OKX Ventures 2022 Analysis: Industry Development and Trend Outlook

In 2021, the cryptocurrency market surged forward, driven by macroeconomic factors: Bitcoin and Ethereum together reached all-time highs, and the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market approached the $3 trillion milestone (peaking at $2.9753 trillion). As core components of the metaverse concept, GameFi and NFTs successively became trending sectors leading the industry, widely favored by capital and attracting numerous leading technology companies to enter the space. As the industry's infrastructure and the underlying network承载ing the metaverse and Web3.0, public chains achieved exciting progress over the past year. The launch of ETH 2.0 and the emergence of the Layer2 sector are equally worth anticipating.

In 2022, the market's future trend has become complex: Bitcoin first extended the downtrend that began last November, falling all the way to near $33,000, marking a new low within six months, then turned from weak to strong in late January and reclaimed the $40,000 mark. The previously extremely panicked market sentiment subsequently saw significant relief. However, risks have not been fully released: US inflation growth reached 7%, refreshing a 39-year record, and recently released CPI data (7.5%) also hit a new high since 1982. Federal Reserve rate hike expectations hang over the market like the Sword of Damocles. This inevitably raises concerns: after global monetary policy tightening, how can the cryptocurrency market achieve independence in the face of financial market turmoil?

This article will review 2021 market development while analyzing the new year's industry development trends.

Trend 1: Accelerated Expansion of the Metaverse

2021 was called the "first year of the metaverse." Beyond the increasing maturity of technologies like 5G and VR, and the rush to enter by internet giants such as Facebook, the development of NFTs and GameFi also provided powerful assistance.

As the "secret key" to the metaverse world, the NFT market's cumulative trading volume last year was $21.5 billion, a month-over-month increase of over 200 times. It achieved leapfrog development in market capitalization, user count, and high-quality projects. The entry of leading enterprises across various fields such as Disney, Porsche, and Coca-Cola, plus the embellishments by celebrities like Stephen Curry, Jay Chou, and Elon Musk, created a phenomenal breakout effect for NFTs.

Since the beginning of 2022, the NFT market has maintained its previous growth momentum. According to Forkast, the number of independent NFT buyers exceeded 895,000 in January, an all-time high, with year-over-year growth of 3,000%. And NFT Scan data shows: The Ethereum network added over 4.134 million new NFT assets in the past 30 days.

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GameFi successfully took the baton from DeFi, driving steady increases in on-chain data such as TVL. According to The Block data: Total Value Locked (TVL) in protocols surged from $16.1 billion to $101.4 billion, with user data also reaching new highs.

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Dapp Radar data shows that a total of 1,334 gaming dApps have been launched and deployed across the entire network. Since July 2021, chain game data has grown rapidly, with players increasing from 80,000 in early April to 1.248 million in December, and daily trading volume growing from around $500,000 in early April to an average of around $200 million, with peak daily trading volume exceeding $850 million.

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In 2021, the term metaverse (Metaverse) became an undeniable presence. And in the newly begun 2022, we will see NFTs, GameFi, and Web3.0 achieve closer and more diverse integration, providing more people with accessible pathways to understand and participate in the metaverse.

Currently, the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market's metaverse sector sits below the $30 billion mark. Compared to the traditional gaming industry and traditional internet companies' combined market capitalization of $16.8 trillion, there is enormous room for development. If previously the metaverse was merely an imagination too distant from reality, then with the successive explosions of infrastructure, NFTs, and GameFi, metaverse application scenarios will further expand and cover all aspects of the traditional internet, influencing social progress in finance, social interaction, production relations, and other areas. Facebook's rebranding to "Meta," as well as internet giants like Google, Microsoft, Tencent, and ByteDance entering this field, seems to be just the beginning of the metaverse becoming a market theme.

Trend 2: Web3.0 Succession Development

Web3.0 is the internet's identity layer, where users can own their identity online and have absolute control over the degree of information disclosure, without needing to surrender ownership of personal information due to social media network monopolies. At the same time, Web3.0 based on blockchain technology also allows users to enjoy the benefits brought by platform ecosystem expansion without worrying about privacy security issues. That is, the value generated during user interactions will belong to users rather than developers. The essence of Web3.0 is the process of returning operational power to users, at which time various decentralized internet applications will be managed by users replacing developers in protocol management.

Currently, Web3.0 faces significant controversy—even Elon Musk, who is extremely inclusive toward the cryptocurrency industry, has questioned its application scenarios and value. But it is undeniable that the traditional internet has entered an obvious bottleneck, Web3.0 is a keyword for pattern transformation, and also a good medicine for solving current Web2.0 pain points. Although Web3.0 concept applications are relatively limited, mainly focusing on storage, decentralized social, payments, domains, and other areas. But I believe that as more teams and companies join Web3.0 development, and more composable applications integrate into Web3.0, this currently still quite vague concept will certainly gain more mainstream acceptance.

Trend 3: New Collaborative Organization — DAO

Decentralized Autonomous Organization DAO is a form of digital world organization based on blockchain technology. Possessing characteristics such as information transparency, community autonomy, freedom, and openness. It can be said that DAO's flat organizational structure can integrate dispersed individual power through smart contracts, allowing collective intelligence to be maximized, thereby avoiding bias and errors in centralized decision-making. At the same time, DAO's structure and characteristics also give it greater advantages in flexibility.

2021 was a year of rapid DAO development, with the ecosystem taking initial shape and demonstrating infinite potential as a new collaborative method. According to statistics, as of January 2022, there were over 4,200 DAO organizations in the industry, covering three major directions: investment, application, and governance, spanning development tools, services, social, creation, collection, and multiple other fields. And the 183 DAOs counted by Deep DAO website have funds scale exceeding $9.6 billion. The cumulative number of organization members and token holders reached 1.7 million, growing over 22.3% in the past month.

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Among them, phenomenal projects like Constitution DAO (PEOPLE) emerged, raising over 11,600 ETH . But just as 2022 began, this record was broken by a raise of 17,400 ETH.

Currently, DAOs still face problems such as governance attacks due to smart contract vulnerabilities, lack of control over raised funds, and arbitrary changes to fundraising rules. But I believe that with the further development of DAO modular operating systems and the improvement of various services, the DAO ecosystem will make further progress in interoperability and composability, thereby continuously expanding its boundaries. Major organizations and institutions will also successively participate in this experiment of collaborative organization paradigm shift.

Trend 4: Explosion of the DEX Derivatives Track

Derivatives are one of the key elements of all mature financial systems. Looking at the development of traditional financial markets, since the 1970s, derivatives have been one of the main forces driving the entire financial industry forward, with derivatives volume in traditional finance being 40 to 60 times that of spot. In the cryptocurrency market, however, derivatives trading market capitalization still accounts for less than half of the entire digital asset market volume. By comparison, derivatives development still has enormous room for imagination. Beyond volume comparison, mature players and institutions in the market are also beginning to attempt using derivatives to hedge risks and capture more value. According to estimates, current DeFi derivatives daily trading volume is equivalent to only 1/6 of DeFi spot trading volume, equivalent to 1/100 of CEX derivatives trading volume.

Although when conducting derivatives trading, people still prefer to operate on CEXs due to considerations of interaction experience, depth, and other factors. But with DeFi derivatives' permissionless and other decentralized characteristics, plus the addition of professional liquidity teams, we have reason to expect breakthrough development in derivatives DEX market share.

Building on the Past, OKX Ventures' Summary and Outlook

To long-term promote the prosperity of the Crypto Ecosystem and assist high-quality project development, OKX Ventures has cumulatively invested in hundreds of projects, covering NFTs, GameFi, DeFi, Layer2 , Web3.0, and other core tracks, participating in the ecological construction of over 90% of leading projects:

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In the public chain track: OKX Ventures, together with hot public chains like Solana, Near, Polygon, and Avax, established ecological funds to support their ecological projects, and invested in highly potential DeFi projects like Acala, Deversifi, Swivel, and Persistence.

OKX Ventures also focused heavily on the Layer2 sector, investing in projects dedicated to scaling solutions such as Arbitrum, zkSync 2.0, Connext, Aurora, and Metis.

In the NFT and GameFi sectors, OKX Ventures focused on three sub-tracks: gaming platforms and guilds, infrastructure, and high-quality projects, respectively investing in highly potential projects like YGG SEA, Blockchainspace, Big Time Studios, Relay, Dehorize, Godsunchained, Chain guardian, waxp, efinity, and metadojo, providing sufficient funding and traffic support.

In Web3.0, OKX Ventures invested in projects like Pocket Network, Octopus, and Joystream, also demonstrating confidence in next-generation internet development.

In 2022, OKX Ventures will continue to closely follow industry development trends, continuously exerting effort in high-potential areas such as Web3.0, metaverse , derivatives DEX, and DAO, working with partners to jointly promote the development of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. We realize that the industry's development speed has surpassed most people's imagination, and facing this change, all industry practitioners should make more adequate preparations.

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