2020 turned out to be a stellar year in the land of crypto/digital assets, with BTC hitting an all time high above USD34K, and DeFi’s Total Value Locked growing from USD1B in January to USD15B in December. According to The Block, Bitcoin’s on-chain transaction volume has also increased by 42% from $672 billion in 2019 to $960 billion in 2020.
While the Covid situation has disrupted people’s life at an unprecedented level, the crypto/digital asset market has fortunately fared better for a few key reasons:
1) Growing institutional adoption of bitcoin due to the growing narrative around Bitcoin being “Digital gold”, and institutions like PayPal and Square opening up crypto gateways to its millions of users and merchants.
2) The emergence of “usable” DeFi protocols that start to answer the perennial question “ What is blockchain technology good for”.
3) Maturing of the Web3.0 stack: The mainnet launch of third generation blockchain protocols (i.e. Polkadot) that has the potential to power real life applications and the maturing of the decentralized stack with Filecoin’s Mainnet launched in Oct this year.
2.5 years since LongHash Venture’s inception, we want to take this opportunity to reflect on how we have contributed to this space and what we might do better.
We are a leading Asia focused Web 3 accelerator and investor. We have stayed true to our Web 3.0 vision by venture building and investing into a new breed of companies that are more secure, more open and more synergistic to growth.
1. Our protocol acceleration partnerships: We work with leading web 3.0 layer 0/1 protocols to jumpstart their ecosystem by providing structured acceleration support to early stage projects.
We took a significant position in Polkadot and launched the first Polkadot accelerator back in July 2019. Since then the Polkadot network has grown to be a USD7B network , with its market cap ranking 7th. There are more than 100 projects (and growing rapidly) looking to participate in the parachain auction expected in 1Q2021. We have also invested into the seed round of early ecosystem projects such as Plasm(smart contract and layer 2), Bifrost (decentralized staking protocol) etc. Additionally, our COO is also a Polkadot ambassador and has written articles around parachain auction and participated actively in shaping up parachain auction strategy for our portfolio companies.
Subsequently, we have also worked with Zilliqa, Algorand, and are soon launching our Filecoin (decentralized storage layer) batch in 1H2021.
2. Our vertical focus in finance: we have always believed that blockchain technology will disrupt the financial sector at an unprecedented level by redefining what money is, how money moves and, how wealth is generated and protected. Over the last two years, we have accelerated companies like XanPool (Asia-focused Fiat gateway), Keyless Technologies (Key management solution) which have shown tremendous growth. Outside the acceleration program, we have also invested in early stage DeFi protocols such as Idle Finance (yield aggregator), and DODO Breeder (DEX with AMM model).
We have grown our team further to 10 people covering Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong under both our acceleration and investment arms. 2020 has been a fruitful year for LongHash Ventures, which wouldn’t have been possible without our partners, community and our awesome team.
We are even more excited about what’s in store for 2021. Just to share a few wild predictions:
We want to thank you for being part of this amazing journey with us. The best is yet to come.