Written by Zhou Zhou, Foresight News
" The temperature difference has become larger. " said Romeo, a first-tier investor.
Romeo has successfully invested in well-known cryptocurrency startups such as Solv, Puffer, and Sonic this year. During his time at Token 2049, he discovered some major changes in the cryptocurrency industry. "Solana, Base, TON and other ecosystems have become stronger and more popular, while more tracks may have been star projects and chosen ones before, but now they seem to be getting quieter."
The popularity of the crypto industry has begun to polarize. Some tracks have become more popular, while some tracks are still alive but have actually cooled down.
Solana, Base, TON, and BTCFi have become the "New Four Heavenly Kings" of the crypto industry in the minds of many practitioners . The Matthew effect has begun to emerge, and the strong will become stronger. On the contrary, NFT, full-chain games, (short-term) AI and other star tracks that were once expected have developed slowly or even stagnated in the past six months, and have been questioned more. Many projects are even being falsified, and practitioners are even more confused.
In addition to industries and tracks, some other new phenomena are also occurring.
Kay, the head of Hashkey Chain, had an intuitive feeling after participating in TOKEN 2049: "The confidence of Chinese entrepreneurs has become stronger."
At the Token2049 in 2022, Chinese practitioners still called themselves "Web3 Jews", feeling inferior and uneasy, like rootless grass. They were worried that they would have no place to settle down in Asia, but if they went to the West, they were worried about being excluded by Western capital and ecology. They were caught in a dilemma.
But at Token2049 in 2024, Chinese entrepreneurs have become more calm and confident. After chatting with many Chinese and European and American entrepreneurs from Base, Solana, and TON, the author found that a very large proportion of developers and entrepreneurs in these three ecosystems are from the Asian community, and in the BTCFi track, the Chinese community even occupies an absolute dominant position.
This year, the world's attention is no longer focused on the cryptocurrency ecosystem dominated by the United States. The Asian crypto circle, with Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea as multiple centers, has become the world's new crypto industry innovation center.
This year's Singapore Token2049 is still lively and is considered to be the well-deserved "Spring Festival of the Crypto". The difference is that entrepreneurs in the ecosystem with strong development momentum have become more confident and determined, while another part of the practitioners have become more confused.
1. The temperature difference becomes larger, and the strong become stronger
Solana, Base, TON, and BTCFi are the four ecosystems that have developed the best in the past year . The entrepreneurs of these four ecosystems have shown stronger confidence in the future.
In the past year, these four ecosystems have continuously produced innovative projects and popular applications, leading the development of the crypto track. Whether in terms of the amount of funds attracted, the number of users, or the number of projects, these four ecosystems have maintained a very obvious advantage. This makes these four ecosystems the most popular in the market and the confidence of entrepreneurs is the strongest.
Each track has several tokens that have entered the top 100 industries by market capitalization, of which Solana-related currencies are as high as 7. And Base, TON, BTCFi, each track has about 3-6 new currencies that have entered the top 300 of the latest cryptocurrency market capitalization.
The prosperity of the ecosystem is naturally transmitted to the activities held during Token2049. During the five hottest days of Token2049 (September 16th to September 20th), Base and TON held one or two events every day, and every event was full; the Solana Breakpoint event was considered by many participants to be the best, most lively, and most vibe event held outside the main venue of Token 2049.
In the last Token 2049, these four ecosystems were still very “weak”.
In TOKEN 2049 in 2023, Solana had just recovered from the FTX incident, and the price of Sol barely stabilized at 20 U and did not continue to fall. At that time, Ethereum was still the overlord in the blockchain, and few people could have predicted that it would shake Ethereum's position again in just one year. Now there are many practitioners who think that Solana may surpass Ethereum; four months before the last TOKEN 2049, Ordi fell continuously, and its market value fell by four-fifths, leaving only 3 U. Many people believed that the Bitcoin ecosystem was dead, but no one thought that Ordi would be listed on Binance two months later, and then it rose all the way. The Bitcoin ecosystem has seen wave after wave of small waves such as L2, staking, and runes.
No one even mentioned Base and TON. These two ecosystems were still “invisible” during the last TOKEN 2049 period. However, in the past six months or so, they have been firmly chosen by many entrepreneurs through their successes.
As Solana, Base, TON, and BTCFi gain momentum, they have also attracted more funds and more excellent developers, and the Matthew effect of the strong getting stronger and the weak getting weaker is emerging. However, outside of these four ecosystems, many cryptocurrency industries and tracks have become increasingly quiet.
2. Mass Adoption: A glimmer of hope
“After seeing TADA, I was very excited and felt like I saw a glimmer of hope for mass adoption,” Kay said.
In this TOKEN 2049, many practitioners are actually disappointed with the overall development of the crypto industry in the past year. In the past year, there have not been enough mass adoption products. However, once TOKEN 2049 landed in Singapore, Kay and many other crypto practitioners were pleasantly surprised to find that a new way to take a taxi has emerged, and people can experience paying for taxi fares with Crypto very smoothly.
TADA is the second largest taxi app in Singapore. It has created a small program TADA mimi on Telegram, which integrates the cryptocurrency TON. People can pay for taxi fares directly through TON. During the entire Token 2049 period, many Web3 practitioners experienced the first time in their lives to use cryptocurrency to pay in the real world. Bitget Exchange participated in it, allowing users to enjoy at least one free taxi service. This promotion also promoted more people to use TADA to take taxis.
Kay noticed the TADA project a few years ago when she was in charge of coin listing review at Bybit. She learned that the founder of TADA was a Korean who worked in cross-border transportation in Hong Kong. Cross-border transportation and the cryptocurrency industry are very close. TADA entered the cryptocurrency industry very early, and its token MVL was launched as early as 2018, with a current market value of $100 million.
Now that Kay has joined HashKey from Bybit, he has discovered that HashKey also has in-depth cooperation with the TON ecosystem and is one of the earliest institutions to attach importance to development in the TON ecosystem. Kay is now in charge of Hashkey Chain, hoping to build a bridge between Web2 and Web3 to attract more users. As far as I know, exchanges such as Binance, HashKey, Bitget, OKX, Bybit, and Huobi have all been deeply involved in the cooperation between TON and Telegram. This has also attracted many users to the exchanges that entered the TON cooperation early.
Practitioners have found new paths to achieve mass adoption from Telegram and TON ecosystems. With a product that has a high degree of overlap with Web3 practitioners and users, Telegram's 900 million user market has become a "hot commodity."
In some difficult to predict scenarios, mass adoption products are slowly being proven.
Polymarket, a prediction market platform on Polygon, is breaking through the barriers of the crypto industry and allowing more participants from the outside world to join. For example, Bloomberg Terminal has integrated the prediction market Polymarket. The Polymarket market is growing rapidly. According to DefiLlama data, at the beginning of this year, the TVL was less than $10 million, and by September, the Polymarket TVL had exceeded $110 million.
An engineer from Polygon told me that Polygon attaches great importance to Polymarket, has invested a lot of resources, and actively embraces new prediction market platforms. Other ecosystems have also seen the potential of this market. Blast, TON, Base, Wintermutue, DYDY, BitMEX and other platforms have recently launched prediction markets. According to what I learned at this conference, more ecological project parties are adding prediction markets to their products.
In addition to predicting the market, I also had discussions with Taki, a Korean entrepreneur in the Warpcast ecosystem, and Yawn, the founder of StepN, a product that was most likely to achieve mass adoption in the last cycle. They all had deeper thoughts on Web3 social networking and whether social networking could achieve mass adoption of blockchain products.
Web3 social networking is still an imaginative market. Although it continues to fail, more and more participants are participating in innovation in this field. Yawn mentioned friend tech and shared his thoughts on Web3 social networking. "How to connect to earn well and make social networking fun through maps without destroying the entire ecological economy is a topic that needs further thinking and verification." Yawn said.
3. Confusion still permeates TOKEN 2049
Although the strong rise of Solana, Base, TON, and BTCFi in the past year has brought a lot of confidence to practitioners, many practitioners are still confused about the future, especially the four consecutive months of lows after the halving, which has dealt a heavy blow to many practitioners.
Investors are confused . This year, there are only a handful of "VC coins" that outperform BTC, and Meme coins outperform a number of so-called "value coins." According to statistics, only 42 projects performed better than BTC this year, and 11 of the top 15 were Meme coins, making the so-called value investment a joke.
Entrepreneurs are also confused . In this year, many hot tracks are being falsified, full-chain games, NFT, Web3 social, Ethereum L2 (mostly)... Because of repeated setbacks in the past six months, the development of these tracks has slowed down and stagnated, and practitioners seem pessimistic and confused.
During this TOKEN 2049 period, the author observed that many "serious" project owners and investors have begun to invest in meme-related tracks.
"98% of AI+Web3 applications have been falsified." Romeo, a Tier 1 investor, told me. "I am very optimistic about the future of AI and Crypto. I think there will definitely be an AI project that is comparable to Ethereum in the future, but the current AI projects are all memes ." Romeo said bluntly.
When asked why he didn’t invest in social networking, Romeo said: “It’s too difficult to do Web3 social networking. There is usually only one winner in this track. Can a track with only one winner still be called a track?”
Investors are confused, entrepreneurs are confused, builders and retail investors are even more confused .
One after another, new tracks that are supposed to represent the future of the crypto industry have risen, and then quickly fallen. We watched them build a red building, we watched them entertain guests, and we watched their building collapse. Too many tracks and projects were hyped up and then falsified in a short period of time. Especially in the four months after the halving, many secondary investors believed that the crypto market was as difficult as hell.
4. The Chinese crypto power awakens, and the multi-center ecosystem in Asia rises
During TOKEN 2049, more and more Chinese teams showed off their muscles on the best stage.
SynFutures, the largest contract platform in the Base ecosystem, was created by a Chinese team, and many of its employees appeared at events held by Base; Catizen, one of the largest Web3 games in the TON ecosystem, was created by Chinese, and they are active in events organized by TON; Jupiter, the largest DEX in the Solana ecosystem, and Sonic, the first L2 in the Solana ecosystem, were also founded by Chinese, and they are active in various major Solana events...
Exchanges, RWA, stablecoins, blockchain ecosystems...Behind almost every scenario, there are Chinese teams deeply involved, not missing any potentially successful crypto track.
In 2022, the Chinese crypto ecosystem is in a very weak state. This is because almost all innovations worth mentioning in the last cycle came from Europe and the United States, and the United States dominated the narrative of the entire crypto industry. But in this cycle, I saw that Chinese teams occupied the core ecological niches of various hot tracks and were not eliminated. They even formed their own teams and successfully pulled up the big track of Bitcoin ecology.
During TOKEN 2049, I also met many entrepreneurs and investors from South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. These four Asian crypto ecosystems all show very different characteristics.
The Korean market sentiment is high, and Upbit has become the cryptocurrency exchange with the strongest listing effect, even surpassing Binance, Coinbase, etc. The Japanese Web3 ecosystem is rising rapidly. At the StepN hiking event, I saw many loyal Japanese users, and institutions such as Sony and SoftBank have also made moves in the crypto industry in recent months. The Japanese crypto ecosystem is considered to have the opportunity to become the next rising crypto ecosystem.
The Singapore and Hong Kong markets are also developing in different directions. The Singapore market has made bold attempts in institutional business and has a forward-looking vision. A senior executive of a Singapore bank told me that 20% of the business of his fintech department has come from Crypto, and the business is growing very rapidly. The combination of TADA and TON has given many Web3 participants a big surprise. The Hong Kong market, backed by China, has greater imagination and is also highly anticipated if there are breakthroughs in scenarios such as RWA and stablecoins.
The Asian crypto circle, with Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea as its multiple centers, has become the world's new innovation center for the crypto industry.
The crypto industry is like a huge puzzle. No one can accurately know its full picture, but through an "information center" like TOKEN 2049, its true picture is slowly unfolding.
