The US economic growth remains resilient, but its high interest rate environment continues to have an impact on the economy, and many countries and regions are facing signs of economic stagnation or mild recession. Although inflation has shown signs of cooling down as planned by the Federal Reserve, the uncertain macroeconomic environment has further contributed to the increased volatility of the cryptocurrency market.
However, factors such as Ethereum spot ETF, on-chain data, native application innovations of major public chain ecosystems, and innovations in the TON ecosystem all provide continued growth momentum for the industry, and OKX Ventures remains optimistic about the market outlook.
Continued efforts in multiple fields
According to OKX Ventures observations and research, many areas of the current crypto industry are showing a stable and improving development trend.
At the policy level, the industry has finally seen significant progress in Ethereum ETFs, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approving all 19 b-4 documents on May 23. If the Ethereum spot ETF begins trading in July 2024, considering that the asset management scale of Bitcoin ETFs has reached US$50 billion, the scale and purchase volume of the ETH spot ETF will be in the tens of billions of dollars based on market value.
On-chain data showed a slight decline in stability, and Meme became a hot spot on the chain. In May and June, the on-chain transaction volume of Ethereum and Bitcoin was US$390 billion and US$338 billion, respectively, which was still in a downward channel compared with March and April. The supply of stablecoins increased to US$142.6 billion, and Ethereum destroyed 26.7k and 26.3k in May and June, and the Ethereum Gas fee reached 1 gwei at the lowest. Meme-type assets remained highly popular in May and June, with a total market value of more than US$60 billion. Especially on the Solana chain, Meme transactions accounted for more than 50% of the total transactions. On-chain data shows that the industry has bottomed out in stages, and we remain optimistic about on-chain innovation in the second half of the year.
The industry infrastructure is improved and the ecological projects are more abundant. The growth of the number of Layer 2 and the total TVL of the Bitcoin ecosystem has promoted the modular development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, such as Nubit inheriting Bitcoins security DA and Solv taking over the aggregation of liquidity benefits. OKX Ventures believes that rich native infrastructure will be an important focus of the market in the future, such as various AI, GameFi and social ecological applications.
The TON ecosystem continues to grow, with applications and data exploding. Backed by Telegrams 900 million active users, TON has rapidly developed TVL exceeding 700 million US dollars, and there are multiple user applications with more than 10 million users. As a result, we see a new entry point for further mass adoption in the industry, and OKX Ventures will continue to support innovative TON applications.
The security field deserves long-term attention. In Q2 2024, the loss amount of on-chain security incidents reached 688 million US dollars, an increase of 37% compared with the loss amount in Q1. DeFi and public chains are the main targets of hacker attacks. There is still a lot of work to be done on the on-chain security side on the C-end user side, and security tools represented by GoPlus still have a long way to go.
OKX Ventures latest investment news
As a long-term value investor in the industry, OKX Ventures continues to seek out and invest in innovative projects in multiple fields, injecting more vitality into them in terms of capital, technology, ecology and other aspects.
Bedrock
According to the projects official website, Bedrock is the first protocol to support multi-asset liquidity re-pledge, and has partnered with RockX, a long-time blockchain infrastructure developer, to provide non-custodial solutions to ensure the security of user assets. Bedrock supports the staking and re-staking of multiple assets, such as uniBTC, uniETH, and uniIOTX, and has partnered with Babylon, EigenLayer, and IoTeX blockchains, respectively, to leverage these collaborations to enhance the security and returns of staked assets.
Among them, uniBTC is a re-staking protocol supported by the Babylon chain, which accepts wrapped BTC tokens (such as wBTC), allowing BTC token holders to enjoy the security of the Ethereum network while also receiving the benefits of staking BTC tokens. uniETH is a Liquid Restaking Token (LRT) designed for local re-staking and obtaining additional rewards from EigenLayer, combining institutional-grade security with increased returns. uniIOTX is a liquidity staking solution on the IoTeX blockchain that solves the problems of the existing Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). Bedrock is committed to unlocking the liquidity and value of PoS tokens through its universal (uni) standard, providing secure liquidity staking tokens and enhanced income opportunities.
In terms of technological innovation and security, Bedrock uses end-to-end contracts and node management integration, provides an Oracle-free technical architecture, and avoids centralization and security risks. Bedrocks non-custodial smart contracts ensure the highest level of protection for user assets, allowing users to stake and withdraw funds at any time without any restrictions on funds.
In terms of multi-asset support and yield strategy, Bedrock provides high staking returns through iniTokens such as uniETH and uniBTC, and users can also expect to receive a variety of airdrop rewards. For example, uniETH users can expect ETH staking returns, EIGEN rewards, AVS airdrops and $ARB, while uniBTC users can receive Babylon-based BTC staking returns and other BTC L2 rewards.
In terms of cross-chain deployment and compatibility, Bedrock’s uni assets have been deployed in multiple ecosystems, including Arbitrum, Linea, Scroll, zklink, manta, etc., further broadening its compatibility and market coverage. This provides users with the flexibility to stake and re-stake on multiple blockchain platforms.
Codatta
According to the projects official website, Codatta is the first decentralized data protocol that builds infrastructure for developers, protocols, and artificial intelligence. Its feature is the confidence of data generated using scientific methods. The platform enhances data transparency and integrity in the crypto ecosystem by providing metadata annotation capabilities for blockchain addresses. Codatta uses advanced artificial intelligence technology and economic incentives to integrate community participation to ensure data accuracy and reliability, thereby providing a solid and reliable data service foundation for developers and various applications.
In terms of flexible scalability, Codatta ensures high quality and high trust through collaboration and automation mechanisms by integrating and managing data from various sources. The protocols infrastructure is highly flexible and can adapt to new data categories.
In terms of data reliability and security, Codatta uses a decentralized approach to annotate metadata, relying on community contributions to verify and confirm metadata tags. It uses artificial intelligence, algorithms, and economic mechanisms to ensure high confidence and accuracy of data, and uses blockchain technology to ensure data immutability and integrity, thereby improving the security of the platform.
In terms of public accessibility and privacy protection, Codatta is a permissionless platform that allows developers, individuals, and protocols to freely access data. At the same time, to prevent malicious use, minimum access restrictions are set for certain risky data sets to protect user information and prevent unauthorized access.
GoPlus
According to the projects official website, GoPlus is an open, permissionless and user-driven Web3 modular user security layer. It is designed to integrate seamlessly with any blockchain platform and greatly enhances user security by providing comprehensive protection covering every stage of the users transaction lifecycle. GoPlus conducts thorough risk analysis and provides users with intelligent and efficient security services by leveraging a decentralized user security network and cutting-edge AI-driven security solutions. GoPlus aims to create a safer and more user-friendly Web3 on-chain interaction environment by filling the gap in the user security layer in the existing blockchain architecture and providing users with more effective and better on-chain security protection.
In terms of comprehensive security lifecycle protection, GoPlus provides all-round protection from the initiation of a transaction to final settlement, providing security protection for every step of user interaction and transaction in the blockchain environment.
In terms of the multi-chain security center, facing the fragmentation of current security services, GoPlus has created a unified security center that provides cross-chain security policy management, allowing users to manage and monitor the security of multiple blockchains on one platform. Currently, the number of interactive wallets is as high as 11 million, the number of paying users exceeds 60k, and the daily active users are as high as 2 million.
In terms of seamless on-chain firewall, GoPlus has introduced an innovative on-chain firewall that is directly integrated into the blockchain and can block risky transactions in real time, ensuring that users transactions are safe and uninterrupted.
In terms of decentralized security services, the security services provided by GoPlus are completely decentralized, ensuring the openness, permissionlessness and user-driven nature of the services, which is consistent with the core values of Web3.
Nubit
According to the projects official website, Nubit is a secure and scalable Bitcoin data availability layer designed to expand Bitcoins data capacity to support applications such as ordinals, second-layer solutions, and price oracles, and enhance the scope and efficiency of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Nubit is expected to solve the bottleneck problem caused by data throughput limitations in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Nubits four core components: verification nodes, full storage nodes, light clients, and consensus mechanisms between nodes. Nubit implements a secure and efficient data verification and storage mechanism that allows participants to verify the authenticity and availability of data without downloading the full data.
In terms of inheriting Bitcoins security, Nubits security is directly inherited from Bitcoin, and its consensus mechanism and economic security, anti-tampering and anti-censorship capabilities are enhanced through Bitcoins own guarantee method.
In terms of data availability sampling (DAS), Nubit ensures the integrity and availability of data through data availability sampling technology (DAS). This technology allows nodes to verify the existence of data by randomly sampling data blocks, without having to download the entire data block.
In terms of efficiency improvement, compared with traditional Merkle proofs, the combination of KZG commitments and Reed-Solomon error correction coding has greatly improved the speed of data retrieval, especially in complex or large data scenarios, the retrieval speed can be increased by up to 100 times.
In terms of test networks and community participation, Nubit has launched the Alpha test network and encourages community members to participate and test different functions to promote the improvement and optimization of the technology.
In terms of adapting to Bitcoins native environment and scalability, the Nubit project and the Nubit DA chain built on the Cosmos SDK are specially optimized for the Bitcoin ecosystem, support Bitcoins native staking, enhance economic security, and have the potential to be promoted to a wider range of Bitcoin applications and services.
Market outlook remains optimistic
Based on technological innovation, increased institutional investment, the impact of the macroeconomic environment, the growth of users and adoption, and the improvement of the regulatory environment, these factors are jointly driving the crypto industry to continue to improve. At present, more and more companies and institutions are beginning to adopt blockchain technology to develop decentralized applications (DApps), smart contracts, decentralized finance (DeFi), etc. These technologies not only improve efficiency and transparency, but also provide new business models and opportunities. For example, Ethereums upgrade and expansion plans (such as the Dencun upgrade) have significantly reduced data costs, improved network performance, and attracted more developers and users.
In particular, the decentralization, security and transparency of blockchain make it a powerful tool to solve problems in the traditional financial system, such as trust issues, high transaction fees and slow transaction processing. In addition, it helps to improve financial inclusion, making it easier for people around the world to access financial services, especially those who cannot access the traditional banking system, thereby promoting innovation and reform of social and economic systems.
Overall, the crypto industry is growing, driven not only by technological innovation and financial inclusion, but also by investment opportunities and decentralization potential. With the further development of technology and the market, the crypto industry is likely to continue to play an important role in influencing the evolution of the global economy and financial system. After going through multiple rounds of bull and bear markets, OKX Ventures is more determined to support innovation, invest in innovation, and support innovation, and is optimistic about the broad development space of the crypto market in the future.
“We remain optimistic about the outlook for the crypto market.”
Risk Warning and Disclaimer
This article is for reference only. This article only represents the authors views and does not represent the position of OKX. This article is not intended to provide (i) investment advice or investment recommendations; (ii) an offer or solicitation to buy, sell or hold digital assets; (iii) financial, accounting, legal or tax advice. Holding digital assets (including stablecoins and NFTs) involves high risks and may fluctuate significantly. You should carefully consider whether trading or holding digital assets is suitable for you based on your financial situation. Please consult your legal/tax/investment professionals for your specific situation. Please be responsible for understanding and complying with local applicable laws and regulations.
