2022 in the eyes of crypto bigwigs: what to watch in cryptocurrency this year?

Block unicorn

特邀专栏作者

2022-01-24 02:32

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The projects, trends and assets to watch this year.

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The projects, trends and assets to watch this year.

Author: Mario Gabriele

Original translation: Block unicorn

The reason I share this anecdote is not to show that I'm an idiot. (Although, in this case, I probably am.) More importantly, it serves to illustrate how many times we can discuss a topic before it actually sticks. Even if it's from someone you admire and respect, it can take a long time to break through the noise.

Today’s post tries to shorten that process for all of us, instead of waiting for the most exciting crypto projects and trends of the year to happen, I asked some of the most thoughtful people I know to share what they are paying attention to. Additionally, I've asked them to explain what makes them energized about their choices to help us go beyond pure approval.

While this isn't investment advice -- if you want proof of the volatility in this industry, you just need to look back at the pullbacks of the past few days -- by the end of today's article, I hope you understand what it is worth paying attention to this year.

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Matt Shapiro, Partner, Multcoin Capital

Building infrastructure with cryptocurrency incentives

Cryptocurrencies are starting to touch the real world in interesting ways. The technological underpinnings of cryptocurrencies are advanced enough that entrepreneurs outside of cryptocurrencies with deep domain knowledge and expertise realize it can be leveraged to disrupt existing businesses or revolutionize or break the rules of traditional industries. The best example so far is Helium, which disrupts wireless networks by using cryptoeconomic incentives to facilitate the construction of real-world infrastructure.

But the market has two paths. Simply organizing the supply side will not work unless there is demand. Render Network is uniquely positioned due to its relationship with Otoy. The company has been at the forefront of rendering software for over a decade. Today, their flagship software solution, Octane Render, is widely regarded as the best-in-class GPU rendering solution. It is used by major movie studios including Disney and tens of thousands of digital artists including Beeple. Otoy provides Render Network with an embedded user base of customers currently doing rendering elsewhere, including Amazon and Nvidia.

structured products

RNDR is a forgotten 2017 coin that is getting a major update. The token design is being updated to include staking and governance features. The rendering network is being migrated to Solana for speed and execution, and integrated with Metaplex. Other major rendering software solutions, such as Redshift, have joined the rendering network.

For these reasons, Render Network is positioned as a core part of the infrastructure connecting web3 and Metaverse.

structured products

As DeFi has grown, I've been keeping an eye on structured products. DeFi yields fell across the board as new capital entered the space to offset demand from borrowers. But new capital inflows have not slowed. They are increasing as traditional asset managers join in, looking to take advantage of inefficiencies and arbitrage opportunities.

Structured products are in an interesting position as more and more capital searches for income and derivatives agreements continue to roll out. For example, covered call option strategies are well established in traditional finance, but are often too complex for most retail investors to understand and execute quickly. The programmability of encryption removes this complexity, making it simple (one-click) for long-term holders to generate returns on their assets by writing covered call options.

This part of the market is growing rapidly and gaining impressive traction. This includes structured product protocols such as Ribbon and StakeDAO on Ethereum, and Katana and Exotic on Solana. Demand for these products also benefits underlying options protocols such as Opyn and Hegic on Ethereum, and Zeta and PsyOptions on Solana. It’s still early days, but this is one area of DeFi to watch.

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Li Jin, co-founder of Variant

Crypto will be a test bed for ambitious economic and social experiments that can create a fairer internet than exists in the web2 world.

Income inequality has increased in most developed countries in recent decades. The concept of Universal Basic Capital (UBC), or Universal Basic Wealth, addresses structural inequality by giving people ownership of value-added assets. Examples include Alaska's Social Wealth Fund, which pays dividends from the state's oil revenues, and Singapore's Central Provident Fund. UBC has advantages over simply redistributing income: basic capital can serve as a safety net, increase bargaining power, empower the ability to take entrepreneurial risk and focus on long-term goals, and ease financial anxiety.

While economists, executives, and political leaders debate how to implement UBC on a larger scale, DAOs are poised to experiment here. According to DeepDAO statistics, as of December 2021, total assets under management (AUM) of DAO treasury bonds listed on the platform totaled $16 billion, up from $400 million in January. A portion of these treasury funds could be earmarked for the DAO's membership base and invested over time to earn yield. Members can then use these accounts for retirement, education, healthcare or start-up capital. Responses here include samples of DAOs attempting to create a form of basic income or basic capital, including Worldcoin, $UBI, Impact Market, as well as smaller experiments such as FWB's artist-in-residence grants or SuperHi's creative basic income.

Cryptocurrencies give us the toolset to build new economies and societies. With that comes the opportunity to ask how we want these economies to work and what kind of society we can create. I'm excited to see DAOs considering token design and financial strategy not just from a short-term user acquisition or engagement perspective, but as the foundation of a new, fairer world.

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Aaron Wright, co-founder of Tribute Labs and LAO

great mix

In 2022, things will start to get weird. These three categories will continue to grow and intermingle. DeFi will enter NFT in terms of lending and staking. NFTs will flirt with the mechanics of DeFi. NFT will be bent into membership cards and social communities, with social tokens as the incentive mechanism within the community.

DAOs and DAO Networks will continue to thrive, supporting artists, creators, and novel financial products. They will enable a growing set of open source tools, IP sets, and a growing number of public products. Tools (especially DAO tools, bridges, zk-tech, messaging, privacy, and storage) will improve and start to mature, unlocking more and more ways for people to cooperate in emerging multiplayer game modes.

Ceramic

Millions, if not more, will join cryptocurrencies through NFTs, opening up a new class of collectors. NFT will no longer be limited to PFPs, game items, virtual worlds, and digital art. They will start cannibalizing other forms of media (with no apparent headwinds), such as fashion and music.

Who knows what will happen to the price, but if the web3 ecosystem can attract more capital, the wealth it generates will increasingly be used to solve harder problems, such as decentralized science and climate change.

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Data is everything. It's a valuable asset in its own right, as evidenced by the rise of companies like Facebook and Google. Both companies have become some of the most profitable businesses in the world thanks to the data they harvest from billions of users.

No one is better positioned to embrace this radical transformation than Ceramic. Ceramic, an open-source protocol for decentralized applications, is building the data rails of web3. For developers, it enables them to build applications without the long-needed underlying trusted centralized database server. Ceramic breaks down data silos for end users and lets them transfer data across platforms. By doing so, it puts control of the data in the hands of the user.

Ceramic is rapidly gaining adoption, with notable projects already building on top of the protocol. With an incredible team and a huge blank canvas for problem spaces, Ceramic is one to watch in 2022.

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Multichain and 2.0

In the long run, successful competitor chains will attract new types of applications that are priced beyond Ethereum and take advantage of the distinct architectural strengths of the different chains. We are starting to see examples of games and NFT marketplaces developed locally outside of the Ethereum mainnet, but this space is just getting started.

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DeFi Token Economics Revival

Protocol-owned liquidity, vote locks, bonds, curve wars — the DeFi ecosystem has seen rapid innovation in economic design around governance tokens. Best practice sets for these protocols are rapidly evolving. Thanks to these more favorable designs and incentives, new protocols can quickly gain market share. Early DeFi projects are reevaluating and restructuring their core economics in light of recent innovations. Communities are being disrupted and realigned. Over the next year, I think we'll see a clear distinction between protocols that can adapt and integrate these new mechanisms, and those that remain stuck in the old ways.

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Gaby Goldberg, investor in TCG Crypto

wallet as identity

All wallets to date have been built and designed around transactions. Many wallets have been in use for over three years and were created specifically for buying, trading and holding tokens. Since then, the purpose of the wallet has changed as the ecosystem has continued to expand. As we move into web3 - a more social, open and interoperable internet - we see interest in wallets as places to store NFTs (see Rainbow or Coinbase Wallet) and multimedia experiences (see Glass, Sound and Altered State Machine) increasing demand). In short, wallets are becoming where people want to spend their time. Existing wallets will not (and, frankly, cannot) adapt to this new behavioral preference.

When we consider how this ecosystem-wide shift might occur, we can examine the factors driving user adoption of wallets that previously reached mass. As a case study, MetaMask had 545,000 monthly active users (MAU) in July 2020. This metric skyrocketed to over 10 million by August 2021, driven by a surge in interest in the "DeFi Summer," in which yield farmers act as consumers. At the time, it was an obvious choice for consumers to use MetaMask to take advantage of DeFi gains, as MetaMask was more accessible (and widely supported) than its competitors.

Stader Labs

We can draw parallels between this example and today's web3 ecosystem. The supply of NFT projects, new yield farming opportunities, and social web3 platforms are all at an all-time high and growing. Traditional wallets consume new demand initially. But as the variety of applications, use cases, and behaviors expands, users (and developers) will demand more integrated wallets that leverage on-chain sources and transfer your digital identity across applications and chains. For these reasons, I am excited about wallets like Genesis, Bitski, and Sudo.

My brilliant friend and investment partner Jay Drain said it best: "Crypto wallets look very much like inventory right now... In the future they will more clearly represent our digital identities by making them composable across the web." I I suggest you check out his full work here.

True Ventures investor John O'Connell

One project I'm very excited about is Stader Labs. Stader is building the "Amazon of Staking" - making it easy for users to stake their cryptocurrency and earn passive income through a variety of strategies based on user preferences.

Launched on Terra, Stader allows users to automatically combine their LUNA staking rewards to maximize returns while distributing their holdings to a variety of different validators to encourage further decentralization across the Terra blockchain. Stader also launched LunaX, a liquid staking derivative of LUNA that allows users to interact with other DeFi applications in the Terra ecosystem.

Today, Stader manages approximately 6.1 million LUNAs (worth approximately $490 million at the time of writing) of various strategies. In the future, Stader plans to launch similar products on other blockchains, including Solana and Ethereum. They will also introduce advanced strategies to further enhance the usefulness of their platform to their growing community (disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in Stader).

change state machine

Another project I'm excited about is Altered State Machine (ASM), which is building a protocol to add enhanced AI capabilities to NFT items. ASM recently abandoned a project called "Brains". NFTs are unique artificial intelligences that can be trained and used in different ways.

For example, ASM launched the Artificial Intelligence Football Association (AIFA). Holders can use their brains to participate in AIFA's money-making video game with special "All-Star" characters. As brains are used in games like this one, the skills and abilities they develop make them even more useful in the future. Users can also train them passively using ASM's simulation modeling technology.

In the future, Brains will be able to be used in other DeFi, gaming and crypto environments. Holders will even combine Brains to mint NFTs, allowing newcomers to join the ecosystem (disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in ASM).

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Andy Weissman, GP (Fund Manager) of USV

I am very curious to see what will happen in the ever-evolving world of digital fashion. Digital identities clearly matter – 4.5 billion social media consumers already use digital identities and personas. As Dani Loftus, founder of digital studio Draup, writes:

The personas that form the basis of your identity are not curated from your physical life, but created entirely digitally, giving you the opportunity to express yourself in entirely new ways.

What new forms of self-expression will emerge? What new tools and platforms will be invented for emerging designers? What new ways to wear, share, sell, distribute? What happens when you mix these concepts with the core principles of web3 - composability, transferability?

I'm looking at some names: Dani Loftus, UNXD, DressX, The Fabricant, Artisans, Charli Cohen, RED DAO, and XXXXTH (note: some of these luminaries are my friends!).

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rise of pseudonyms

The last year has seen an increase in anonymous influencers in gaming and crypto, from well-known creators (Dream, Corpse Husband, CodeMiko) to more niche but highly engaged thought leaders with NFT-based identities (Gmoney, Punk 6529, 4156). There are also examples in art and fashion. We'll see more people join this cadre; people will use multiple identities, just as some identities will be made up of multiple people. We've seen massive pseudonymization on platforms like Reddit, Discord, Tumblr, and even parts of Twitter and Instagram.

This trend has no clear connection to web3. But NFT identity, on-chain reputation, decentralization, and composability are critical to its development. As we spend more and more of our lives in digital spaces, I hope that flexible identities will be as important a factor in shaping the desired future as digital currencies and property rights.

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Vertical NFT Market

OpenSea is the biggest winner in our portfolio. While it will continue to be a generational company and the dominant NFT secondary market, I believe specific verticals will carve out niches with better UI/UX, search and discovery. SuperRare is a successful example of high-end 1/1 crypto art, but there will be others in categories like photography (Sloika), metaverse (Metahood), and music (Catalog).

I will specifically highlight music NFTs, which surprisingly haven't exploded yet, unlike other categories like fine art, collectibles, and games, but I feel collectors' tastes are changing rapidly. Leading music NFT marketplace Catalog had a breakout month in October, with volume charts reminiscent of what I saw before the crypto art explosion I saw in SuperRare in early 2020. For music, it's a question of when not if.

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Tina He, co-founder of 0xStation

Birth of a new "city"

Psychological undercurrents have been gathering at this point for some time. Both web2 and web3 startups are riding the wave from different directions and with different vehicles. Both argue that the democratizing power of tools enables mass consumers to participate in an economy once controlled by a few institutions or companies.

The "software is eating the world" argument is still being played on a large scale in web2. For most web2 companies, a cohesive, smooth, and delightful user experience abstracts the legal plumbing and regulatory alignment done by SLAs, laborious data digitization, and standard harmonization. For web3 companies, these institutions are being created as entirely new entities and rapidly gaining legitimacy. The former will fight for consumer attention, while the latter will fight to build the guardrails of legitimacy and invite a whole new working class to help them get there.

Music NFT

The most exciting trend in 2022 will be to see how the story of this many cities unfolds - giving birth to a new class of workers, citizens, leaders and infrastructure. – find Tina here

first level titleCooper Turley, full-time DAO
Music NFTRanging from indie artists like Daniel Allan and Haleek Maul to Nas and 3LAU. Artists are fully tagging audio files, giving fans a way to collect their favorite songs or recordings. Here are some market leaders:
Table of contents.As the premier 1/1 music NFT marketplace, Catalog is the first major platform to tokenize audio files by building on Zora. It features a variety of established artists, up-and-coming acts and Genesis records. Catalog has sold more than $2 million in recordings to date and has become a cornerstone of the music NFT movement.

Throwing a listening party has never been more satisfying. Sound lets musicians share new music by releasing a set of numbered NFTs, enabling listeners to support their favorite artists. Early versions are considered more valuable than later versions, incentivizing discovery. So far, Sound has held 29 audition sessions with no seats in a row, all of which ended within the first minute of launch. Sound is one to keep an eye on as the secondary market continues to develop.

Earlier this week, Royal launched its first product, enabling fans to collect NFTs by directly claiming royalties. By enabling credit card transactions, Royal appears to have attracted many non-crypto natives — 40% of participants joined the decline using this method. For those new to web3, Royal offers a promising solution.

Beyond music NFTs, the space includes a growing number of labels, agencies, and collectives coming together to collect music. Whether you're a fan, degen, or artist, there's something for everyone.

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DAO ecology

first level titleHanel Baveja, USV Investor

Reimagining the structures that make drug development obscure and dislocated today may require a completely orthogonal, non-obvious perspective: DeSci.

It broadens the idea of how to be a new scientific intellectual property stakeholder and aggregate resources - human and capital - in new ways through DAOs and other web3 structures to bring more new intellectual property to the world. Perhaps DeSci's most radical vision empowers new and larger groups of stakeholders—patients, researchers, and enthusiasts—with positive market effects, resulting in cheaper, better products for all.

Boring Ape Yacht Club

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Alexis Ohanian, founder of 776

Boring Ape Yacht Club

As an early ape holder, I'm biased, I've converted a lot of people from my old co-founder Garry to my own wife (I bought her as a gift), but I think we'll go from BAYC in 2022 Get More This resets our expectations of what NFTs x Culture can do.

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DAO as a new subreddit

DAOs leverage both the internet and encryption to enable tribes of strangers to use pools of resources for a common purpose. With DAOs, people can now pool resources together and decide what to do with them through a governance process. The rate at which DAOs are created has grown exponentially — what started as a trickle of one or two new DAOs per day has now turned into a torrent. The largest DAOs control coffers worth billions of dollars, issue grants and employ large teams. In contrast, the smallest DAO could be a group of friends pooling their resources to purchase NFTs.

Ceramic

DAOs offer jobs, donate to charities, fund initiatives, contribute to political campaigns, and throw great parties. In the future, we may have as many DAOs as there are subreddits - in addition to forums, these organizations will be able to direct resources toward ideals they care about.

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David Phelps, co-founder of Ecodao

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If you were a scholar in the years before the printing press, chances are you were also a navigator — spending most of your time neither reading nor lecturing, but traveling between libraries studying and making copies books. You moved, but the books didn't. Of course, the printing press changed all that: now books could be moved, so you didn't have to, and centuries of revolution followed. But for all the advances in technology, in today's internet, we're mostly preprinters. We cannot transfer the people we follow, the types of media we like, the reputations and audiences we build — our data — as a platform. Like academics, we spend our time moving between platforms; media on those platforms doesn't.

What would happen if our data were transferable? We should see at least four major social consequences:

1. People can track the impact of creative work being shared, used and monetized across the furthest reaches of the internet.

2. People will share more data with the platform to improve performance and recommendations as it improves their experience across the web.

3. People will be incentivized to contribute to public datasets that result in better analytics and social graphs on which the platform can innovate. AI can use this information to automate many of our everyday online tasks.

In other words, data portability represents a massive societal shift that shifts power from platforms to users. Or rather, data portability shifts power from platforms to protocols, as users can only manage and transfer their data on common tracks that standardize, validate, and stream such data. Platforms must be built on common data rails to leverage each other's content and audiences. Still, as users move their tokens, NFTs, content, followers, and reputation from one to the other, as Joel Monegro suggested a few years ago, they also lose the moat. At the same time, the moats of data protocols are getting thicker in terms of getting users to port data in the first place.

This behavior is what Ceramic achieved when developing the dataflow blockchain, letting us own our data. This means we can monetize our data, set up automatic commissions when anyone uses it, and earn rewards from competing to win our platform. For that matter, we can also track and demonstrate the impact of creative work: imagine writing a song and not only getting paid when others play it at events to make money, but also allowing others to recreate it without permission. Remix, the revenue streams back to you while collecting data on its usage, which you can use to find career opportunities while connecting with others with similar tastes. In web3, our ability to manage data will allow us to manage our entire lives online. NFTs are just the front end of how we are viewed as data in the metaverse.

If the 2010s were the decade that distributed ledger technology (DLT) enabled sovereign finance, the 2020s will be the decade that provides sovereign data of all types. We can go back to our ancient scholars, wandering between libraries in a vain pursuit of sharing and translating each other's texts so that the libraries might eventually resemble each other. In the less poetic web3 data stack, Arweave is like a library, hosting books, while protocols like The Graph and Kyve act like librarians to help index and query the books we need.

But Ceramic is unique not only because it provides a common rail for the platform, but also because it allows us to write books in libraries in the first place. Providing tools to own and manage our data gives us the incentive to collect and create new types of data that may even exceed our imagination. That's huge potential. Not only can we own our data online as individuals, but we can reap the rewards of sharing it, collectivizing it, and reorganizing it in new public social structures that we have not yet fully conceived.

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Token Weighted Voting

With DAOs becoming one of the de facto structures in web3, with a lot of money and millions of members, the stakes of getting things right are much higher. All of this makes organizational design failure in a DAO a considerable risk.

0xStation

In 2022, I expect to see major experiments in governance, slowly moving away from token-based voting to other mechanisms for distributing governance power based on merit, background and expertise required for decisions. As tokens become less important to governance, DAOs will be forced to ask themselves what the intrinsic value of tokens really is, which may be a compelling function to explore new mechanisms that give token value beyond governance powers.

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Syndicate

Brian Flynn, co-founder of Rabbit Hole

If we're playing great online games, the next level of play is trading "social points" for "contribution points". I think 0xStation will play a key role in this transition. The project is building the infrastructure to connect talent to the right projects in web3 to help members of the new economy work and play. As these individuals develop and engage, their achievements will be displayed on the blockchain, creating a log of skills and abilities. Over time, I expect on-chain reputation to replace social status on sites like Twitter to better showcase the value of a particular individual and the work they've accomplished, and 0xStation will be a place to watch.

Julia Lipton, Founder, Awesome People Ventures

I continue to be bullish on DAOs, it’s still early days, but it’s clear that DAOs will unlock new types of organizations, projects, and investments that were not possible before.

JellyFi

A key player in this space is Syndicate. They make creating investment groups very easy. Communities form overnight to invest in NFTs, DeFi projects and even startups. Want to buy 100 crypto squads or run a DeFi investment fund? Interested in angel investing with your friends? Syndicate is probably your best bet.

Setting up a traditional investment fund is expensive, laborious and legally complex. Syndicate enables projects, friends, and a trustless community to coordinate funds for investment almost instantly. We'll continue to see new ways of aligning labor and capital in 2022, and I'm excited to see what happens next.

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I'm excited to introduce two projects with incredible female co-founders, the first being JellyFi, which provides an easy source of liquidity for other DeFi projects. They offer undercollateralized loans compared to the typical overcollateralized loans we see in DeFi today.

Their clients are audited institutional borrowers (DAOs, dApps, and DeFi protocols) who use liquidity like a revolving line of credit. This structure allows lenders to earn higher returns than over-collateralized DeFi lending platforms.

This excites me because it provides an easier and more efficient form of credit for the ecosystem. This will become increasingly important as high-potential DeFi projects experience growing pains or need to weather temporary setbacks.

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dematerialized

While cryptocurrencies are currently dominated by men, many female-led projects are capturing our attention and imagination. Dematerialized, the Metaverse's Net-a-Porter, is one of them. They curate and launch digital and 'physical' fashion in collaboration with existing fashion brands and web3 artists. I bought my first phygital costume (boots with 3D NFT) from The Dematerialized in 2021. Boots are definitely cooler than me.

Beyond the otherworldly merchandise, I love two key points about the project: its mission to tackle waste in the fashion industry by shifting consumption to digital platforms, and its commitment to attracting and guiding newcomers through a familiar user experience. Users use cryptocurrencies.

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