01 If retail investors don’t have dreams, bankers won’t be able to profit from them

Recently, several big-name projects have launched their tokens on the exchange, such as LayerZero, which raised $260 million in financing and had a valuation of $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 price that retail investors pay for spot stocks 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 crown to a straw hat

In addition to LayerZero, there is also the controversial Zksync.

2022 was the highlight of Zksync, 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 zk rollup. Two years later, anyone who doesn'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 coin can only rely on luck.

Another zk giant project, Aleo, has also been slow to issue coins. This project also raised $200 million in 2022 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 never had good results

Don’t expect any miracles in the crypto industry. The following chart shows projects with financing amounts exceeding $500 million in history. It can be said that none of them are 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 have issued tokens, and the other 6 have not issued any tokens.

04 All projects that issued coins broke the issue price

Let’s first look at the three coin-issuing projects. EOS ranks first. When ICO was at its peak in 2018, it directly raised $4 billion from retail investors and was 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 coin-issuing projects are absolutely "failed", and their founders are all in jail.

Terra raised $1 billion in a big way in early 2022, and its coin was listed on the exchange shortly thereafter, followed by the famous “death spiral”.

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 newcomer 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 investor 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 on 519 again, a review of the 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 didn’t issue coins are also half dead

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 2021. Although the platform has obtained official authorization from a number of stars to mint official star cards, Sorare is not in a good situation at a time when NFT is at its lowest point. There was even news of layoffs a few months ago:

06 ToB business is the best for you

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 all the 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 Sell low and sell high is the best way

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:

【Disclaimer】The market is risky, so be cautious when investing. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions in this article are suitable for their specific circumstances. Investing based on this information is at your own risk.