On January 9, 2019, the 2020 "FAT" Summit Forum and Awards Ceremony hosted by Odaily came to an end in Beijing.
This forum focused on four topics, including: how the blockchain can empower the industry, the way to break through the public chain in 2020, the future opportunities of the asset management track, and what targets are the funds that are still frequently selling. In the four themed roundtables, the guests shared their thoughts from different perspectives, taking everyone to review 2019 and predict trends.
On January 9, 2019, the 2020 "FAT" Summit Forum and Awards Ceremony hosted by Odaily came to an end in Beijing.
This forum focused on four topics, including: how the blockchain can empower the industry, the way to break through the public chain in 2020, the future opportunities of the asset management track, and what targets are the funds that are still frequently selling. In the four themed roundtables, the guests shared their thoughts from different perspectives, taking everyone to review 2019 and predict trends.
Among them, "Market fluctuations, how to predict capital?" The round table forum was hosted by Ms. Wang Mengdie, founder and CEO of Odaily. Guests participating in the round table discussion included Huang Lingbo, vice president of Fenbushi Capital, Mable Jiang, executive director of Multicoin Capital, and founding partner of Tongzhou Capital. Zhang Lie, Benrui Capital Partner Lin Weihao and Fundamental Labs Partner Yuan Hao.
When talking about the promising investment tracks in the blockchain field in 2020, Huang Lingbo, vice president of Fenbushi Capital, said that there are three investment opportunities in 2020: 1. Bitcoin is halved; 2. The launch of the old high-quality public chain brings 3. Global market increment, including data increment and capital increment. However, Huang Lingbo believes that the protocol layer projects in 2020, such as Defi protocol and governance protocol, have long-term investment value, but there may be a lack of systematic and explosive opportunities in 2020.
Lin Weihao, a partner of Benrui Capital, is optimistic about asset certification projects, and said that he will continue to focus on projects with strong viability and profitability, as well as commercial application landing projects.
The following is the shorthand summary of the roundtable discussion (with deletions):
secondary titleThe following is the shorthand summary of the roundtable discussion (with deletions):
Mable Jiang：Hello everyone! First of all, I would like to thank all the distinguished guests again, and the friends who came to participate in the event today have persisted until now. First of all, please briefly introduce yourself and your organization.
Lin Weihao:Thank you Mandy. The previous round table also briefly introduced that I am the executive director of Multicoin Capital. Multicoin is a theme-driven investment fund that is involved in primary and secondary markets, and we have a dedicated hedge fund for secondary market transactions and primary investment VC. The themes we invest in include Web3, open finance, etc., and there are some sub-themes under this. The projects we invest in are not only cryptocurrencies, but also some equity investments.
Lin Weihao:Hello everyone! My name is Lin Weihao, and I am a partner of Benrui Capital. I do venture capital and digital asset management. I mainly manage two funds of US dollars and digital assets, as well as consulting services.
Hello everyone! I am Zhang of Oneboat Capital. The English name of Oneboat Capital is Oneboat Capital, so friends also like to call us "Oneboat Capital". Different from many capitals, our fund is less than 100 million US dollars, but it is all composed of self-owned funds, without the pressure of external LPs and the limitations of funding deadlines. This allows us to be more free in investment decisions, take a longer-term view, and pay more attention to cycles. We have invested in more than 100 projects, including investments in strategic layout: such as wallets, mining pools, security, media, chips, etc. It also includes investment in blockchain-native projects, such as public chains, protocols, and applications.
Huang Lingbo:We should be a relatively low-key capital in the industry. Our team itself does not like or is good at doing PR. In addition, we do not stand for any projects we invest in in principle. So I also take this opportunity to welcome more practitioners to get to know us further. Thanks!
Huang Lingbo:Hello everyone! I am the VP of Fenbushi Capital. Founded in 2015, Fenbushi Capital is the first domestic fund focusing on blockchain investment. From our investment portfolio, the distributed platform has invested in about 150 projects, of which more than 70% are overseas investments. From a strategic point of view, Distributed is more inclined to invest in the underlying architecture of the blockchain industry, including public chains, etc., and is also more inclined to long-term value investment. Distributed itself is the earliest investor of ETH, EOS and Polkadot. Overall, Distributed will always be committed to the investment and development of the blockchain industry ecology. thank you all!
Yuan Hao:Hello everyone! I am Yuan Hao, Managing Partner of Fundamental Labs. Fundamental Labs was established in 2016, focusing on investing in the blockchain primary market. Focusing on the three directions of infrastructure, the first direction is about technical infrastructure, and invested in many public chains, including the underlying protocol. The second aspect is about the trading infrastructure, investing in relatively large exchanges at home and abroad. The third aspect is about computing power. In the past three years, I have invested in more than 60 projects, and there are more overseas projects. Thanks!
Wang Mengdie:
Mable Jiang：Thank you for your introduction. According to the data of Crypto Fund Research, more than 70 Crypto Funds closed down in 2019, and this is definitely an incomplete statistic. At the same time, the fundraising situation and investment data of funds also showed an overall decline in 2019. Of course, many people are also saying that this is a normal process of survival of the fittest in the market, because there are also funds that are actively investing in the market. The funds selected in our list this time basically announced their investment in porforlio in at least a dozen or even more in 2019. many.
So what do the guests think of the market changes in the past year? How did your organization formulate its own strategy and make precise moves in the rapidly fluctuating market in 2019?
Secondly, as I just mentioned, it is not only venture capital, but also investment in the secondary market. Because we have always believed that cryptocurrency is an asset. Since it is an asset, you can go long and short. If you have some knowledge based on its fundamentals, you can do relatively medium and long-term transactions based on the fundamentals.
Lin Weihao:Finally, how is the money earned? The matter of making money should ultimately be attributed to poor cognition and poor information. Like before, many overseas traditional VCs may only be in Silicon Valley or New York, but gradually realized that the arbitrage (arbitrage) between global markets is very large. So they went to Asia. These earlier funds that came to Asia made money.
Lin Weihao:
The first question is about the changes in 2019. My personal perception is that there are no particularly eye-catching changes in technology. There have been many changes in policy. The policy has indeed closed some arbitrage opportunities in the bonus period, but at the same time it has opened up a new path. After the irrational stage of the capital boom, some new directions have been judged for everyone. I think these changes, for example, whether Libra is still working hard or DeFi is very hot, is also a step-by-step development of benchmarking traditional finance, including exchanges from spot to derivatives, from futures to options ETFs and so on. But for us as capital, investment or asset management, we need to rationally allocate funds to do the best professional management to achieve value-added, and we will not be too limited by these macroscopically.
To answer the second question, how to shoot quickly and accurately, you need to sink. At the beginning, I knew a lot about it, and there were many tracks, no matter whether it was mining, chain, industrial services, original ecology, ST (asset tokenization), or DeFi. Finally, I must ask myself, In addition to providing pure financial services for the project, what else can be provided to the project to help him grow and bring us to grow together? This is the truth.
Because the development of the industry is too early, for many projects, I personally say that there is no way to make a very sure valuation including the price of BTC. If there is no way to do valuation, vertical cycle, etc., many things have no cash and no profitability as a basis to invest in (except for exchanges).The only question I want to answer is what kind of track and what kind of assets or projects can be found to empower him, and to assist in the matching of assets and funds on a global scale. Probably like this.
It's opened:
We maintain a certain sensitivity to short-term market changes, such as the upsurge of mining exchanges, the upsurge of gambling DApps, the new IEO fundraising model, STO, stable currency, Staking, Libra and Dcep, etc. But we pay more attention to the industry cycle and foreseeable long-term dividends. Tongzhou Capital was established in the middle of 2018 when the market was most "bear" and maintained the principle of self-owned capital within a few years. The reason why it is confident to do so is because of one sentence: "Looking more at the blockchain industry, and deeply Realize that this is just the beginning."
When you are optimistic about the future of a certain asset and want to hold a large amount, will you choose to buy a large amount when there is a big bubble, or choose to buy a lot when the bubble is small? I believe everyone will choose the latter. In fact, the principle of "buy low and sell high" is very simple, but 90% of people may not be able to do it. Therefore, we are very firm in the bear market. Since mid-2018, we have invested in a total of 70 projects. As far as I know, we should be the most capital in the industry in the bear market, with a single investment amount of more than 300,000 US dollars. We have also jointly invested in many projects with Distributed.
In general, our strategy is: use the lowest cost and the most effective money to obtain the most high-quality assets, respect and respect the industry cycle, extend the time, and let the chips fly for a while.Finally, let’s talk about how to make precise investments. From 2018 to 2019, we have successfully avoided many upsurges, including the exchange mining boom, and the DApp boom dominated by EOS and TRON. We don’t understand or think it may not be the craze in the future direction after we understand it, we will boldly and firmly abide by the strategy of “more research, less action”. When others are fanatical, we can remain calm and not anxious because we think we are sober and rational. The suggestion for investment institutions is to rationally look at the development cycle of new blockchain technology, allocate assets with an appropriate proportion at the appropriate stage, do a good job in benefit-output ratio assessment, and balance development, which is a smarter choice. Thanks!
Huang Lingbo
: In fact, I have talked with many friends about how everyone feels in 2019. The basic consensus is that 2019 is a very confusing year. There are probably two main reasons: the first is that the underlying technology of the blockchain industry itself has not been obtained Strong development. The second is that many popular applications, including DeFi and DApp, are difficult to achieve large-scale or sustainable development in the end. Maybe many of the hot spots in 2018 or the hot spots that lasted in the first half of 2019 have finally become calm and rational, and many previously fanciful bubbles have begun to burst.
In general, everyone knows that it took more than 30 years for the Internet to become relatively popular. As many guests mentioned just now, the blockchain belongs to a very early stage, so this kind of confusion and trough is very normal of.
For Distributed, we were established relatively early and have experienced multiple bulls and bears. Therefore, the entire investment rhythm within Distributed is still relatively stable, but we believe that there is a good opportunity to mine "gold" during the downturn period, and teams that are relatively speculative or not capable enough in the industry will gradually be eliminated. , and the ones who really stay are really ideal or really high-quality teams. Therefore, in 2019, Fenbushi Capital will mainly seek investment from such teams in the primary market. In the secondary market, especially in the second half of the year, we will do some excavation and investment in the top 100 projects by market value, and will follow its transactions. Quantity, fundamentals, development of the main network, community conditions and prices, choose a certain project to invest and get better returns. Although it is a trough, there are still good opportunities, and everything remains relatively stable. Thanks!
Yuan Hao: I think 2019 is the year to discard the fake and keep the real. It was too hot in 2017, and after the hotness, there will be inertia in 2018, so there are many copycat projects and garbage projects on the market. In 2019, I participated in many projects like Web3, and saw relatively few primary market projects, which is a year of value return.
For our investment institutions, it is very important for you to grasp the cycle. During the bear market in 2018, everyone was afraid to make a move, especially at the end of 2018 and in the fourth quarter of 2018, many projects could not be financed at all. , but we were still shooting at that time. Only at the beginning of 2019 will there be investment income. This is counter-cyclical, which is a very important consideration for us. In particular, it is not the same as we used to do VC and PE. The cyclical nature is very strong, stronger than the original VC and PE, just like Bitcoin is halved every four years. Therefore, it is very important to grasp the timing, especially the timing of entry and exit.
The second aspect is about infrastructure. For example, there were many application layer projects in 2017 and 2018. Of course, there were also underlying infrastructure agreement parties. But at that time, more projects in the market were application layer projects. But later you will find that there are big problems in the application project, and the users cannot use it at all, or the users in the current market cannot support or accept the product. Therefore, we feel that the next stage of blockchain development still needs to improve the underlying infrastructure, and we will continue to deploy in this regard.
In other respects, as an investment institution, you must have a very strong spirit of independent judgment. There are many hot spots in 2019, such as IEO, but these hot spots are short-lived. It is not necessary for investment institutions to pursue these hot spots. Investment institutions must have long-term thinking. Judging from past investment experience, we have always hoped to invest in original projects with long-term vitality. For example, we invested in Coinbase before. Coinbase has done a very good job in compliance and has been very stable.Secondly, for those projects that have a foundation in the encryption world and have fundamental value, we can continue to increase and place bets. For some speculative or hot projects, we should observe and observe before making a move. Therefore, calm and independent judgment is also an important aspect for investment institutions. Thanks!
Wang Mengdie:
Thank you for your wonderful speeches. In fact, the speeches of the guests just now are quite inspiring. I especially like what the boss said just now about the heavy bear market. It sounds very confidence-inspiring. It is true that the media often uses concepts such as crossing bulls and bears. Next is the last question. In the new year, which track and direction of investment will everyone continue to pay attention to, or think that it is still a blue ocean of new opportunities, and which fields are many people betting on, but you are Not optimistic?
Mable Jiang: There is still a lot to say about this issue, but because of the limited time today, I will summarize it in a general way. First of all, make a small advertisement. Please move to the official website of Multicoin Capital. We have an article about the cognitive section of the new Web3 stack in 2019. There is a Chinese version. I think it is very worth reading. The topic of Web3 omits 10,000 words here.
Here we mainly talk about open finance. I think the previous roundtable discussed a lot about DeFi and CeFi, which is quite interesting. Because I have never liked the concept of DeFi, I think it makes more sense to call it open finance. The reason is still the same sentence, a black cat, a white cat, is a good cat that catches mice.
For example, in the existing financial system, there are a lot of institutions that need to be supported by a strong centralization, rather than fully decentralized. To give the best example, recently imToken released ERC20 BTC that can be used as collateral for loans on Ethereum. Based on the perception of many users, they are not necessarily willing to trust the weak center ERC20 BTC to use it. Completely exchanged for one-to-one BTC. For some individuals and institutions that need to borrow money, they can directly go to a relatively strong center like imToken to exchange it. This is a good example.
In fact, there is a mismatch between the two sides, so how can we connect the two demands and the supply side? In fact, I think we may see a big improvement in 2019. Because some institutions are already capable of bringing the fiat currencies of centralized institutions into the cryptocurrency industry. I think the first step is to mobilize global funds from the supply side, and then go a little further. What may not be seen in 2020 is the anchoring of real assets to the asset side. The problem solved in this way is the problem of global open finance in the true sense. This is a bigger point that we are looking forward to very much.
Lin Weihao:Finally, let me talk about the question Mandy just asked. Where do you think it is too hot (not suitable for investment)? At present, we are still somewhat confused about investing in decentralized applications on the chain whose mainnet has not yet been launched. It mainly refers to those decentralized products that have flourished on relatively large public chains, but it is still worth pondering, what are the risks of investing in it?
Lin Weihao:
Considering the track and direction in 2020, my idea is to focus on projects with strong viability and profitability, and then commercial application landing projects.
Everyone has been discussing that the essence of the implementation of commercial applications is actually whether the presentation of value is logical and understandable, but at present, many things are indeed incomprehensible to reason, and it may be due to the right time, place and people and problems. to avoid driving. In fact, like some trading systems that revolve around the financial attributes of the trading link, there will be a certain degree of enthusiasm at the beginning. I think this aspect still has investment value.
Benchmarking the development history of traditional finance and the existing global regulatory framework, as well as existing technologies, whether it is Dex, or centralized trading platforms, etc., should still maintain a certain degree of sensitivity and attention. Because good things can happen at any time.
For example, everyone knows that the market value of derivatives may be dozens of times that of spot commodities. However, whether the existing trading users have the conditions for participation and the cognitive threshold and whether the market liquidity has been achieved is worth investigating. I think it has not yet been achieved, that is, the time I just said has not yet arrived.In other tracks, I personally pay more attention to asset tokenization, which is also a security token that has been hot for a while. I have recently seen some project parties working very hard on their prerequisite infrastructure. go hard.
It's opened:
Compared with the Internet, the architecture of the blockchain, whether in terms of efficiency or throughput, including stability, is out of reach, which is a big difference. In addition, the decentralization and trustless mechanisms advocated by the blockchain itself are facing logical and security challenges. I think that the direction that all capital cannot ignore still revolves around the optimization of the performance of the public chain "impossible triangle".
However, we are often harsh on the public chain, expecting it to be as easy to use as the Internet, but in fact, the current situation of the public chain can already meet the basic demands of a large number of application scenarios, but DAPP has not been able to open the situation for a long time. It is worthy of our reflection.
The protocol layer is a link between the past and the future, and the lack of ecology at the protocol layer directly leads to the failure of application projects to be implemented, and the public chain ecology cannot prosper. So I am looking forward to the future, when the protocol layer is perfect and prosperous, all walks of life can be deconstructed and reconstructed based on the blockchain, and according to their own business and needs, they can freely plug in and combine protocols with different functions, bringing a qualitative leap in the value flow rate , This will be an extremely open and free new business form. This is also the Web 3.0 form we are looking forward to, and we will pay more attention to it after 2020.
Huang Lingbo:Finally, we have been looking at some middleware projects since 2018. These projects are mainly used to improve the applicability of the blockchain or improve the development environment for developers. At present, these projects are often relatively small tool projects. The quantity is small, and the needs to be solved are also small. Balanced to economics, so while I personally love this type of project, less is really invested. But this type of project is actually very practical and demanding. To be honest, it is much more realistic than many public chains I have seen. With the advent of the 1920s, I believe that the blockchain will develop more and more talents will pour in. In the future, we will pay more attention to middleware projects. The prosperity of middleware will also greatly promote the freedom, communication and prosperity of developers and innovation teams, and greatly improve the development of this new technology of blockchain.
Huang Lingbo:
Time is tight, so let’s just talk about the idea of investing in 2020. I personally think there are three investment opportunities in 2020:
The first one must be the halving of Bitcoin, so I won’t say much, everyone must have read a lot of articles.
The second one I personally think is the launch of high-quality old public chain projects, among which Polkadot and Filecoin may be more well-known. The mining of Filecoin itself and the ecological emergence of the protocol layer, or the emergence of the polkadot parachain and the protocol layer, may be a wave of investment opportunities in 2020.
Many guests have said about the protocol layer, and I also agree that the protocol layer has great opportunities, and it is still very early. However, I personally think that in 2020, the number of projects including data protocols, DeFi protocols, or governance protocols may not be too many, and they are relatively scattered. What I personally find interesting is the emergence of on-chain data indexing protocols or derivative Staking protocols or DAOs, but they will not present systematic or explosive investment opportunities, but some similar projects may appear periodically .
The third thing I personally think is that the bigger opportunity in 2020 is the growth of the global market. The growth of the global market is mainly divided into two parts: capital growth and data growth.
Let me talk about the increase in funds first, mainly institutional funds and personal funds. The main reason for the increase in institutional funds, I personally think that the global blockchain compliance policy is becoming more and more mature, so more institutions will start to tend to enter the blockchain industry . In this way, more and more institutional funds will be invested in the industry, and you can also see that the transaction data of Bakkt is gradually increasing. For this field, we think that such projects are more inclined to its compliance and its enterprises. Service capabilities.
As for personal funds, we found that many projects are doing things to lower the threshold for users, including projects such as keyless wallets or robo-advisory apps. Such projects may have certain technical barriers or certain compliance, but what may be more important to them is strong operational capabilities. Such projects are similar to Internet to C projects. Only with strong operational capabilities can they become leaders in the industry and form certain traffic entry barriers. Of course, the regions mentioned earlier, including Vietnam, etc., are also an advantage of this strong operational capability.
Then let’s talk about data increment, which is very interesting. I personally think that 2020 may be a big year for Oracle (oracle machine). Everyone should know what Oracle means. Oracle itself is divided into three categories: the first category is natively generated on the chain. Data is the original on-chain database Oracle. The second type of oracle is to cooperate with traditional institutions, grant credit to traditional institutions, let them serve as nodes of the public chain or alliance chain, and let them output data to the chain. The third category uses the governance mechanism to verify the data itself and upload it to the chain.
I personally think that the third type of Oracle is still too early, and it may not develop until M2M is relatively mature. It is the second type of Oracle that may develop vigorously in 2020. There are two reasons why I think the second type of Oracle may develop vigorously:
First, blockchain technology itself is a technology supported by governments around the world, so it has created a large number of B-type users, that is, institutional users (including governments), financial institutions or large enterprises have begun to put their data on the chain. In fact, most of the massive data in real life are in their hands, including corporate and personal financial data, identity data, consumption data, content data, and so on. If their data can be uploaded to the chain, it will be a very good infrastructure for the blockchain industry. I personally think that it is very likely that many previous application layer and protocol layer projects have not developed and this is also very related to this. This is the first reason.
The second reason is that I personally feel that more and more traditional scenarios of to C are connected to the blockchain. how to say? In the past, there were many scenarios where I wanted to do blockchain, but we found that most of the projects were created by ourselves in the industry or in the blockchain circle. This is a very difficult thing in itself. high and consume a lot of resources. So there are very few successful projects of this type, and the sustainability is poor. But I see that many projects are beginning to transform now, and they are beginning to cooperate with traditional scenarios with traffic. The business model is not pure to C, but a service model of to B to C. In traditional scenarios, users themselves do not need to know that what I buy is related to the blockchain, they just buy an item and have unique authority. This might be a good way.
What is worth mentioning here is the NFT method. NFT itself is a very good blockchain carrier for cutting into traditional scenarios. We have already seen such cases. NFT itself can be used as the carrier of some electronic certificates that need to be confirmed, including various tickets or ip content, etc. I may not be divergent enough to think, everyone can brainstorm.Overall, in terms of data increment, it is actually just the first step for the blockchain to cut into our traditional life, because it only puts the data on the chain, and the real value of the blockchain may be that after it is on the chain, various Derivative developments, including possible on-chain data transactions, multi-party privacy computing, or DeFi, regulatory technology, etc. These may be the next step, but I personally feel that it needs to be done step by step, and what may be more important in 2020 is the process of these incremental chaining and the process of capital entry. This is a personal opinion. Thanks!
Yuan Hao:
I think investing in the blockchain is very interesting, and I have shared it from the company. There are three directions:
The first one is to invest in companies with cash flow and the purpose of making money, typically similar to centralized exchanges, including Coinbase, PayPal Finance, etc., which can make money and earn cash flow. As long as these businesses are valuable and have cash flow, they can continue to invest in the long-term, and we can continue to look at them in 2020.
The second is to invest in projects that do not make money, which means Bitcoin, do you think it makes money? It does not make money, but just builds a network. Ethereum also creates a network that everyone can use on the platform. In this direction, invest in those projects with original value.
The third one is a company that does not aim to make money. What is a company that does not aim to make money? It's a little different from before. I wrote an article about middleware a few years ago. Why is middleware an area worthy of everyone's attention today? Are you saying it must be for the purpose of making money? uncertain. The teams of these companies are very passionate and dreamy, and they are also down-to-earth to contribute to the long-term development of the encrypted world. It has always been a very small circle of blockchain, and blockchain is a very small group, and the current user volume is only 30 to 50 million. If everyone in this market only does what they like to do or earns what they can earn, without long-term prospects, it will be difficult to make the industry bigger.Why do we say that the third field needs long-term attention? Because they help project developers reduce the development threshold, or improve the usability of some applications. Now you will find that DeFi projects are very popular, but they are rarely used. Why? It is because its usability is too poor and there are too few users. What are we going to do now? Middleware companies can really help bring these applications to the mainstream society. Only in the future can the blockchain have a great future and a better tomorrow. Thanks!
