the time and were considered important directions for the future. This year, they are still important topics of the conference. The difference is that last year people were more imagining, but this year, these two tracks have already had certain practical applications.
"Hong Kong + Crypto" has begun to take shape. HashKey and OSL have become Hong Kong's cryptocurrency compliance companies, one focusing on retail users and the other focusing on institutional users.
An anonymous crypto exchage practitioner told me: " HashKey Global's daily fee income has reached 200,000 US dollars, and this is a number achieved within two weeks of going online. "
"Contract revenue accounts for about 50%." The practitioner added . After a difficult game with regulators, Hong Kong's compliant cryptocurrency exchanges have finally begun to move towards internationalization.
In addition to the crypto exchage business, the "Hong Kong + Crypto" ecosystem has also formed more than a dozen tracks with actual business scenarios, including crypto ETFs, crypto brokers, crypto asset management, crypto custody, crypto data services, crypto insurance, crypto insurance brokers, stablecoins, and crypto data services. In each ecosystem, there are at least three or four companies, and at most dozens of companies.
At the Foresight 2024 conference, five companies from different sectors of Hong Kong's compliant crypto industry were invited to share their experiences over the past year. For example, Matrixport, the leader of Asian crypto assets; Yuanbi Technology, a Hong Kong stablecoin company; HashKey, the leader of Hong Kong's cryptocurrency exchange; Xinhuo Technology, a Hong Kong-listed company dedicated to crypto asset custody; and Bitrace, a crypto data service company entering Hong Kong.
In April of a year ago, I couldn’t find a representative Hong Kong crypto company with actual business to attend the Foresight Summit. However, this year, the situation has completely changed, and a compliant crypto industry ecosystem has been initially established, and it has only been more than a year.
Of course, some once unrealistic fantasies have also been ruthlessly punctured. For example, after the issuance of the Hong Kong cryptocurrency ETF, its total market value was too low, less than one percent of the US cryptocurrency ETF. For example, Hong Kong's exchange business and stablecoin business are currently far from being comparable to companies such as Binance and Tether. But what about one or two years later?
"AI+Crypto" is similar to "Hong Kong+Crypto". A large number of companies focusing on this track have been born. Some companies are making Web3 AI big models, some are making Web3 AI applications, and some are making Web3 AI infrastructure.
TAO Ecosystem has become a leader in this field. Grayscale, which is one step ahead of Bitcoin ETF and Ethereum ETF, has also established a fund for TAO.
Last year, we designed an AI-related roundtable theme for the conference called "The Future of Web3 under the GPT-4 Wave", and invited guests including well-known media professionals, AI entrepreneurs, and traditional industry investors. This year, the theme of the roundtable is "AI+Crypto, From Narrative to Application", and we invited entrepreneurs in this niche track, which may also reflect the changes in the AI+Crypto industry to a certain extent.
At the Foresight conference in 2023, the two major tracks of "Hong Kong + Crypto" and "AI + Crypto" were still a barren desert. Now in "Foresight 2024", they have grown into a lush meadow with hundreds of companies. Perhaps by the time the "Foresight 2025" Web3 conference is held, towering trees will have begun to grow on this meadow.
