Mint Ventures华语

Authors: Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures & Lawrence Lee, Researcher at Mint Ventures
Introduction: In the altcoin bear market, fundamental investments are still effective
Undoubtedly, this round of bull market cycle has been the worst for altcoins.
Unlike the historical pattern where various altcoins' prices became active after the initiation of previous bull markets, leading to a rapid decline in BTC's market share, in this bull market, since the market bottomed out in November 2022, BTC's market share has continuously risen from around 38%, currently stabilizing above 61%. This is still under the backdrop of the rapid expansion of the number of altcoins in this cycle, highlighting the weakness of this round of altcoin prices.

By Lawrence Lee, Research Fellow, Mint Ventures
1. Introduction
Hyperliquid can be said to be the biggest highlight of the recent crypto market besides AI and Meme. Its strategy of not accepting VC investment, distributing 70% of tokens to the community and returning all income to platform users has attracted market attention. Its strategy of directly repurchasing HYPE with its income has made HYPE's circulating market value quickly surpass UNI and rank among the top 25 cryptocurrencies. It has also caused its platform business data to soar across the board.
This article aims to describe the current status of Hyperliquid’s development, analyze its economic model, and analyze the current valuation of HYPE to give an answer to the question “Is HYPE expensive?”

Author: Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures

1. Introduction
Recently, the Web3 comprehensive cloud service provider 4EVERLAND, which has been established and operated for over 4 years, finally conducted its TGE. Starting from decentralized front-end hosting services, it has gradually expanded to Web3 gateways, custom decentralized storage solutions, RaaS (Rollup as a Service), blockchain RPC, and AI RPC services, forming a product matrix around Web3 development needs.
In this article, I will conduct research on some key issues of the project to provide readers with an intuitive impression of the project, including:

Author: Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures
1. Introduction
If one were to name the best performing L1 in this bull market cycle, most people's answer would be Solana.
Whether in terms of active addresses or fee revenue, Solana's market share in L1 has rapidly expanded:
Number of active addresses: The share of active addresses on Solana has grown from 3.48% to 56.83%, a year-on-year increase of 1533%;

L1 monthly active addresses market share, data source: tokenterminal.
Fees: Solana's fee revenue share has grown from 0.62% to 28.92%, a year-on-year increase of 4564%.

Author: Lawrence Lee, Research Fellow at Mint Ventures

After receiving two rounds of financing, including a $12 million round led by Polychain and financing from Binance labs, the restaking project Solayer on the Solana chain has become one of the few bright spots in the DeFi field in the recent market. Its TVL has also continued to rise and has now surpassed Orca, ranking twelfth in TVL on the Solana chain.

Solana project TVL ranking Source: DeFillama

The staking track is a crypto-native sub-track and also the crypto track with the largest TVL. However, its representative tokens such as LDO, EIGEN, and ETHFI have struggled in this cycle. Apart from the Ethereum network on which they are located, are there other reasons?

Author: Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures

Introduction
Ethena is one of the few phenomenal DeFi projects in this cycle, with its token's circulating market cap once exceeding 2 billion USD (corresponding FDV exceeding 23 billion). However, since entering April this year, its token price has rapidly declined, with Ethena's circulating market value retreating over 80% from its peak, and the token price has fallen as much as 87%.
Since entering September, Ethena has accelerated its collaboration with various projects, expanding the usage scenarios of its stablecoin USDE, and the stablecoin's scale has begun to rebound from the bottom, with its circulating market value rebounding from a low of 400 million USD in September to currently about 1 billion USD.

Author: Lydia Wu, Researcher at Mint Ventures

The data in this article is as of October 8, 2024
TL;DR
Prediction markets in a narrow sense usually do not include traditional gambling and sports betting, but emphasize information discovery and public decision-making reference functions.
Prediction markets cannot remain “correct”. They fail because people take the probabilities given by prediction markets as given facts.
Cryptocurrency brings more freedom of transaction amounts and less friction to the prediction market

Polymarket's user profile is quite different from crypto native users such as NFT traders and meme players. They are usually older, do not pursue extreme profit and loss ratios, and have a strong motivation to obtain and analyze information.

By Lawrence Lee, Research Fellow, Mint Ventures
summary
Since the development of the crypto economy, the infrastructure on the chain has been gradually improved, but the user experience is still in its early stages. After the user operation experience is improved, it is expected to attract more users to enter the chain ecosystem, which in turn promotes the further development of infrastructure and the enrichment of business forms, forming a ladder cloud effect of stepping on the left foot and the right foot. The "1995 moment" of cryptocurrencies may depend on the emergence of a user-oriented killer application or operating system.
The intention track is committed to this, changing the current on-chain operation logic of "assuming that users are experts" to "assuming that users are novices", hiding the complex operations and logic, and providing users with a simpler, more convenient and safer experience. AI can also help users realize their intentions more easily.

By: Lydia Wu, Research Fellow, Mint Ventures

If you were confused when you first encountered the concept of "chain abstraction", you are not alone.
——It looks very important, there are many projects, a lot of financing, and they all claim to be standards... but I don’t know what they are for. Is “chain abstraction” another buzz word on the Web3 new concept pipeline?
This article will start from the concept and return to the basic issues in order to scoop out pearls from the sea of ​​nothingness.
TLS;DR:
The purpose of abstraction is to hide complexity, and the level of abstraction in the context of Web3 is often higher than that of Web2 (and therefore more difficult)

By Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures

Aave is one of the projects that I have been following for a long time. Yesterday, its governance team ACI released a draft of Aave’s new economic model in the community forum, announcing expected upgrades in multiple aspects such as the value capture of Aave tokens and the security model of the protocol.
Regarding Aave, the author’s recent article provides a relatively complete analysis of its current situation, competitiveness, and valuation: https://research.mintventures.fund/2024/07/03/zh-altcoins-keep-falling-time-to-refocus-on-defi/
This article focuses on answering the following four questions about this latest proposal with huge impact:

Author: Alex Xu, Lawrence Lee
introduction
As one of the oldest tracks in the crypto field, the Defi track has not performed well in this bull market. The overall increase of the Defi sector in the past year (41.3%) is not only far behind the average level (91%), but even lags behind Ethereum (75.8%).

Data source: artemis
If we only look at the data from 2024, the performance of the Defi sector is also difficult to say well, with an overall decline of 11.2%.

Data source: artemis
However, in my opinion, in the peculiar market context where BTC hit a new high and then altcoins fell together, the Defi sector, especially the leading projects therein, may have ushered in the best layout time since its birth.

By: Lydia Wu, Research Fellow, Mint Ventures

*Readers should be aware that since Quilibrium's mainnet has not yet been released and there is little public information available, the descriptions of the incentive mechanism, economic model, financing history, roadmap, etc. in this article are only based on the current time point, and the actual situation may change in the future. This article is mainly written for research and popular science purposes, please do not use it as an investment reference, and we also welcome criticism and discussion from peers.
1. Report highlights
1.1 Core investment logic
Quilibrium attempts to find a "balance" between the computing power of the traditional Internet and the decentralization of blockchain, and has designed a unique decentralized cloud computing architecture for this purpose.

By Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures
introduction
So far, this round of crypto bull market cycle is the most boring one in terms of business innovation. It lacks phenomenal hot tracks such as DeFi, NFT, and Gamefi in the previous bull market, resulting in a lack of industry hotspots in the overall market, and the growth of users, industry investment, and developers is relatively weak.
This is also reflected in the current asset prices. Throughout the entire cycle, the exchange rates of most Alt coins against BTC continue to lose money, including ETH. After all, the valuation of smart contract platforms is determined by the prosperity of applications. When the development and innovation of applications are lackluster, the valuation of public chains is also difficult to increase.

By Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures

introduction
In my last article, I mentioned that this round of crypto bull market lacks sufficiently influential new business and new asset narratives compared to the previous two cycles. AI is one of the few new narratives in the Web3 field this round. In this article, I will combine this year's hot AI project IO.NET to try to sort out my thoughts on the following two questions:
The necessity of AI+Web3 in business
Necessity and challenges of distributed computing services
Secondly, the author will sort out the key information of the representative project of AI distributed computing power: IO.NET project, including product logic, competitive situation and project background, and deduce the valuation of the project.

Moderator: Blair Zhu, Mint Ventures
Guest: Ganesh Swami, CEO of Covalent
Interview time: March 23, 2024
Original interview link: WEB3 Founders Real Talk with Covalent Recap

Ganesh’s experience and introduction to Covalent

Blair: Hello everyone, welcome back to Web3 Founders Real Talk. Here we will connect with real industry disruptors and have honest conversations. Today, we are very happy to invite Ganesh, CEO of Covalent. Welcome!
Ganesh: Blair, I’m so glad to have me on the show and I look forward to further interacting with the community.

Author: Lawrence Lee, Researcher, Mint Ventures
introduction
Web3 games have always been a track that Mint Ventures pays close attention to. Although the Play 2 Earn concept brought about by the last bull market is no longer mentioned. At present, both Axie and StepN have collapsed as Pond's, but the million-level and extremely sticky products they had at their peak Daily activity data is the first time the Crypto industry has had such close contact with “Massive Adoption”. Compared with another social product category with the possibility of Massive Adoption, games naturally have a richer and more complex economic ecology, and the team also has more refined control space to collect taxes from multiple angles, superimposing the experience and based on the game itself. Exquisitely designed irrational consumption makes it more likely to maintain a relative ecological balance for a long time. In addition, web3 games can also more effectively utilize the convenient assetization methods that Crypto can bring, which makes investors generally optimistic about the prospects of web3 games.

Author: Lydia Wu, Researcher at Mint Ventures

Introduction: Decoupling of the Classical Public Chain Concept
The figures on DefiLlama and CoinMarketCap seem to conclusively show that TON is a "giant and unpopular public chain" - the total market capitalization has long been among the top 20, but the 24-hour transaction volume is always outside the 100th; the TVL is only 53M under the new high, which is not ranked Entering the top 50 in the public chain; MC/TVL valuation has reached an astonishing 293, which is 33 times that of Ethereum.

Source: DefiLlama, CoinMarketCap
The past few months have witnessed the decoupling of the public chain concept defined by Ethereum by Rollup and modularity. The narrative of the chain has been weak. The market has accepted Blast’s chain name, and also realized that AO is using the name of the network to operate a public chain. The truth.

Author: Alex Xu, Research Partner, Mint Ventures

introduction
Last week, BTC completed its move up to its all-time high against the U.S. dollar, which means we have entered the official stage of this bull market. Compared with the rebound and recovery starting from the bottom of the bear market, the sentiment in the official stage of the bull market will further heat up and the fluctuations will be more intense.
The official stage of each bull market has some common characteristics, such as:
The situation has gradually transitioned from BTC leading the rise to altcoins leading the rise. Bitcoin's market share has declined. The growth rates and increases of various currencies have become more violent. It has become the darling of social media and search engines, and public attention has increased rapidly.

Author: Lawrence Lee, Researcher, Mint Ventures

1. Key points of the report
1.1 Core investment logic
Gelato has been deeply involved in the field of developer services for many years and has formed a relatively complete developer service suite. It is expected to achieve business breakthroughs in combination with the RaaS service they launched at the end of 23. RaaS projects have entered a period of intensive currency issuance. Altlayer, Dymension, and Saga have all issued coins in the near future. In addition, there are also Conduit and Caldera with excellent financing backgrounds in the track. The RaaS track is expected to gain continued attention from the market in the future.
1.2 Main risks
Difficulty in earning income. Gelato's two main businesses: smart contract automation and RaaS business models determine that it is more difficult to obtain revenue than its competitors. Chainlink in the smart contract automation field, Altlayer, Conduit, Caldera and Dymension in the RaaS field all constitute Gelato's strong competitors, but Gelato's competitive advantage is not strong enough. Token use cases are thin.

Author: Alex Xu, Research Partner, Mint Ventures
1. Key points of the report
1.1 Core investment logic
Covalent is a leading project on a rapid development track. All business data are in a rapid growth stage, and revenue data is increasing. In terms of income level, Covalent has an income several times greater than that of The Graph, the current leading project on the track, and seems to have achieved a better PMF (Product Market Fit). However, because its income stream has not yet been uploaded to the chain, market investors There may be a large awareness gap about this.
In terms of new business, the Ethereum Wayback Machine it is developing is a long-term blob DA (blob is a new data storage structure after the Ethereum EIP4844 upgrade, which stores data that does not require permanent chain storage). It is also in line with the current market hot spots.