Is the blockchain industry currently dominated by individual entrepreneurs?
A photo recently swiped the screen on the Internet and the currency circle at the same time:
The five people from left to right in this photo are Shen Nanpeng of Sequoia Capital, Feng Bo, founding partner of Ceyuan Venture Capital and founder of Dragonfly Capital, Vitalik Buterin (V God), founder of Ethereum, and founder of Meituan Wang Xing and Zhang Tao, founder of Dianping.com.
This is a blockchain conference hosted by Dragonfly Capital in Beijing. The conference mainly discusses topics such as smart contracts, centralized finance, decentralized finance, and investment trends.
In the meeting, bigwigs from the Internet, venture capital and blockchain are rarely in the same frame.
The reason why the photos caused the screen to be swiped is mainly because several bigwigs are very important in their respective fields, and their being in the same frame makes everyone wonder if they will conspire together to do things together.
In addition to V God in the photo, several other ordinary investors in the currency circle may not necessarily know it. Let us share with you one by one:
1) Shen Nanpeng, Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital China Fund, established in September 2005, currently manages more than US$3.7 billion in funds.
It has invested in many giants in the Internet industry: Ali, Didi, Toutiao, Kuaishou, Meituan, etc.
In the blockchain industry, Sequoia China's most well-known investment is Bitmain, the world's largest mining machine company, and has invested in both the A round and the B round. In addition, Sequoia Capital is relatively well-known in the United States for participating in the decentralized storage project Filecoin.
2) Feng Bo, Founding Partner of Ceyuan Venture Capital and Founder of Dragonfly Capital
Famous cases of CEYUAN venture capital investment in the Internet field include Xunlei, Lightingjishi and Meitu.
In the field of blockchain, Feng Bo paid attention to its value early on. As early as 2014, Ceyuan Venture Capital led the round A financing of the exchange OKCoin, and then participated in the C round of OKCoin in 2017.
Feng Bo established Dragonfly Capital, a new fund dedicated to investing in blockchain projects last year, and has invested in many top blockchain projects and top DeFi projects in the industry: cross-chain star Cosmos, expansion project Coda, decentralized finance dYdX, decentralized Lending Compound and so on.
3) Wang Xing, founder of Meituan
Whether you are an investor in the currency circle or not, you will know about Meituan, because most of us may have ordered meals with Meituan.
Meituan currently does not have much public information about its layout in the blockchain field, but Wang Xing himself has expressed his views on the news in the blockchain field. For example, he once commented that "Facebook's strategy for promoting Libra is very clear... When encountering a very small number of powerful countries, of course, they should bow their heads and collude with each other." "...
The framed photos of these five people aroused a lot of associations, especially imagining whether the Internet giants will make any big moves in the blockchain field next.
Among the four people except V God, Feng Bo from Ceyuan Ventures is actually the one who has worked the hardest on the blockchain. Even this blockchain conference was organized by Dragonfly Capital, which he initiated. Sequoia Capital’s main investments in the blockchain field are generally large-scale projects with simple and clear application scenarios.
Traditional Internet people like Wang Xing and Zhang Tao, whose main business is for mass consumers, are actually still on the sidelines until now. Although they will also pay attention to the blockchain,But I think it will be very difficult for them to find business scenarios similar to directly facing mass consumers in the blockchain for a long time to come.
The root cause is also the limitations of blockchain technology itself, and this limitation will remain in place for the foreseeable few years. So they pay attention to it, but if they want to take action in this field, they will always feel that they can't do it.
Is it possible for them to allocate part of their resources to the blockchain field? I think even if it does, the rewards will not be as good as expected, and the effect will not be very good, because the way of playing in this field is fundamentally different from the traditional Internet.
The way of smashing funds, obtaining traffic, and creating thresholds in the traditional Internet is completely unworkable in blockchain applications. And the bosses who are used to that way will feel inconvenient in this field and will be constrained everywhere.
Is the blockchain still the world of individual entrepreneurs?
Until now, almost all traditional corporate giants have entered the blockchain not directly to consumers, but to enterprises or to transform existing technologies at the technical level. And such an approach has not produced obvious commercial benefits so far. Therefore, for the giants, entering the blockchain is not so much a new field of layout as a hot spot. They will not make great efforts, let alone Really put your heart into it.
Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that the blockchain field is still dominated by individual entrepreneurs now and for a period of time in the future. For ordinary entrepreneurs who want to start a business in this field, they must seize this opportunity.
