Author: Frank, Foresight News

2022 has passed by in a flash, and this year's industry is even more volatile, especially after experiencing several "black swan" events, which have carried out extreme stress tests on the entire encryption market from many aspects, and thus contributed enough attention from inside and outside the industry and hot topics.

Everything in the past is prologue. This article counts the search results of Foresight News users this year, and merges the capitalization of the same concept, and sorts out the hot search list for 2022 (including the hot search list on the site and the Mirror hot search list).

Through this list, we can not only get a glimpse of the hottest and most concerned projects or tracks in the eyes of users this year, but perhaps we can also use this as a lesson to discover the possibility of sparks hidden behind and harvest a survival guide for 2023 .

The annual hot search list on the site

Aptos: Top New Public Chain of the Year

It is not surprising that "Aptos" can rank first in the annual hot search list on the site this year. Although it only started the airdrop of the token APT in October, as a new public chain leader born with a golden spoon in its mouth, Aptos This year, whether it is in terms of community attention or ecological enthusiasm, it has successfully taken over the baton from EOS, Polkadot, Solana, and Avalanche in history, and has become a new top public chain.

If we look back at Aptos’s major project progress nodes since this year, we will also find that it will almost run through 2022:

• On March 15, Aptos completed a strategic financing of US$200 million, led by a16z, with participation from Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures;

• On May 13th, Aptos opened the incentive testnet 1 registration, which was officially opened on May 16th and lasted until May 27th;

• On July 1st, Aptos opened the registration of Incentive Testnet 2, which was officially launched on July 12th and lasted until July 22nd;

• On August 19th, Aptos opened the registration of Incentive Testnet 3, which will last until September 9th;

• On July 25, Aptos completed a financing of US$150 million, led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto;

• On October 18th, Aptos went live on the main network, and immediately released an overview of token economics. The initial total supply of APT is 1 billion, of which 51.02% are allocated to the community, 19.00% to core contributors, and 16.50% to the foundation. 13.48% allocated to investors;

• On October 19th, Aptos issued an airdrop of about 20 million APT tokens to users who completed the Aptos incentive testnet application or minted APTOS:ZERO testnet NFT;

Aptos, which started in 2022, will gradually usher in ecological prosperity in 2023, or it will replicate the development trajectory of EOS and Polkadot, which is still unknown.

Airdrop: a core topic throughout the year

"Airdrop" is a hot word this year after Aptos. From APE in March to OP in June, to APT and Blur in October for multiple rounds of packages, the large airdrops that have been cashed out this year have almost run through the whole year :

• On March 17th, Yuga Labs, the parent company of BAYC, launched the token APE, with a total of 1 billion pieces, of which 62% will be allocated to the community, 15% to airdrops, 47% to ecological funds, 8% to BAYC founders, 16% Allocated to Yuga Labs team, 14% to partners and investors;

• On June 1st, Optimism officially opened to claim the airdrop of OP governance tokens, with a total initial issuance of 429,496,7296 tokens, which will be inflated at a fixed rate of 2% per year, and 5% of the total tokens will be airdropped in the first round;

• On October 18th, an overview of token economics was released on Aptos. The total initial supply of APT is 1 billion. About 20 million APT tokens will be airdropped to users who complete the Aptos incentive testnet application or mint APTOS:ZERO testnet NFT ;

• On October 20th, Blur was officially launched, and will airdrop Packages to all users who have traded NFT in the past 6 months; then on December 6th, the second round of airdrops will be opened, the scale is ten times that of the first one, and the third The round of airdrops will end in January next year, and BLUR tokens will also be launched at that time;

At the same time, potential airdrops such as Sui, zkSync, StarkNet, Scroll, Aleo, Sei, etc. may also have high hopes for everyone, so this year everyone’s participation in the testnet and airdrops has become a basic operation, and it is also destined to make the airdrop issue a reality. The enthusiasm continues (see the timeline "Summary of Selected Potential Airdrops").

Sui: The protagonist of the new public chain who comes first

The evolution of "Sui"'s popularity this year has perfectly verified the logic of a good meal in the encrypted world. As two related projects that also came out of Diem's ​​core team members, Sui is more like Aptos than the powerful Aptos. In Cosmos back then, Aptos was like the beloved Polkado back then:

At the beginning, the attention and discussion of Sui was far less than that of Aptos, especially after the release of tokens by Aptos in October this year, the popularity was once far behind.

However, in the past month, unlike the voice of the Aptos ecosystem that has gradually diminished, Sui’s popularity has remained high with the disclosure of details such as token distribution that everyone has been looking forward to. With the arrival of 2023, Sui will most likely become one of the protagonists who have received much attention like Aptos this year.

FTX: The largest industry black swan in 2022

The explosion of "FTX" should be the black swan event that has the most profound impact on the industry this year, and it is also regarded as the Lehman crisis in the encrypted world. Its large capital holes and outrageous operations have led to no one knowing who will be next The object of the explosion.

Therefore, its impact on the entire market is not only in terms of assets and prices, but more importantly, it has a profound impact on industry confidence and regulatory expectations: one of the world's top three exchanges, and a leading company that is in the limelight, privately misappropriated user assets It even led to a shortfall of billions of dollars, so that it collapsed overnight.

You must know that just a few months ago, FTX did not seem to be affected by Terra and Three Arrows Capital. It gave the market the feeling that it had money in its pockets, attacked on all sides, and expanded on the M&A front—won Voyager for about $1.422 billion. The bankruptcy auction defeated previously rumored competitors such as Binance, and at the same time expressed its consideration of bidding for the assets of the bankrupt encryption lending platform Celsius Network and so on.

So few people could have imagined that the beginning of all this would be so dramatic, and no one would have imagined that the collapse of a $32 billion giant would be so rapid, and the series of chain reactions it triggered, whether it is FTX and its related entities themselves, Centralized institutions such as Genesis and DCG are still the counterparties of the transaction, and the crisis is still in deep fermentation.

The arrest of SBF by the Bahamas police on December 13th can be regarded as turning a new page for the entire FTX incident. The aftermath of the incident is expected to continue to rippling in 2023, and the battle line is destined to be long.

Cosmos: implicitly the second largest public chain ecology

In the first half of this year, "Cosmos" took advantage of the hotness of the LUNA and Terra ecology, and the situation changed for a while, and the development momentum was obviously far better than the now lonely Polkadot parachain project.

Even though the subsequent crash of Terra had a serious impact on the deeply involved Cosmos ecology, unlike Polkadot's parachain auctions and project attention, Cosmos is still a hot project, especially with the release of 2.0 at the Cosmoverse conference. version of the white paper, which greatly expands the narrative space in terms of inter-chain security, liquidity staking, new token models, and fee mechanisms.

Although the release of ATOM tokens may bring selling pressure to the secondary market in the short to medium term, it is undoubtedly a boost to the longer-term narrative. After all, there are stories to tell, and it is the public chain, etc. The source of the endless life of encryption projects.

Delphi Digital, which previously focused on the research and development of the Terra ecology, also stated that it will focus on the Cosmos ecosystem in the future. Although the performance in terms of security and technical issues is not satisfactory, at least for now, Cosmos is implicitly becoming a platform in 2023. The trend of the second largest public chain ecology after Ethereum.

Financing: More than 20 billion-dollar financings throughout the year

"Financing" continues to receive attention as a major topic. Here is a brief list of some "well-known projects + more than 100 million US dollars" financing events worth paying attention to this year (some projects with low correlation and special track are excluded. , but according to incomplete statistics, there are still more than 20 cases, and they are relatively balanced before and after, which shows that although there are constant turmoil this year, the financing boom is still strong):

• Solana ecological wallet Phantom completed a new round of financing of US$109 million led by Paradigm, with a valuation of US$1.2 billion;

• Blockchain development platform Alchemy completed $200 million in financing at a valuation of $10.2 billion, led by Lightspeed and Silver Lake;

• Amber Group completed a financing of US$200 million at a valuation of US$3 billion, with participation from Temasek, Sequoia China, Pantera Capital and Tiger Global Management;

• Immutable, the development company of Immutable X, the NFT second-layer expansion solution, completed a $200 million financing at a valuation of $2.5 billion, led by Temasek;

• ConsenSys completed a $450 million Series D round of financing at a valuation of $7 billion, led by ParaFi Capital;

• Optimism completed $150 million in Series B financing, co-led by a16z and Paradigm;

• Yuga Labs, the parent company of BAYC, completed a new round of financing of US$450 million at a valuation of US$4 billion, led by a16z;

• Helium completed a $200 million Series D financing at a valuation of $1.2 billion, led by Tiger Global;

• LayerZero Labs, the development team of LayerZero, announced the completion of a US$135 million A+ round of financing, co-led by FTX Ventures, Sequoia Capital and a16z;

• NEAR Protocol completes $350 million in financing, led by Tiger Global;

• Indian encryption exchange CoinDCX completed a $135 million D round of financing at a valuation of $2.15 billion, led by Pantera Capital and Steadview Capital;

• KuCoin completed a financing of US$150 million at a valuation of US$10 billion, led by Jump Crypto, with participation from Circle Ventures, IDG Capital, and Matrix Partners;

• Chainalysis completed a $170 million Series F round at a valuation of $8.6 billion, led by the company’s existing investor, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC;

• Magic Eden, the Solana ecological NFT market, completed a US$130 million Series B financing at a valuation of US$1.6 billion, co-led by Electric Capital and Greylock;

• Digital asset brokerage company FalconX completed a $150 million Series D round of financing at a valuation of $8 billion, led by GIC and B Capital;

• Gnosis Safe, a digital asset management platform, announced that it has changed its name to Safe and completed a US$100 million financing led by 1 kx;

• Limit Break, the parent company of the NFT project DigiDaigaku, has completed two rounds of financing totaling $200 million, led by Josh Buckley, Paradigm and Standard Crypto;

• Sui development team Mysten Labs completed $300 million in financing, led by FTX Ventures;

• Animoca Brands completes $110 million in financing led by Temasek;

• Uniswap Labs completed a $165 million Series B round of financing at a valuation of $1.66 billion, led by Polychain Capital;

• zkSync development company Matter Labs completed a $200 million Series C round led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly;

• Aztec Network completed $100 million in financing, led by a16z crypto;

• Amber Group completed $300 million in financing, led by Fenbushi Capital US;

Ethereum: Entering a New Era of PoS

The biggest industry event of "Ethereum" this year is the PoS merger - at 14:42 on September 15, 2022, Ethereum successfully reached the total difficulty of the main network merger terminal, and the last block in the PoW era was mined by F 2 Pool Out, the block height is 15537393.

The Ethereum execution layer (i.e. the previous main network) and the proof-of-stake consensus layer (i.e. the beacon chain) triggered the merge mechanism at block height 15537393, and produced the first PoS block (at height 15537394).

Hello, PoS; Byebye, PoW. As today's 100-billion-dollar behemoth, Ethereum, which was born nearly ten years ago, has completely become the leading currency representing PoS, thus bringing the encryption competition into a new era. In 2023, it will also be a new era after Ethereum fully enters PoS. One year will usher in many key milestones such as the upgrade of Shanghai, which is worth looking forward to.

zkSync: the main force of zkEVM whose role is getting more and more important

As one of the most anticipated future directions of Ethereum, "zkSync" has always been regarded as the main force of the entire Layer 2, especially the zkEVM test gold, and the launch of the 2.0 mainnet in October this year also means that ZK Rollup is compatible with EVM , zkSync is at the forefront of many Layer 2 competitions.

At this year's Korea Blockchain Week, Vitalik also reiterated his optimism for ZK Rollup in the Layer War:

I still believe that some Optimistic Rollup projects today will be successful, but it is expected that some Optimistic Rollup projects dedicated to scaling Ethereum today will turn to embrace ZK-Rollups, because ZK-Rollups have "fundamental advantages", and even bluntly stated that "ZK Rollup is likely to be Ethereum Workshop's top Layer 2 expansion weapon".

Now against the background of depressed sentiment in the encryption market, Layer 2, especially zkEVM, will play a particularly important role in the entire Ethereum ecosystem. How zkSync will perform in 2023 (when will it issue coins) is expected to be the most important one of the topics of concern.

Binance: Sit firmly on Diaoyutai amidst FUD

"Binance" is still sitting firmly on Diaoyutai under the background of this year's troubled industry.

Especially after the FTX incident, it took frequent actions. It not only participated in the bidding of Voyager and other institutions affected by FTX, but also established an industry recovery fund with a scale of US$2 billion.

Although it has recently been questioned due to regulatory issues, doubtful reserves, and its role in the collapse of FTX, and even once formed a FUD wave, the current market trust in Binance should still be relatively stable, and the exchange track has temporarily entered the "post-FTX era". ".

dYdX: Brilliantly influenced by FTX

The listing of "dYdX" should be mainly due to the contribution of the FTX event. The sudden collapse of FTX once again proved that there is no myth of "too big to fail" in the encryption industry, and it also detonated the encryption industry to a certain extent. crisis of confidence and liquidity dilemma.

While the crisis continues to spread to centralized exchanges and institutions, decentralized projects like dYdX have once again shined brilliantly. Both the transaction volume and the number of new users have increased significantly, becoming the core of this industry crisis. one of the biggest beneficiaries.

From the perspective of data, whether it is on-chain derivatives projects such as dYdX, GMX, Gains, or traditional DEX protocols such as Uniswap, after the FTX incident began to ferment in early November, the transaction volume began to increase several times compared with the previous day. On the 9th and 10th that followed, historical records were set.

Among them, dYdX achieved a transaction volume of more than 13 billion US dollars in the week from November 6 to November 12, setting a new weekly high since the Terra crisis on May 8 this year.

Although the DEX craze only lasted for a week after that—for example, starting on November 13, dYdX’s weekly trading volume fell back to an average level of around $2 billion, but the need for decentralization was once again recognized. logical validation.

Hong Kong: Trying to return to the center of the encryption stage

"Hong Kong" is gradually trying to return to one of the geographic centers of the encryption industry and the Web3 world this year.

In "CoinDesk: The 50 Most Influential Universities in the Blockchain Field in 2022" compiled by Foresight News, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University ranked first, and others such as the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology were also listed. Being one of the regions with the highest density of universities on the list shows that Hong Kong already has sufficient competitive strength and heritage.

However, since the beginning of this year, Hong Kong has gradually fallen to the front row in the buzzing argument that Web3 is moving towards Singapore. It seems that after missing the wave of the Internet, it will further lag behind the pulse of the Web3 era. Cities such as London and New York are vying for the status of global encrypted financial center and virtual asset center.

Among them, on October 16, Hong Kong Financial Secretary Chen Maobo published an article "Hong Kong's Innovation and Technology Development", and pointed out that Hong Kong should be promoted to develop into an international virtual asset center. "The policy declaration will clearly express the government's position and show the global industry that we promote Hong Kong. The vision of developing into an international virtual asset center, and the commitment and determination to explore financial innovation with the global asset industry.”

Whether it is the intensive appearance of Web3 stakeholders on the first day of this year's Fintech Week, or the exciting solemn promise in the virtual asset policy declaration, they have further declared to the world Hong Kong's full sincerity in opening the door to Web3 and encrypted assets .

And dialectically, in October, people were still talking about Hong Kong’s strict regulatory system because FTX left Hong Kong for the Bahamas. Just one month later, FTX’s detonation seemed to prove Hong Kong’s sensitivity to risks, regulation and innovation. There are two sides to one body, misfortunes and blessings depend on it. Only when the tide recedes can the true chapter be seen.

In December, the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission also stated that it was drafting regulatory requirements for licensed virtual asset exchanges under the new system, and would launch public consultations, and was closely monitoring the latest developments in the field of virtual assets; then CSOP Asset Management Co., Ltd. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange launched the first batch of virtual asset ETFs in Asia: CSOP Bitcoin Futures ETF (3066.HK), CSOP Ethereum Futures ETF (3068.HK), which once again demonstrated the current Hong Kong government’s support for encrypted assets and Web3 An open-minded attitude has accelerated the wave of embracing encryption.

NEAR: The star public chain that is still on the rise

As one of the star public chains most favored by capital, "NEAR"'s development this year can only be said to be unsatisfactory. It lags behind other mainstream public chains in terms of actual ecological development (even the algorithmic stablecoin USN, which had high hopes, also ended in disappointment. ). However, as a characteristic public chain that has always taken unlimited expansion as one of its visions, after NEAR started staking, the next new shard is the key narrative to start the next stage, which still needs continuous attention.

LayerZero: Undiminished heat, reduced volume

As an omnichain interoperability protocol, "LayerZero" theoretically supports all cross-chain communication between Layer 1 and Layer 2, so it has been quite popular for narrative. This year, with the launch of Coinbase and Binance and the launch of the Aptos mainnet The rapid access at the beginning also brought several short-term peaks of popularity.

However, its development team, LayerZero Labs, had previously completed a US$135 million A+ round of financing led by FTX Ventures. Therefore, after the FTX explosion, LayerZero and its Stargate (STG) were obviously much weaker in terms of volume and performance, which hindered their future development. A shadow was cast.

Public chain: new kings fall one after another, passion fades

"Public chain" is undoubtedly one of the most reflective tracks this year. The collapse of Terra's ecology and the fall of Solana are representative events, which almost verified the fall of the new king and the unknown of the new king.

The collapse of Terra in the middle of the year and its secondary disasters have, to a certain extent, presented the duality of large and weak new public chains (SolanaAvalanche, Fantom) to the public, and the Solana crisis triggered by FTX at the end of the year has completely torn apart The so-called ecological halo:

A new-generation public chain that was once hot, has changed in just a few days. At the same time, the discussion at the Solana Lisbon Conference is in full swing. However, the agenda has not yet ended, and the fate has already turned. It is embarrassing.

This makes people re-examine the myths of the new public chain, especially the "Ethereum killers" like Solana who once held high the banner, and now they have fallen one by one. In front of the collapsed confidence and the evaporating market value like the morning dew, it is also about to collapse.

However, the voices of Aptos and Sui have not yet made people see enough hope. Therefore, after the enthusiasm for the new public chain subsides, it seems that only Bitcoin and Ethereum are more resilient and worthy of attention and expectation.

Wallet: Control the private key to control the future

"Wallet" has received attention again as users' distrust of more centralized exchanges has intensified. Under the trend of market funds outflowing to the chain, the importance of personal control of the assets behind the wallet has also been further highlighted.

The explosion of FTX this time also shows that there is no centralized exchange that is too big to fail, "Not your keys, not your crypto". Only by mastering your own private key can you master your own future.

a16z: Encryption venture capital is the leader

The listing of "a16z" should benefit from its continuous investment and financing. According to previous Foresight News statistics based on public information, a16z has invested in more than 90 companies or projects in the Web3 field, including public chains, Layer 2, DeFi, NFT, games, Metaverse and almost all Web3 tracks.

Aleo: Airdrops Focus on Objects

"Aleo" is positioned as a programmable privacy network. The biggest project progress milestone this year should be the $200 million B-round financing completed in February. Since then, it has become one of the main objects for everyone to learn (airdrop).

Uniswap: NFT layout, fee switch dual force

Although "Uniswap" ranks at the bottom of this year's hot search list, its progress in NFT market layout and fee switching has attracted much attention.

Among them, in terms of getting involved in the NFT track, Uniswap first acquired Genie, an NFT aggregation market, and then realized NFT transactions through the integration of sudoswap, and aggregated NFT orders on OpenSea, X2Y2, LooksRare, sudoswap, Larva Labs, Foundation, and NFT 20, and gradually entered into substantive The follow-up results of the NFT trading track are also worthy of attention.

In terms of fee switching, it has always been the key to the empowerment of UNI that has attracted much attention. On August 10, Uniswap's "fee switch" proposal passed the consensus check vote, and then the temperature check (temperature check) vote was also successfully passed. The last step of the chain Upvoting is temporarily delayed due to community feedback, and an answer is expected in early 2023.

Mirror Year in Search

There is a partial overlap between Mirror’s annual hot search list and the site, exactly half, including "Aptos", "zkSync", "Sui", "Cosmos", and "LayerZero", which shows the popularity of hot words and sufficient attention. representative meaning.

Among the remaining 5, "airdrop", "tutorial" and "test" have always been the front-row regulars of Mirror's weekly hot search list, which fits with Mirror's historical data and proves that Mirror is in the minds of many users. An article library full of wealth codes or treasure tutorials, so many users' search preferences also focus on technical or tutorial articles such as airdrops and tutorials.

summary

summary

In general, more than half of the specific project hot words on the hot search list this year (on the site), exactly 11, "financing", "NFT", "Web3", "airdrop", "wallet", "public "Chain" and other major topics accounted for 6 more, and the rest were basically event hot words.

In addition, on this year's annual hot search list, the hot contribution of many hot words is also inseparable from the catalysis of the FTX event. In addition to "FTX" and "Binance" and other directly related hot words, "dYdX" and "wallet" , "LayerZero", "Public Chain", etc. are more or less affected by it.

The gray line of the grass snake, the veins are thousands of miles away. For the cryptocurrency market, although the risks exposed this year have caused enough turmoil and suspicion from the outside world, they will at least slowly enhance the robustness of the system. Here we can revisit a sentence written by Author Hayes in his blog after "3.12":

「Long live volatility,and stay healthy" (grow from fluctuations and stay healthy forever)

This may be the biggest harvest we can get in 2022 in the current changing market, and it is also the best survival guide for 2023.