01. If retail investors don’t have dreams, the bankers won’t be able to profit from them
Recently, there have been several big-name projects that have launched their tokens on the exchange, such as LayerZero, which has raised $260 million in financing and was valued at $3 billion in March 2023.
After Binance was launched at the end of last month, the market response was very flat:
Moreover, the price has recovered somewhat in the past two days due to the market maker's manipulation:
If the price is more than two yuan a few days ago, the spot price for retail investors is lower than last year's VC price, and 90% of the VC shares have not been released.
What full-chain interoperability protocol, what cross-chain messaging? There are no serious interaction scenarios or serious transactions on the various chains now, so retail investors naturally won’t buy into it.
02. ZK also changed from the industry's crown to a straw hat
In addition to LayerZero, there is also the controversial Zksync.
2022 was Zksync’s highlight year, with a single round of financing of US$200 million, bringing the cumulative financing amount to US$260 million.
But they are just Ethereum's second-layer chain based on zkrollup. Two years later, even those who don't understand code can go to Lumoz and generate a zk second-layer chain in ten minutes. (How long does it take to launch a public chain? It turns out it only takes ten minutes!)
The valuation of this project was not disclosed at the beginning, but it should not be cheap to raise 200 million in a single transaction.
After listing last month, the price of the currency has been falling:
The current market value is only over 3 billion US dollars. Zksync’s previous airdrop operation must have offended the community and ecological projects. The future price of the currency can only rely on luck.
Another zk giant project, Aleo, has also been slow to issue coins. This project also raised $200 million in 22 years and is valued at $1.45 billion.
However, considering that Aleo still needs to sell mining machines, the project team still has the motivation to boost the price. I just don’t know how much of the money raised two years ago is left now, and whether it is enough to boost the price.
03. Historically, those who raised a lot of money have never had good results.
Don’t expect any miracles in the crypto industry. The following is a list of projects with financing amounts exceeding $500 million in history. It can be said that they are not very investor-friendly:
Historically, there are ten projects that have raised more than 500 million yuan in financing, but DCG’s current role is more like investment, so we will ignore this.
Among the remaining 9 projects, only 3 issued tokens, and the other 6 did not issue any tokens.
04. All the projects that issued coins broke the issue price
Let’s first look at the three coin-issuing projects. The first one is EOS, which directly raised $4 billion from retail investors when ICO was at its peak in 2018. It is known as the “Ethereum killer” (there are a lot of Ethereum killers).
The current market value of EOS is only 1 billion US dollars, which is only a quarter of the funds raised in the beginning.
Another two projects that issued coins are absolutely "doomed", and their founders are all in jail.
Terra raised $1 billion in a big way in early 2022, and soon after, it went public, and then the famous "death spiral" began.
Judging from this trend, all investors should have invested in it. The current market value of the project is 260 million, and the tokens have not been unlocked yet. FDV still has 400 million.
If the Terra project team did not do any work after raising funds and just used the funds to protect the market, this would not have happened.
The next big thing that is as famous as Terra in 2022 is FTX. This project has a bigger background, with a total fundraising amount of 1.8 billion US dollars, and each of its investors is more famous than the other: SoftBank/Temasek/Sequoia and other well-known institutions are among them.
As for what happened later, I believe everyone knows it (if you don’t know, click here to review the 519 tragedy in the cryptocurrency circle!)
This pair of Crouching Dragon and Phoenix are these two, and I release them to pay tribute to them:
05. Those who haven’t issued coins are also half out of business
The projects that issued coins have all fallen below their issue prices, with their market capitalizations not even matching the amount of funds raised, and those projects that have not issued coins are mostly not that good either.
In 2021, the Forte project raised nearly 1 billion US dollars through two rounds of financing and claimed to be an infrastructure service provider for blockchain games.
However, this year when the gaming ecosystem is booming, there is almost no news about this project.
The project's official Twitter account was last active in 2023, and judging from the interactions, it is not very popular anymore.
Sorare is a project in the NFT era of 21 years. Although the platform has obtained official authorization from a number of stars to mint official star cards, at a time when NFT is at its lowest point, Sorare is not in a good situation. There was even news of layoffs a few months ago:
06. The ups and downs of toB business are known to the people themselves
There are a few other projects that I can’t say are doing well or not, and these projects are all ToB.
NYDIG has raised more than a billion dollars in investment, and their investors are all financial industry giants, such as Morgan Stanley and Soros Fund.
NYDIG provides one-stop Bitcoin services to institutional clients, from mining to custody, and is truly a good helper for capitalists in mining.
Fireblocks also provides services to enterprises, the main scenario is crypto asset custody and the cumulative amount of funds raised is said to have exceeded 1.2 billion US dollars, but the last round of financing was in 2022.
According to Bloomberg, Fireblocks has also been laying off employees recently:
07. Application scenarios are king
Among so many web3 projects that have raised a lot of money, Moonpay may be the best:
Moonpay completed a financing of US$555 million at the end of 2021, and added another US$87 million in 2022.
The company is said to have been profitable since it entered the market in 2019, with revenue exceeding $150 million in 22 years.
However, because Moonpay's main business is fiat currency deposits and withdrawals, which is a highly regulated niche industry, Moonpay chose not to issue coins, but instead followed Coinbase's IPO route.
But whether it is Moonpay, or the previously mentioned NYDIG and Fireblocks, the reason why these projects are still alive is because they have real business scenarios.
08. To make money from investing, you must buy low and sell high
Even if there is a real scenario, it is very dangerous for investors to take over at a high price. Let's review the financing amounts of several projects. I believe you will be surprised:
Ethereum raised only over 10 million USD, and it mainly relied on ICO:
Solana, which is currently the closest to becoming an Ethereum killer, only raised 20 million US dollars before issuing the coin:
Binance's private placement financing amount should not be large:
