Winners of the Top 30 Influential Figures in Blockchain
Hu Xinzhi: Partnership Lead of Taipei Blockchain Week (TBW)
Contributions to the industry in the past year:
As the Partnership Lead, I worked with the team to jointly host the Taipei Blockchain Week, calling upon blockchain industry professionals from around the world to come to Taiwan for交流.
Assisted XueDAO in organizing the CONNECT hackathon, helping student developers participate in developing innovative applications and facilitating job opportunities for students in the industry.
What are your thoughts on the developments in 2025?
Q1: What are you most looking forward to seeing in the Web3 industry in 2025?
During the last bull market driven by DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), many high-quality Web3 startups emerged in Taiwan, achieving significant international recognition. What I look forward to the most in 2025 is for Taiwan to give birth to a few more internationally recognized high-quality Web3 startups, encouraging more industry professionals and investors to pay attention to Taiwan's ecosystem, which will help the Web3 industry in Taiwan to thrive.
Q2: From the perspective of your area of expertise, what do you think is the most important trend in the blockchain industry in 2025? What are your insights and observations?
Since entering the bear market in 2022, it is evident from the perspective of user growth that the total number of Web3 product users worldwide has not significantly increased. Most projects rely on wealth expectations to attract users, making the entire market a zero-sum game competing for user attention. Additionally, projects issued tokens early without a sustainable revenue mechanism, thus having to rely on Ponzi schemes to give users wealth expectations. This is not a good phenomenon for the sustainability of products, and it is challenging to see products that truly address pain points and solutions like Web2.
In the current situation, what do you think the trends for 2025 will be? I believe the key factors breaking the circle are each country's regulations and attitudes towards cryptocurrencies, whether they can encourage more outsiders to invest in cryptocurrencies.
As the founder of Paradigm said: 'Just as the Gold Rush of 1849 transformed San Francisco from a quiet village into a major port (eventually becoming a center of technological innovation), today's cryptocurrency boom is attracting settlers and prompting infrastructure development, transforming it from a barren planet into a thriving crypto civilization.' A gold rush is necessary to drive people to cluster and build, as we saw in the last bull market.
The approval of the Bitcoin ETF in 2024 sparked a wave of excitement, shifting the industry's focus from the Bitcoin ecosystem to meme coins and TON mini-games. We can also observe more emerging public chains eager to try their hand at global exhibitions, along with established public chains striving for innovation and change.
I believe one of the trends to pay attention to in 2025 is how these emerging public chains can provide sufficient incentives and innovative applications to recruit users and developers. For developers, following emerging public chains presents a great opportunity to shine. A great example is the complementary development of Taiwanese developers with the SUI ecosystem, and the early participation incentives given to users by emerging public chains provide excellent profit opportunities!
Q3: Are there any interesting plans or products to share for 2025?
The most interesting project in 2025 is of course the Taipei Blockchain Week (TBW). TBW is an event initiated by a group of volunteers, and it's hard to believe how this group of unpaid volunteers with regular jobs managed to organize a large-scale exhibition through effective collaboration. Everyone's personal abilities and sense of responsibility were crucial.
Our biggest goal is to make TBW a globally recognized blockchain exhibition, encouraging more Web3 professionals worldwide to come to Taipei for交流 and investment collaboration. We will continue to strive for this.
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