"Stepping Stones" for Blockchain Development: Infrastructure Construction

In the crypto world, the investment behaviors of some well-known investment institutions are often forward-looking layouts, which seem to herald the next stage of the industry explosion. Therefore, the investment direction of investment institutions has always attracted much attention. As a crypto investment institution just established last year, ViaBTC Capital's investment acumen is not inferior. The Move2Earn application project StepN it invested in in 2021 has become an example of a gamified Web3 project. In addition to application projects, infrastructure has always been the focus of ViaBTC Capital. Since the beginning of this year, ViaBTC Capital has focused its investment on new public chains in infrastructure, Ethereum 2.0, new storage and development tools and other sub-tracks.

The significance of laying out the infrastructure track

With the prosperity and development of Web3 applications such as DeFi, GameFi, SocialFi, and NFT, the blockchain ecosystem is also increasingly enriched. New applications continue to push up the market value of the encrypted world, and Web3 applications continue to surpass the history of Web2, such as Compound, Uniswap, SNX, dYdX, Axie, StepN and other projects involving finance, trading, derivatives, games, reality world, and more. Developers of decentralized applications (DApps) are going beyond the blockchain infrastructure and only focusing on the development and innovation of DApps with "high short-term benefits", resulting in high costs for users and difficult cross-platform links, etc. The problem has left the impression of a bad user experience, and other institutions and users have always maintained a wait-and-see attitude, and have been reluctant to embrace the blockchain.

ViaBTC Capital has always adhered to ViaBTC Group's vision of "becoming the infrastructure of the blockchain world", and believes that only the continuous improvement of blockchain infrastructure is the foundation for the long-term development of blockchain. The framework still has many problems and challenges, such as high gas costs, poor interoperability, difficult data index verification, and difficult development.

The infrastructure that ViaBTC Capital has invested in

ViaBTC Capital has only been established for half a year, but it has invested in more than 20 projects, of which the investment in infrastructure projects (including tools) accounts for 70%.

ViaBTC Capital focuses on the infrastructure related to Ethereum, including Arbitrum, one of the popular Layer 2 expansion schemes, MEV infrastructure Flashbots, and Near-based EVM compatible protocol Aurora, etc. These infrastructures provide more solutions for the expansion of the Ethereum ecosystem. Arbitrum, as the second-layer infrastructure of the Ethereum ecosystem, promotes the extensive growth of the entire Ethereum ecosystem, making the transaction speed and Costs are increasing exponentially; Flashbots is committed to building an efficient and democratized MEV market, which is crucial to Ethereum and even the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem; Aurora is a smart contract on the NEAR protocol compatible with Ethereum EVM, Help expand the Ethereum ecosystem while providing users with lower transaction costs.

Among other infrastructures, DeFiYield, an innovative tool for managing digital assets, and BlockVision, a Web 3.0 data infrastructure startup, have also attracted attention. DeFiYield has very professional security protection, a huge database of audit reports and accident databases, and can manage its own digital assets and asset data on multiple chains and various protocols in one stop, while ensuring asset security. In the future, it is likely to become every One of the essential infrastructure tools for asset users; BlockVision provides a series of APIs to make building and running blockchain queries more concise, intuitive and accessible, as well as development kits and visual analytics designed for developers Statistics greatly reduce the development difficulty for developers. Currently, Ethereum, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Optimism, Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche and other chains are supported.

In 2022, ViaBTC Capital devotes itself to exploring the investment in the field of infrastructure

1. New public chain: Obviously, the multi-chain pattern has gradually formed. In the future, the new public chain still has a very large development space and market demand. At present, the development of Ethereum and compatible EVM chains is also quite rapid, and the new public chains Solana, Avalanche, Terra, etc. are all rising stars. ViaBTC Capital will also continue to pay attention to the progress of the new public chain development team and its innovations in the underlying architecture, consensus mechanism and user needs.

2. Ethereum 2.0: ViaBTC Capital believes that Ethereum has the ability to reshape the global financial system and has the opportunity to become a platform for all future decentralized applications. With the upgrade of Ethereum to PoS proof of stake, Beacon Chain (beacon chain), Sharding (sharding) and Docking (docking) are all important modules for its upgrade, aiming at the infrastructure, supporting facilities and tools of ETH2.0 It is very likely that such projects will stand out. I believe that many excellent developers and projects will emerge in the future to serve the entire ETH2.0 ecosystem.

3. New storage: Storage, as an essential part of infrastructure, supports infrastructure data storage and ecological project storage requirements. With the vigorous development of NFT, GameFi, and new public chains, the market demand for decentralized storage solutions will grow exponentially, and the market urgently needs a more complete, efficient, low-cost and fast-responding decentralized storage solution. .

4. Development tools: Development tools involve node deployment, verification, smart contracts, APIs, data indexing, access and other aspects. According to the "Electric Capital Developer Report (2021)" report, the number of monthly active developers in 2021 exceeded 18,000, a record high. With the development of the multi-chain structure, the deployment of DApp applications and the establishment of more complex applications and contracts, the market's requirements for developers will become higher and higher. It can be predicted that friendly development services for developers will also be developed. Welcome to a good market.

Although ViaBTC Capital's portfolio covers multiple tracks, these projects share common characteristics: more ecologically friendly, promising infrastructure, technologically advanced and visionary. ViaBTC Capital maintains long-term attention and thinking on infrastructure, and has invested a lot of manpower and technology to provide innovative ideas and opinions on related improvements and changes at the infrastructure level. This kind of help is not only financial support, but also a full range of post-investment services: resource support, institutional resources, technology and business model consulting, etc. At the same time, it provides in-depth incubation services on the market side to solve the marketing shortage in the technical team market. plate.

ViaBTC Capital respects the developers who have ideals and are willing to work hard in them, and sincerely give them more help. ViaBTC Capital is moving towards building the next generation of cutting-edge cryptographic infrastructure. The goal is to lay a paving stone for the development of blockchain, and choosing to invest in infrastructure may be ViaBTC Capital's way of "paving the way" for the blockchain industry.

*The above does not constitute investment advice