Web3 Matching Event Highlights

Introduction

Web3 Matching is the inaugural offline investor-startup event that was held in Vietnam on the 11th of December. Powered by Kyros Ventures and co-hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and BNB Chain, the event was an incredible opportunity for start-ups in the space to pitch to potential investors. We gathered some of the industry’s biggest names to meet with the brightest startups in a 1:1 ”speed-dating” style curated setting for an unprecedented mentoring and networking opportunity.

Representatives of the Web3 Matching event’s organizers: Kyros Ventures, BNB Chain and AWS

We had an attendance of over 50 experienced experts, partners, and advisors, including Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, Animoca Ventures, Newman Capital, Magnus Capital, Kyber Network, Kyros Ventures, GGV Capital, iCandy, Golden Gate Ventures, Faculty Group, Coin98 Ventures, Superscrypt, Plug and Play, GeekCartel and Cydonia Ventures.

On event day, the shortlisted projects from over 330 applicants had a chance to share their ideas and gather advice in person from 16 VCs. It is promising to see how lively the sector is with an array of builders from all regions, and their innovative ideas who are passionately building through this bear market.

Top 20 projects participating in the Speed Dating session

Highlights

Our Web3 Matching event gathered a lot of attention from the Vietnamese crypto community, including projects, local media partners, and funds. This is proof that the VN Web3 scene continues to thrive despite the bear market.

Guest welcoming area in the Web3 Matching

All guests wore name cards and were provided with information allowing attendees to get easily acquainted. The layout and scheduling instructions were crucial to the teams’ smooth transition between tables. The organizer team also provided each attendee with a large gift bag.

Web3 Matching begins with a small panel discussion titled “Strategy for Product Development and Market Entry During Bear Market Season,” which has recently piqued the interest of many crypto projects.

There were some very special guests who shared their valuable experience in developing business models and strategies for success. With the assistance of VCs,  start-ups can create long-term and effective ways to promote their brand.

Representatives from Animoca Ventures, Kyber Network, GGV Ventures, Pantera Capital and Kyros Ventures in the panel discussion

Following that was the main event, the “speed dating” model between the top 20 projects and VCs. For speed dating, each project was allowed 20 minutes to talk with a VC on a predetermined schedule before moving on to another table to meet with a new VC.

The event gave attendees the opportunity to meet with many funds while also having quality 1:1 meetings, discussions and the opportunity to seek advice on specific aspects of their projects. The event was an invaluable opportunity to build relationships and introduce teams to potential future collaborators and investors.

The signature Speed Dating session

Furthermore, the organizers set up a separate online video call area for projects/funds that were unable to attend the live event.

Dedicated area for online video call

A warm tea party and minigame with attractive rewards was interspersed throughout the program, providing project participants moments of relaxation and laughter. Projects also used this time to share information about themselves with one another and to connect with the many other guests attending the event.

Minigame winner of the Web3 Matching Quiz

Web3 Matching successfully closed after more than 4 hours of lively discussion and received many positive responses from funds, projects, and attendees.

Group photo at the end of Web3 Matching event

The program concluded with an outdoor dinner party where the organizers entertained attendees once more and provided a completely new space for networking.

Networking dinner & buffet after the main Web3 Matching event

The future of blockchain and the Web3 sector looks promising despite the tough year that we have all experienced. The many collapses this year is a true test of the tenacity of those who remain, but without a doubt, we are still resilient.

On behalf of the organizing teams – BNB Chain, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Kyros Ventures, we would like to express our sincere thanks to all the valuable partners and teams who attended Web3 Matching, making it a successful, memorable and invaluable event.

Let’s buidl! Together we will continue to unlock the potential of the blockchain space and facilitate its growth through discussions on development outlook and community engagement. Through continually improving the practices that aid the advancement of the space, we are contributing to the success of the next-gen startups in the local SEA market.

About organizers

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

A renowned Internet infrastructure provider with the mission to empower the developers in this space to redefine the Internet by helping them build their solutions with more effective tools and world-class security. AWS has the broadest and deepest sets of solutions to suit the wide variety of Web3 companies’ infrastructure needs.

Website | Twitter

BNB Chain

One of the most popular blockchains in the world, dedicated to delivering its core infrastructure necessary for mass adoption, and always remains as a community-first and open-source ecosystem built on a permissionless and decentralized environment.

Website | Twitter | Telegram

Kyros Ventures 

The gateway to the entirety of the blockchain landscape in Vietnam, which sets its goal to educate the growing crypto population, and to help as much development in the Web3 sector as possible through incubation for startups in the space.

Website | Twitter | Telegram

Fractionalized NFTs Decoded

Fractionalized NFTs

In the first part, we were introduced to the big picture of the existing puzzle pieces in the NFTFi market. In this article, let’s dig deeper into a very potential market niche called Fractionalized NFTs.

What are Fractionalized NFTs?

With the current gloomy market situation, spending large capital to buy NFTs as a hoarding asset is quite risky. Moreover, because of the originality (indivisibility) of tokens of ERC-721 standard, it is difficult for users to invest in NFTs with the DCA strategy. Therefore, a solution to this problem has been found: fractionalized NFTs or fragmented NFTs. This is initially a solution to make it easier for ordinary users to access blue-chip NFTs, which have a very high floor price. Basically, projects provide this solution by converting NFTs into fungible tokens with ERC-20 standard (similar to yield-bearing tokens of DeFi projects like AAVE’s aTokens or SushiSwap’s xTokens).

Fractionalized NFTs projects

Unic.ly and Fractional.art (Tessera) 

Users can create a vault for one or more NFTs in the same collection and split it into multiple fungible ERC-20 tokens. When another investor wants to redeem an NFT in the Unic.ly vault, they will have to pay a price higher than the trigger price that the vault owner has set. At this point, the auction process will take place, and the overall winner will buy one or more intact NFTs according to ERC-721 or ERC-1155 standards and return the ETH to the vault. The initial investors will be entitled to receive this ETH according to the percentage of their ERC-20 tokens in the vault as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Unic.ly mechanism

Fractional.art has a similar mechanism to Unic.ly, but the trigger price will not be pre-determined by the vault creator. Instead, the co-owners will have to vote to determine the reserve price – the lowest price that the buyer who wants to buy back the original NFT copy has to pay. If more than 50% of the total supply of fragmented NFTs (i.e. ERC-20 tokens) is used for voting, the reserve price will change. This price will be calculated according to the weighted average of all votes. 

For example, if 75% vote for a reserve price of 150 ETH and 25% vote for a reserve price of 200 ETH, then the final reserve price result will be 162.5 ETH.

NFT20 and NFTX

These projects also create pools and allow users to deposit NFTs in them like Unic.ly, but the difference is that the buyer has to buy enough ERC-20 tokens in the pool to redeem any NFTs in that pool.

Also, ERC-20 tokens that are fragmented from the original NFTs can stake these tokens for an additional reward of transaction fees (like the LPs of AMMs in DeFi) or mortgage and borrow stablecoins to execute yield farming.

Szns.io

Szns is also a project on NFTs fragmentation, yet with a different approach where the NFTs in each collection acts like the governance token for that collection: Token holders will jointly participate in the process of managing & using the NFTs in the collection through voting.

Bridgesplit

Operating on the Solana blockchain, Bridgesplit has many products around NFTs, typically fractionalization, yield farming with fragmented NFTs, index funds, etc. Like the above projects, Fragmented NFTs can also be traded on Solana AMMs such as Raydium. Token holders will also have voting rights on the selling price and timing of the sale for NFTs.

Assessment

Correlation

The reason that fragmented NFTs are correlated with native NFTs is because of arbitrageurs. For example, when the floor price of CryptoPunks rises, the arbitrageurs will buy ERC-20 tokens in the NFTX pool to obtain an original CryptoPunks, then list that CryptoPunk on OpenSea (which has a floor price higher than the total purchase price of ERC-20 tokens) to make a profit.

Accuracy here can be understood as the correlation of fractionalized tokens with the NFTs they represent in the pool. The higher the correlation coefficient, the more accurately the fractionalized tokens reflect the returns of the original NFTs.

Figure 2. Data from 01/01/2022 to 26/08/2022 (Source: CoinGecko & Dune Analytics)
Figure 2. Correlation between Fractionalized NFTs and Native NFTs’ floor price

Figure 2 shows that all fragmented tokens have a positive correlation coefficient (greater than 0) with the floor price of NFT collections. NFTX’s PUNK token shows the most correlation (0.81), followed by Unic.ly’s UPUNK (0.7), Fractional.art’s HOODIE (0.68) and NFT20’s GPUNKS20 (0.54).

The reason for this difference in correlation is due to the difference in liquidity in the swap pool of fragmented tokens. In particular, PUNK and HOODIE are mainly traded on DEXs while UPUNK is traded on MEXC and Unic.ly’s DEX (Figure 3). Moreover, Fractional.art’s HOODIE token is fragmented from a single NFT, Punk #7171, rather than fragmented from a pool of many NFTs like NFTX, so the liquidity is also somewhat lower.

Figure 3. Liquidity of Fractionalized NFTs pool

SZNS’s MeebitsDAO pool consists of 92 NFTs of which the correlation coefficient to the floor price of BST Meebits is 0.36, and the liquidity in the pool of ERC-20 tokens is around $82,540 (at press time).

It should also be added, that it is thanks to the high liquidity of the PUNK token that it has been used as a token in the reserve fund of FloorDAO – a protocol that works similar to OlympusDAO (Figure 4):

  • First, users will deposit PUNK into FloorDAO to receive FLOOR tokens back at a discounted price
  • FloorDAO will use the PUNK received to continue deploying to NFTX to receive rewards for providing liquidity
Figure 4. FloorDAO mechanism
Figure 4. FloorDAO mechanism

Ownership

Fragmented NFTs tokens are created mainly to serve investment needs without having to own the NFT. A major downside to holding these fragmented tokens is that users do not have full authority when it comes to buying/selling the fragmented NFTs they hold. Also, NFTs in a normal vault cannot be rented out to create a new cash flow for owners unless the members of the DAO of SZNS organization vote to rent, making the optimization of profit from assets in the pool much reduced.

Epilogue

Fragmented NFTs projects, although not very active, are still a useful tool for investors who want to allocate capital into the NFTs market but are still concerned about the illiquidity of this asset class. Therefore, when investing in the fragmented NFTs segment, investors need to choose reputable projects with high liquidity and active trading volume to minimize risks for their portfolios.

NFTFi: An Overview

The keyword NFTFi is becoming increasingly popular; will this be the next new trend that combines the best of the two previous trends, DeFi and NFT?

What is NFTFi?

NFTFi, as the name implies, is a combination of NFT and Finance.

The protocols in the NFTFi array were created primarily to increase liquidity for NFTs, an asset class that has previously been considered illiquid due to market volatility as well as their uniqueness – a barrier to price discovery.

Projects in NFTFi will also aid in cash flow optimization for NFT collectors, providing more incentive for them to buy and hoard NFT as an asset class with long-term value rather than a means of speculative facilities as it is now.

Basically, NFTFi projects convert NFTs into fungible tokens with ERC-20 standard, similar to yield-bearing tokens of DeFi projects like AAVE’s aTokens or SushiSwap’s xTokens.

NFTFi ecosystem (Source: 0xMinion at GBV)

Main sections in NFTFi

Provide liquidity

The Marketplace model – NFT floor – is the most popular today because it connects NFT buyers and sellers and serves as a source of liquidity for the entire market. The price formation process is based on the bid and ask prices that are arbitrarily set between two parties.

EcosystemNotable NFT exchanges
EthereumOpenSea, LooksRare
SolanaMagic Eden
PolygonOpenSea
FlowFlowverse
AvalancheJoepegs, NFTrade, Chikn

However, as a result of the aforementioned bid-ask mechanism, NFT has become a less liquid asset than other investment channels such as stocks or cryptocurrencies because NFTs in the same collection are sold at a low price. The rarity or attractiveness of some of their characteristics determines their value. The use of various valuation methods, including emotional pricing, has widened the spread between the bid and ask prices for most NFTs on the market today.

Several liquidity solutions were developed to solve this problem, most notably fractionalized NFT (fragmented NFT) and AMM (Automated Market Maker).

Fractionalization is a solution that allows ordinary users to access blue-chip NFT collections, which have a very high floor price – potentially ranging from a few tens to millions of dollars. Some protocols, such as Unic.ly or Fractional.art, provide this solution by converting NFTs into fungible tokens compliant with ERC-20 standards (similar to yield-bearing tokens from DeFi projects such as AAVE’s aToken or SushiSwap’s xToken). Through speculators specializing in arbitrage, the price of these ERC-20 tokens will move according to the floor price of collections on the traditional NFT market, allowing users to profit when investing in a highly volatile asset like NFT but without the huge risk of putting up a large amount of capital at an early stage.

AMM is also a solution born to solve NFT’s liquidity problem. Still, it targets the disadvantage of the bid-ask mechanism when buying and selling NFT on traditional exchanges by allowing users to buy/sell NFT via instant liquidity pools. For example, one of the recent AMM for NFT projects is sudoswap/sudoAMM. If the formula x*y = k is applied to the valuation of pool assets like DeFi’s AMMs, slippage will be high because NFTs are inherently indivisible, unlike ERC-20 tokens. Therefore, the sudoswap project has applied the bonding curve model to determine the price increase/decrease every time an NFT in the pool is bought/sold to ETH.

Credit

Credit segment projects are divided into two types: Lending and pre-paid post-purchases (BNPL).

Lending in NFT works similarly to DeFi, except the collateral is NFTs (usually blue-chip NFTs because they are more liquid) rather than ERC-20 tokens. To protect lenders, the project may devise a formula for calculating an appropriate liquidation price threshold when the floor price of the NFT collection begins to fall. Some projects, such as JPEG’d, also allow NFT collateral to be used to mint stablecoins, using a mechanism similar to the Collateral debt positions (CDPs) used for MakerDAO’s DAI.

For BNPL projects, the buyer must place a down payment in order to receive or gain access to some of the NFT’s existing benefits, and the balance must be paid back within a short period of time (depending on the project’s regulations). This service is supported by platforms such as Cyan, ApeNow, and BendDAO.

Valuation Tool

Valuation is critical for NFT investors because the current state of speculation and flash inflation makes it difficult for them to make independent investment decisions.

Most NFT pricing platforms today use AI technology, such as NFTvaluations or Upshot, while others use crowd-sourcing price formation such as Abascus and PawnHouse.

Derivatives

NFT derivatives platforms function similarly to DeFi derivatives platforms. Users can buy and sell options contracts to hedge risk or optimize cash flow from their assets, depending on their investment strategy and market forecast.

Call/put options of various NFT collections listed on Putty.finance

The majority of NFT’s derivative projects are starting to take shape, demo, or launch. Among these are nftperp, Mimicry (the NFT prediction market), and Hook (which is in the testing phase on the testnet).

Demo version of NFT perpetual contract

Liquidity Aggregator 

An aggregator is a solution that aggregates prices from various NFT exchanges in order to provide users with an “all-in-one” data source when purchasing or selling NFTs. Gem.xyz (acquired by OpenSea) and Genie (acquired by Uniswap) are two prominent platforms in this segment. According to Dune Analytics data, even though the number of transactions on these two platforms has decreased significantly since the beginning of June 2022, Gem continues to outperform and outnumber its competitors. While on Solana, Hyperspace is the popular NFT liquidity aggregator.

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Epilogue

As mentioned above, NFTFi projects have not received much attention yet and are still in the finishing stage. Therefore, the explosion of NFTFi until now is still a big unknown to many people.

In the following parts of this series, each piece of the NFTFi puzzle will be dissected and analyzed so that you can have more precise judgments about the potential of NFTFi in the near future.

Sudoswap has just announced the preparation of an airdrop of SUDO tokens for users. Is this the first light of the NFTFi summer day?

Kyros Ventures joins force with Aura Network to build the Internet of NFTs

Kyros Ventures is pleased to announce our strategic partnership with Aura Network, an unparalleled scalable Layer 1 blockchain solution designed for NFT adoption. We are excited to help the Aura Network team realize its vision as the epicenter of the NFT ecosystem development. 

Aura Network is a Layer 1 blockchain with the main focus of popularizing NFTs across various industries. As a pioneer in NFT infrastructure, its vision is to create a one-stop destination for minting, evaluating, querying, and transacting NFTs.

Aura Network has three primary features as a universal framework: a one-stop destination for developing new NFT use cases, a multi-chain platform supporting both crypto and traditional businesses, and an infrastructure layer to integrate metaverse applications. With four core layers of infrastructure, currency, dApps and OpenAPI, the Aura ecosystem promises to enhance efficiency by solving the scalability problem without compromising security.

Riding on the NFT adoption waves, Kyros shares the same vision with Aura Network to build an NFT-centric infrastructure that promotes developers, while at the same time, break through to reach a more mainstream set of end users. Kyros will be supporting Aura Network in educating users on this new applicable technology and looking forward to expanding Aura Network’s presence in the Vietnam market as a pioneer builder in the Internet of NFT.

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About Kyros Ventures 

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities.

For further information, please visit Kyros Ventures

About Aura Network 

Aura Network is a layer-1, NFT-centric blockchain that focuses on expanding the use of NFTs across various industries. Our vision is to create a one-stop destination for minting, evaluating, querying, and transacting NFTs, to become a pioneer NFT infrastructure for the future. Aura Network focuses on building a sovereign blockchain that is optimized for NFT use cases.

For further information, please visit Aura Network

Episode 4: Seeking alpha with Alpha Finance Labs

Recovering from the exploit, Alpha Finance is coming back strongly with various updates and new product lines. Joined us last Thursday, Tascha Punyaneramitdee, the co-founder and CEO of Alpha Finance Labs, also shared her view on NFT from a perspective of DeFi yield farming.

What’s on wait? Beta Finance, one of the first projects incubated by Alpha Launchpad. Follow us in our seeking alpha journey.

Kyros Research’s Quarterly Report – Q1 2021

The Big Picture

  • Bullish momentum continues to rule the market sentiment throughout the first quarter of 2021. The total market cap soars 144% from $787B to $1,919B in Q1, 2021, according to Coingecko.
  • Institutional sector participation in the market marks all-time-high (ATH) with several public firms and investment funds that either announce Bitcoin investments or launch cryptocurrency products.

Institutional Investor

  • Network effect has passed onto institutional investors on Bitcoin in 2021 with a large wave of adoption (Figure 1). Joining forces with Grayscale, Square and MicroStrategy, Tesla did not only add Bitcoin into its balance sheet but also allowed its users to purchase Tesla cars by Bitcoin. The institutional adoption continues to spread like wildfire, in the context of highly-concerned global economic status post-Covid-19.

Figure 1: Bitcoin Mass Adoption in QI/2021

  • Grayscale, for the first time in the past 3 years, has added 5 new tokens into its investment product lines, providing indirect access to crypto for accredited US investors and institutions (Figure 2). The latest batch includes Basic Attention Token, Chainlink, Decentraland, Filecoin and Livepeer. In the meantime, the largest institutional Bitcoin-hodler also expands its current portfolio of existing crypto assets, accumulating a higher stake of those coins’ total supply.

Figure 2: Grayscale holding over coins’ supply

Bitcoin

Figure 3: Bitcoin Price Returns in Q1 & Q2

The Summer Time

  • Figure 3 depicts that Quarter 1 2021 has seen the best return since 2017. The market size is double with bullish sentiment carried over from the second half of last year.
  • Quarter 2 has been a pivotal period of the crypto cycle ever since 2017. Either carrying on the previous bullish momentum or cooling down the bear, crypto summer brings a fresh vibe for new trends. Q2 2017 was the start of the peak half a year later. Q2 2018 marked the market’s second rebound before the crypto winter. Q2 2019 was the best performed season for that year. Q2 2020 witnessed a great recovery from  Black Thursday. Forecasting Q2 2021 from a limited dataset would not be a piece of wise advice, yet a green quarter can be the modest expectation.

The Trillion-Cap Assets Universe

  • Bitcoin market capitalization has surpassed the 1 trillion USD mark for the first time ever in the last quarter. The next milestone for Bitcoin is Silver before achieving its ultimate goal, e-Gold (Figure 4). 
  • Needless to say, Bitcoin was the best-performer among the trillion cap asset universe in the first quarter of 2021. The cryptocurrency skyrocketed 102%, with the market cap finishing the first bullish round at 1.1 trillion USD.

Figure 4: Bitcoin among other trillion cap assets

Ethereum Challengers

  • The second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum is on the right track for its potent network upgrade, the eth2.0 staking event. At the end of Q1 2021, the total staked Ether reached 3,611,147 ETH, equivalent to $6.7B or 3.13% of the total circulating supply.  

Polkadot

  • Polkadot has risen as one of the most competent Ethereum challengers. Figure 5 depicts how the ecosystem’s public awareness has grown. The Google search trend for “Polkadot” keyword peaked twice in the first three months of 2021. Correspondingly, DOT price reached ATH in late February.

Figure 5: Polkadot Price vs. Google Search

  • The Polkadot ecosystem has expanded rapidly in many aspects. More and more wallets now support Polkadot with respect to the rising demand from the users, which also explains why the quantity of multi-chain wallets already outnumbered that of Polkadot-only wallets in the ecosystem (Figure 6). That is not to mention the fact that the project is still under development for its fully functional mainnet.

Figure 6: Polkadot-supported wallets 

Binance Smart Chain 

  • The next candidate for an Ethereum-challenger title is Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Daily transactions of BSC have surpassed Ethereum for the first time in Quarter 1, 2021 (Figure 7). Since then, it continued to perform well and ended up almost 3x over Ethereum on the metric.

Figure 7: Daily transaction on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain

  • BSC’s flagship, PancakeSwap, also surpassed Uniswap, SushiSwap, and Curve to be ranked as the top 1 Decentralized Exchange (DEX) by 24h volume. All of these achievements have contributed largely to upward demand pressure on the price of BNB, the utility token of the BSC ecosystem. As the result, BNB marketcap has passed Tether and Cardano to be the top 3 biggest altcoins, following Bitcoin and Ethereum, for the first time since the inception.

DeFi

  • Following the trend of 2020, DeFi is still on fire. The Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi platforms has almost tripled since the beginning of the year, reaching nearly 65 billion dollars in both Ethereum and BSC. The pie is still growing; no one seems to be eating each other’s piece, just yet.

Figure 8: TVL on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain

  • As Figure 8 demonstrates, Ethereum is still the dominant player when it captures $51.5 billion in total economic value, quadrupling that of BSC at the end of March. Meanwhile, BSC has risen as an ideal protocol for DeFi projects, proved by its escalating TVL from just a few million to now $13 billion, and that seems to be just a start.
  • According to the leading explorer DappRadar, there are 4764 Dapps in the crypto space, 46,5% of which are running on top of Ethereum, while BSC is a home for 276 dApps or 5,8% of the pool. However, BSC looks more ‘DeFi-focused’. Out of 503 DeFi projects, 33,2% is based on Ethereum while 41,4% uses BSC. In summary, despite Ethereum’s adoption being more impressive, BSC is still a redoubtable challenger in the DeFi corner.

DEXs

  • Without DEX, the DeFi greenfield would never have taken the spotlight for 2020. Thus, the year of 2021 is undoubtedly the right time for DEX to mature and possibly become mainstream. With optimized usability, deeper liquidity, and emerging composability, the DEX ecosystem is as strong as ever.

Figure 9: Monthly DEX volume (source: Dune Analytics)

  • Figure 9 points out that DEXs have already processed more transaction value in Q1 2021 than all previous periods combined. Notably, the volume hit ATH of nearly $77B in February, carrying on the exponential growth momentum. In the Ethereum-powered DEX sector, Uniswap represents more than double Sushi’s volume, gaining around 50% of the market share (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Top DEX volume in Q1 2021 (source: Dune Analytics)

  • February also marks the highest-ever level of monthly revenue for Ethereum miners, roughly half of which has come in the form of transaction fees. The revenue numbers reflect the price of ETH, which exceeded the $2000 mark briefly this month. Data collected in Figure 11 shows that, for the first time, Ethereum miners have brought in more than $1 billion in revenue for the month of February.

Figure 11: Ethereum miner revenue in Q1 2021

Scaling Solutions

  • Despite its burgeon, the DeFi ecosystem is in somewhat of a bottleneck crisis, as more and more projects are developed and launched on the Ethereum network with growing transactions’ volume, causing gas fees to skyrocket. The good news is that a group of layer-two (L2) scaling solutions has already bloomed around Ethereum. They are offering variable avenues to scale Ethereum for the mass. A variety of L2 models is displayed in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Ethereum scaling solution model

  • Layer-2 protocols are perhaps the greatest hope for Ethereum devotees at the moment. In short, layer-2 chains operate on top of the Ethereum mainchain but function in a much more efficient way with drastically reduced transaction fees and a few-second transaction speed. One such Layer 2 technology is rollups, which take much of the burden of computation and storage out of the blockchain, utilizing it just for its security sake.
  • Figure 13 mapped out many projects inheriting L2 technology in which the cutting-edge ZK-Rollup technology is well-positioned to be a leader. Overall, as long as Ethereum block space is expensive, scaling solution demand is still high.

Figure 13: Ethereum scaling solution map

NFT 

  • Well-known since 2017 with the CryptoKitties phenomenon, NFT segment silently exists alongside other crypto major trends for years. Covid19 seems to be a catalyst for NFT frenzy in Q1 2021. From art, trading cards to music and other collectibles, things are now on a digitizing trend when offline exhibitions, concerts or auctions have found it hard  to cope with social distancing situations. 

Figure 14: Crypto art market share in Q1 2021

  • Figure 14 shows how well Nifty Gateway is dominating the marketplace for the crypto art segment. Following up are SuperRare and Foundation. 
  • Meanwhile from the  NFT sales from projects’ point of view, we have the major names including NBA Top Shot by Dapper Labs, CryptoPunks, Hashmasks, etc. (figure 15) The all-time sales boom matched with their impressive market cap growth up to 1800% in Q1 2021. The rise of these projects aligns closely with how well the relevant traditional market is transforming into digital. NBA Top Shot is an example. Partnership with NBA and NBA Players’ Association was a crucial milestone in the sport NFT field and blockchain industry as a whole. One successful case will lure a gigantic wave of adoption because nothing can bring people together better than sport.

Figure 15: NFT collectibles market share in QI/2021 

We hope you enjoyed a little journey back to the first start of 2021. A road is still long and time is all we’ve got. In an unpredictable world like crypto, nothing is certain. Trade responsibly, and we look forward to another lookback in the next quarters!

Kyros Ventures joins commander Enex.Space in its journey into the crypto space!

Kyros Ventures is happy to be assisting Enex.Space in its first journey into the crypto space. We understand the importance of a good start and would be more than happy to help out such a potential project. 

Enex.Space is a DeFi platform built on the Enecuum blockchain that unites regular mobile and desktop devices into a powerful blockchain network. Enex.Space utilizes its native ENX token to represent overall liquidity on the AMM DEX and facilitate trading operations. Enex.Space consists of liquidity pools, a treasury fund called “Commander ENEX,” and other yield farming opportunities via the “Space Drop”, “Space Harvest Farm”, and “Space Station” functions of the platform.

Kyros Ventures will be participating in Enex.Space’s Private Round with a 12-month unlock term. Although Enex is just in the beginning phase of its development, Kyros is eager to see the advantages its features can bring to the table in the near future. Thus, we decided to invest in ENX private round sale, along with expanding its reputation to the Vietnamese crypto market. Vietnam is surely an ideal location for a crypto start as we are prioritizing blockchain technology development. 

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About Kyros 

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities. For further information, please visit: Kyros.Ventures

About Enex Space

Enex.Space is a DeFi platform powered by the Enecuum blockchain and built by Trinity Lab. Enecuum aims to bring cryptocurrency into the mainstream by incorporating mobile and desktop device users into a blockchain network for decentralized, fast, and low-cost applications. The Enecuum Network combines the Trinity Protocol combination of Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Activity (PoA), and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithms to deliver a hybrid form of consensus, powered by the ENQ token, that allows users to create custom tokens on top of it. For further information, please visit Enex.Space

Kyros Ventures joined in Mixsome fundraising round of $2.7M

Bringing blockchain technology to mass adoption has always been one of the biggest goals that any crypto project wants to achieve. A solution to decrease the complexity of this technology is needed to draw more mainstream users. Thus, Kyros Ventures decided to partner up with Mixsome to encourage simplifying blockchain usage. 

Mixsome is the industry’s leading DeFi Flow tool to assist in the development and creation of Decentralized Finance solutions. Mixsome will help streamline the application of DeFi and address 3 core issues of accessibility, complication and usability. 

Some of MixSome’s solutions include: 

  • Fiat-Crypto: Easy to use application with fiat to DeFi on-ramp. 
  • Investment flow: Mixsome has built-in processes that allow you to smoothly navigate DeFi markets and find your desired product.
  • Investment strategies: Custom, predefined, and trending DeFi strategies.
  • Data Science: AI-retested strategies yield the highest returns.
  • Risk / Reward profile: Mixsome’s tools allow traders and investors to find the perfect flow and determine a winning strategy.
  • Put / Call option: Automatically hold your position at a specific rate to protect it from liquidation or increase leverage based on market movement.
  • Lower cost ratio: Mixsome allows taking advantage of lower-cost ratios compared to buying DeFi tokens separately.

Kyros Ventures invested in Mixsome’s fundraising round of $2.7 million, along with many industry leading investors Alphabit, Genblock Capital, Coin98 Ventures, Spark Digital Capital, CMS, 4 Seasons Ventures, Blocksync, Iconomy, A195, Jun Capital, Master Ventures and GBIC.

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About Kyros

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities.

For further information, please visit: kyros.ventures

About Mixsome

Mixsome is a DeFi tool that helps create and optimize DeFi strategies by allowing customers to mix different DeFi protocols and tokens into customized token baskets. Customers can set up a different number of DeFi protocol tokens, and then Mixsome mixes it into the same transaction, allowing customers to benefit from DeFi growth and yields by building custom strategies simply and conveniently. Furthermore, customers can create different strategies simultaneously and manage their risks without sacrificing potential yields.

For further information, please visit: mixsome.cash

Kyros Ventures partners up with Raze Network, heading towards cross-chain privacy

Kyros Ventures is happy to be supporting the development of a secure blockchain ecosystem through our partnership with Raze Network. 

Raze Network is a second-layer protocol that will provide cross-chain payment privacy for the entire DeFi stack of the Polkadot ecosystem. The core technical module of the Raze Network is a second-layer anonymous payment for the DeFi ecosystem. This module will be imported as a substrate-based smart contract which will serve as a universal plug-and-play infrastructure for Polkadot which allows the user to hide one’s account address and financial information before participating in the DeFi stack.

Some of Raze’s highlighted products include: 

  • Private Transaction: RAZE token is meant for enabling the privacy of on-chain transactions between the recipient and destination addresses and transfer any token between any blockchain.
  • Secret DeFi Bridge: Users can hide their trading history as RAZE is compatible across all DeFi products, which are fully compatible with Uniswap, AAVE, Compound and DeFi ecosystem on Polkadot and Cosmos
  • Anonymity Mining: The access to the liquidity pool always stays anonymous and secure, to mine RAZE in a truly private way.
  • RazeVM Integration: Allow builders to deploy the privacy-preserving functions with an open protocol connected to all DApps. 

Kyros’s vision aligns with Raze Network regarding the path towards a more secure blockchain ecosystem, providing privacy-conscious users with more powerful tools to make more informed financial decisions, especially when it comes to privacy protection. Kyros will be assisting Raze in executing its development plan to the Vietnamese market. 

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About Kyros

Kyros Ventures is the investment branch of Coin68 Media, the leading cryptocurrency entity in Vietnam. Specializing in incubation and investment, Kyros Ventures is the gateway for international cryptocurrency projects to enter the Vietnamese market, helping them to achieve greater awareness and adoption thanks to its extensive network of partners and communities.

For further information, please visit: https://blog.kyros.ventures

About Raze Network

Raze Network is a Substrate-based, cross-chain privacy protocol for the Polkadot ecosystem. It is built as a native privacy layer that can provide end-to-end anonymity for the entire DeFi and Web3.0 stack. The Raze Network applies zkSNARKs to the Zether framework to build a second-layer decentralized anonymous module. It will then be imported as a substrate-based smart contract. The objective of Raze Network is to enable cross-chain privacy-preserving payment and trading systems, while protecting the transparency of your assets and behaviours from surveillance. For further information, please visit: https://raze.network