Missionary Founders Setting the Stage for the Next Generation of Crypto Advancements
There are two kinds of investors in the crypto industry: those that are looking for quick gains, and those who believe in the future of the industry and want to help build something special.
Han Kao and I came into the space trying to bring order to the chaos. At Crypto Briefing, we waded through the hype to warn others of scams and empty promises, and shined a spotlight on the underappreciated projects building something real. For instance, we were one of the first to notice and realize the potential of THORChain, F1 Delta Time, Theta, Injective, Ren Protocol and Matic Network (now Polygon) among others.
For years, we focused coverage on strong projects backed by missionary founders. However, our deep research into the projects revealed that founders need a lot more than just media coverage. This is why we founded Sanctor Capital — to build a real sanctuary for founders and help ensure they have the guidance and support to meet their project milestones and achieve their goals with the help from a network of top mentors.
The industry is at a different stage than when we started. We are past the proof-of-concept, and looking towards traditional market adoption, where products benefit from multi-million person user-bases and multibillion dollar transaction flow. The basic infrastructure is there, but there is still much to build.
This is why we expect core traditional use cases to start coming onto the blockchain, opening the floodgates for consumers and traditional professionals in finance, gaming, arts and collectibles, social network platforms, ecommerce and more.
Infrastructure and Web3
Scalability, interoperability and base layer decentralization are going to be big themes in the next few years. With scalability remaining a key concern for the Ethereum ecosystem, L2 projects will play an even more integral role as the competition between blockchains heats up.
Alongside that, interoperability will also be more important than ever with BSC, Solana and Flow proving that there is life outside the Ethereum ecosystem. We are big believers in the multi-chain universe, and expect specialized chains to emerge. So, cross-chain communication will inevitably have to become more efficient.
As usage increases more and more data will be produced on various blockchain networks, communication between centralized applications and services and the decentralized stack will need to improve in order to support user onboarding. The demand for tools to manage and visualize it will be in high demand, if not already.
Furthermore, there are a lot of infrastructure components yet to be built. Reading/writing and indexing improvements need to be made for projects to be able to efficiently communicate with blockchains and with each other, and base layer things like decentralized CDN and VPN are still finding their way in the market.
We look forward to infrastructure and data management making strides as that will increase the capabilities of projects working at the application layer.
Finance
DeFi has been leading the industry on the path to adoption, and has already surpassed $100B, but we see this as just the PoC stage for the sector. As the technology stacks mature, we expect better onboarding experiences to emerge to make it easier for retail users to try applications.
Within this vertical, we see an enormous opportunity in uncollateralized offerings. Too much capital is shackled in smart contracts and the notion of having to provide assets in order to borrow makes many traditional loan use cases unrealistic.
In parallel, more traditional finance products will be migrated over to the blockchain. With more traditional finance professionals giving DeFi a try, and more retail onramps, it may finally be time for active management use-cases.
A lot of this will depend on proper digital identity and risk management. Projects will need to be able to evaluate risk and history behind wallets and also be able to be compliant with regulation in order to be able to onboard the next wave of institutional and retail capital. We are very excited about projects working to make that possible.
Gaming and the Metaverse
While DeFi may hold greater appeal in terms of the near-term market potential, gaming and the metaverse may be the key to onboarding the broader consumer audience.
Gaming concepts and use cases are much easier to understand, and it is also easier to abstract away blockchain technology to make it more appealing to retail users.
The metaverse has been developing even prior to blockchain. MMORPG games and VR/AR technology have been available for some time, but without blockchain technology, true user ownership, in-world economies and multi-world interconnectivity were not truly possible.
We are excited by both platforms serving as metaverse foundations, as well as projects looking to build within these realms. Moreover, because the metaverse effectively opens up new worlds with their own rules and economies, core primitives from other verticals like DeFi also start to apply. We already see examples of that with projects like NFTX and NFTfi, and believe that to be just the beginning.
Social Media, Content and Online Communities
Decentralized media has been one of the big goals of the industry. We have seen a number of attempts in the past, but there hasn’t been much success to this point. We believe that the infrastructure and the economic primitives are now in place for a meaningful shift in this sector.
Moreover the social influencer model has organically integrated into the crypto space. Going forward we see a bright future for decentralized media platforms. Users will be able to own and monetize their content. It will not be easy to unseat market leaders like Facebook and Twitter, but there may be lower hanging fruit both in the form of individual influencer tokenization, and niche content monetization.
Looking at other frontiers
While DeFi and decentralized collectibles and gaming have captured headlines, other sectors have also been making substantial strides implementing DLT concepts. We are looking at promising technology in other verticals as well including logistics and enterprise. What’s important for us is that the project has missionary founders and a daring idea. We are looking for technologies that alter markets and are ready to bring the full strength of our network to support these endeavors.
If this sounds like you, don’t hesitate to reach out. We are eager to help.
