TOKEN2049: As the temperature difference grows, the strong get stronger

Written by Zhou Zhou, Foresight News

「The temperature difference has increased." said Romeo, a first-tier investor.

Romeo has successfully invested in well-known companies such as Solv, Puffer, and Sonic this year.cryptocurrencyDuring the Token 2049 period, he discoveredcryptocurrencyThe industry has undergone some major changes. "Solana, Base, TON and other ecosystems have become stronger and more popular, while many tracks, which may have been star projects and chosen ones before, are now becoming 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 begins to emerge, and the strong become stronger. On the contrary, NFT, full-chain games, (short-term) AI These star tracks that were once highly anticipated have developed slowly or even stagnated in the past six months and have been questioned more. Many projects have even been falsified, and practitioners seem 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 large number of developers and entrepreneurs in these three ecosystems are from Asia.CommunityIn the BTCFi track, the Chinese community even occupies an absolute dominant position.

这一年，全球的目光不再都聚焦于美国为主的cryptocurrency生态，以新加坡、香港、日本、韩国为多中心的亚洲加密圈，已经成为全球新的加密行业创新中心。

This year's Singapore Token2049 is still lively and is considered to be the well-deserved "Spring Festival of the Cryptocurrency Circle". 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 best in the past year.Entrepreneurs in 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 severalTokenAmong the industries that have entered the top 100 by market capitalization, there are as many as 7 Solana-related currencies. 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 2023, TOKEN 2049, 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 stillBlockchainFew people could have predicted that it would once again shake Ethereum’s position in just one year, and now many people believe that Solana may surpass Ethereum; in the four months before the last TOKEN 2049, Ordi continued to fall, and its market value fell by four-fifths, leaving only 3 U. Many people believed that the Bitcoin ecosystem was dead, and no one thought that Ordi would be listed two months later.Binance, and then it continued to rise, and the Bitcoin ecosystem emerged L2, pledges, runes, and other small waves.

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-hailing 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 that they used cryptocurrency to pay in the real world. Bitget exchangeBy participating in this promotion, users can enjoy at least one free taxi ride. This promotion also encourages more people to use TADA 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.Token MVL has been around since 2018 and currently has a market cap of $100 million.

After Kay joined HashKey from Bybit, he found that HashKey also cooperated deeply with the TON ecosystem and was one of the first 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,Binance, HashKey, Bitget, OKX, Bybit, Huobi, etc.exchange都已经深入参与到 TON 和 Telegram 的合作中。这也为早期进入 TON 合作的exchange吸引了众多用户。

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 questions about Web3 social networking and whether social networking can be realized.BlockchainThe mass adoption of the product has a deeper level of thinking.

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 friXiaobai Navigationend 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," said Yawn.

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 are Meme coins, making the so-called value investment a joke.

Entrepreneurs are also confusedIn this year, many hot tracks are being falsified, including full-chain games, NFT, Web3 social, Ethereum L2 (Mostly)…because of repeated setbacks over a period of half a year, 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% AI+Web3 applications have all 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 will be on par with Ethereum in the future.But the current AI projects are all Meme. " 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.

The first in Base ecosystemcontract平台 SynFutures ，是华人团队创建的，许多员工出现在了 Base 举办的活动上；TON 生态最大的 Web3 游戏之一 Catizen，是华人创建的，他们活跃在 TON 组办的活动上；Solana 生态上的第一大 DEX Jupiter ，Solana 生态第一个 L2 Sonic，也都是华人创办的，他们活跃在各个各大 Solana 活动中……

Exchanges, RWA, stablecoins,BlockchainEcosystem...Behind almost every scenario, there is a Chinese team 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.

韩国市场情绪高涨，Upbit 成为当前上币效应最强的加密货币交易所，甚至在上币效应方面，超越了Binance、Coinbase 等。日本 Web3 生态迅速崛起，在 StepN 的徒步活动上，我看到了很多日本的忠实用户，而索尼、软银等机构也在近几个月来在加密行业出手，日本加密生态被认为有机会成为下一个崛起的加密生态。

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 the 20% business of his financial technology department has come from Crypto, and the business has grown 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.

The article comes from the Internet:TOKEN2049: As the temperature difference grows, the strong get stronger

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