Disclaimer: NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE
1.Ventures News
OKX Blockdream Ventures has a long-term commitment on driving a thriving crypto ecosystem and has invested in hundreds of mainstream projects such as NFT, GameFi, DeFi, Layer2, and Web3.0. At the same time, we have partnered with ecosystems like Solana, NEAR, Polygon and Avalanche on their projects' development.
We kept focusing on fields like GameFi, DeFi, NFT in Q1 2022 and made key layouts in related areas, investing in projects such as Zebec (Solana+DeFi), LiveArtX (NFT), Angelic (Solana+GameFi), Ref Finance (NEAR+DeFi ) and , participated and invested.
The following are highlights of OKX Blockdream Ventures' portfolios and their post-investment progress.
Zebec
- Project Overview.
- Zebec is a streaming payment protocol built on Solana that revolutionizes the future of payroll and traditional financial systems. Using Zebec, employees will be able to receive funds on a per second basis and reap greater rewards in the long run.
- Project Highlights.
- Programmability: Programmability of payments using smart contracts. Token transfers can be controlled just like the deposit process.
- Low rates: Supports a network of interleaved value streams from multiple assets for minimal gas consumption.
- Composability: Funding streams can be built on top of other funding streams.
- This native solution brings many advantages: improved funding efficiency, reduced gas fees, reduced number of user signatures, etc.
- Investment logic.
- The Zebec team has excellent development skills and a track record of serial entrepreneurial success.
- Zebec's exploration of payment methods drives users to dominate their own assets with more flexible streaming payments, and the programmable nature of the protocol allows other projects to also establish ongoing connections with users to automatically pay for investments and transactions. When the combinability of payments is greatly increased, more scenarios and imaginations will be derived.
- Zebec has raised sufficient funds for the development of the project and OKX Blockdream Ventures is pleased to participate with Coinbase Ventures, Solana Ventures, Alameda Research, GoldenTree and others to contribute to the development of Streaming Payments.
LiveArtX
- Project Overview.
- LiveArtX is an advanced NFT platform connecting the art world with Web 3.0, built for artists, collectors and the future art community. Artists can produce their work in the LiveArtX Creator Hub with robust management and resale royalties. Collectors can also access a carefully selected selection of the best artworks on the LiveArtX Marketplace.
- Project Highlights.
- To create a high-quality NFT platform, the LiveArtX team adheres to three difficult but sound principles.
- Authenticity: LiveArtX validates every project on the marketplace, ensuring that each NFT work is original and belongs to the correct owner at the time of sale.
- High standards of curation: the platform provides top curation resources to help sellers curate and buyers find quality NFTs.
- User experience first: buying NFT supports ETH and credit card payments, more ways coming.
- Investment logic.
- LiveArtX is composed of a team of art industry experts with decades of experience, and is a premium NFT platform connecting the art world with Web 3.0, adhering to a high-quality operation.
- Experts provide certificates of authenticity: including the most important information about the artwork, such as creator's address, casting time, NFT's smart contracts, number of art transactions, archive packages, etc.; legally reviewed rights and reproduction terms to create a marketplace that artists and collectors can trust.
- OKX Blockdream Ventures values this differentiated, high quality and attentive platform and will provide the corresponding support.
Angelic
- Project Overview.
- Angelic is an online multiplayer RPG on Solana that combines narrative RPG with turn-based strategy gameplay. The game is set in a collaborative multiplayer sci-fi universe.
- The Angelic team is striving to deliver a 3A (AAA) game that offers an engaging and immersive single player experience, as well as a complex and deep multiplayer layer.
- The game puts full ownership of in-game assets in the hands of the player through the use of NFTs, and provides governance rights to the player through DAO.
- Project Highlights.
- The founding team has been deeply involved in the game industry for decades, with most members coming from well-known studios with multiple successful large-scale games, including quality first-tier projects such as League of Legends, Glorious 3, oculus and crytek.
- The game story and planning are fascinating.
- Angelic's Roadmap is progressing well, and OKX Blockdream Ventures will continue to monitor its latest developments.
- Investment Logic.
- The Angelic team is experienced and focused on game development, designing engaging game mechanics and artwork, and delivering a very compelling product, so we look forward to Angelic's success.
Gamepad
- Project Overview.
- Gamepad.co is the next generation decentralized incubator for the GameFi, Play-to-Earn and Metaverse projects.
- Project Highlights.
- The team envisions a top-notch launchpad to power high-quality metaverse and GameFi projects, guaranteeing long-term returns and success, with the inspiration to become the world's top decentralized Ycombinator.
- Investment Logic.
- With extensive experience in project incubation and investment, and having focused on blockchain for many years, the Gamepad team has the potential of a successful incubator.
Mirror world
- Project Overview.
- Mirror world is a blockchain AI-powered avatar game that includes a series of content matrices that make up the game universe.
- Each Mirror is a standalone game or narrative, with the AI-powered Soul allowing gamers to co-create the game narrative.
- Project Highlights.
- Faster progress on the game, with 11,000 first generation Mirror NFTs already sold out; the first beta of the game has been completed and partnerships have been reached with over 20 guilds that are working to create a Web 3.0 paradise through Mirror IP.
- OKX Blockdream Ventures, together with capital from Galaxy Interactive, Republic Crypto and Alameda Research, to assist Mirror World in becoming the first project to connect multiple games.
- Investment logic.
- Mirror world is a leader in technical capabilities, the project is innovative, the project is progressing beyond expectations and has the promise to break through the interoperability of connecting multiple games, OKX Blockdream Ventures will continue to support.
Ref Finance
- Project Overview.
- Ref Finance is the gateway to the NEAR ecosystem, serving users from outside NEAR. Ref supports a range of near-native, ERC-20 and other L1 assets through the Rainbow Bridge between NEAR, Aurora (EVM) and Ethereum, as well as the bridge between Solana, Terra and Celo enabled by Allbridge.io.
- It raised $4.8 million in funding and received a $2 million grant from the Celo Foundation to build the (NEAR-Celo) marketplace.
- Project Highlights.
- Ref Finance, built natively on NEAR and produced by NEAR Lab with good interoperability, was one of the first AMMs in the NEAR marketplace and is the core DeFi project in the NEAR ecosystem.
- It uses the Rust language to implement Uni v2 AMM and Curve stableswap, improving execution efficiency and achieving a fast (done in 1-2 seconds), cheap and scalable trading experience for large-scale adoption.
- Ref is very flexible, allowing users to create custom pools of money and enable the best trading strategy algorithms across all pools.
- It will be the first in the market to perform cross-chain liquidity aggregation AMM (between Aurora <> NEAR) and will launch a new Farm in May.
- Investment logic.
- Ref is a NEAR ecological project with an experienced team that has integrated the latest concepts in the DeFi space and adapted them on NEAR, proposing the concept of cross-chain liquidity aggregation AMM. Based on the long-term bullishness on NEAR ecological development, OKX Blockdream Ventures will continue to focus on its ecological DeFi projects.
2.Field Focus / Insight
First and foremost, OKX Blockdream Ventures will keep focusing on GameFi and Metaverse.
GameFi has contributed greatly to assets and users' growth of Blockchain industry. By March 31, 2022, the overall Market Cap of GameFi has reached $209.08 B. According to DappRadar, the average GameFi daily player is 1.11 M, which is proved by Footprint Analytics' data(1.08M), too.
Axie Infinity was one of the most successful GamiFi in 2021, which led to a great increase in Gamefi users. On March 31, 2022, its user base had reached 2.097m. Its Market Cap peaked at $10.49B on November 8, 2021, with a 135,255% increase within year. Meanwhile StepN, a similar concept, is Following the trend and guiding sports users into blockchain market.
Besides blockchain protocols, traditional companies are getting involved in this emerging industry, including Ubisoft, Voodoo (France), Zynga (US) and NCSoft (South Korea).They have released their Gamefi plans sequentially. YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon also commented that GameFi industry has the potential to see a-more-than-10-million daily wallet interaction by the end of 2022.
Therefore, in the past two months, OKX Blockdream Ventures has not only kept focusing on high-quality GameFi projects over the past 2 months, but also continued to help Portfolio projects' growth and operation, including MonkeyLeague, Sidus and dozens of nice GameFi projects. Currently Metaverse and GameFi are, like Web2 Model, biased towards introverts. The open metaverse, portability and interoperability of personal data assets will see further development, so we will keep Researching and focusing on high-quality GameFi projects and ecosystem.
OKX Blockdream Ventures will continue to focus on cross-chain and EVM-compatible projects.
Second，the cross-chain field has unabated heat. Previously, Vitalik wrote "The future will be multi-chain, pessimistic about cross-chain applications" which sparked a discussion on cross-chain's future trend. In particular, a major security incident occurred in the cross-chain space, where an attack on Sky Mavis' Ronin verifier node and Axie DAO verifier node on March 23, 2022 resulted in a theft of 173,600 ETH and $25.5 million from the Ronin Network.
On the other hand, both Acala and Karura will integrate with Wormhole to enhance their cross-chain capability. This states that cross-chain is an important area that gains market attention, and OKX Blockdream Ventures will keep an eye on it, especially universal cross-chain solutions, cross-chain security and cross-chain ecology projects.
In the multi-chain field, OKX Blockdream Ventures continues to focus on EVM compatible projects, which have been growing rapidly over the past few months. MoonBeam, Aurora, Neon and Evmos all evolved their ecosystems rapidly. We think EVM compatible projects are an important innovation of the industry by offering an opportunity for quick trial and error fixing without incurring the high cost of the Ethernet mainnet. We see it as an attempt to overturn the old architecture. Evmos team plans to relaunch the network in the second week of April, which we will watch closely. No matter who the winner in the field is, OKX Blockdream Ventures, as an industry contributor, will participate in and spare no effort to support innovative projects in the field.
Disclaimer: NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE