Author: Rui Source: @YeruiZhang

Nothing to do on Christmas Eve, just chat

For the primary market and those doing projects, this cycle is the most difficult version. Most of the investment logic inherited from the previous cycle has failed, such as following the ETH foundation or following big VCs. Before April, the community’s pricing for projects was based on TVL and which VC backer, how many projects A16Z invested in were worth, and what level of Infra projects the TVL reached could be compared. However, the pricing logic of these communities was changed in April. Then completely collapsed. When the receiving community does not know at what price it should take over, the playing methods developed by investment institutions based on the consensus of these takeovers will be completely ineffective.

The most successful project in the first half of the year was ENA, the last beacon in the era of VC-led consensus. ENA is both the natural choice and the only one. She has basically never experienced any hardships since she was born. She got TVL at the best time, cooperated with Pendle at the best time and started to increase leverage through DEFI, and went to the exchange at the best time. The end of the first season and the beginning of the second season happened to be in the critical period of bear to bull, and then quickly bottomed out and rebounded. Beyond that, every other project is still absorbing the pain of the retreat of vested interests.

So when the original mechanism failed to work, the market's gameplay also began to change:

With the collapse of the pricing system, a group of non-mainstream developers are robbing resources originally allocated by those with vested interests.

Hype and Virtual, the two versions of this cycle, are the best reflections of this trend, both of which are reflections of accumulation and accumulation. Everyone knows that Hype has increased nearly 10 times in one month, but everyone does not know that Hype’s OI did not exceed 500M before August. Everyone knows that Virtual took the lead in the AI ​​wave at the end of October, but everyone doesn’t know that when they first transitioned to AI in April, almost no one was optimistic about it. Both projects have gone through a long period of pain, and during the pain period they have found the teammates that best suit them.

The total resources of the market are limited. In other words, the cake is only so big. For traditional VC projects, because there are many people sharing the cake, it needs to be done carefully, because if you are not careful, you may not take care of any interests.The result was a car crash and fatalities. For these projects of non-mainstream developers, because they were not taken seriously in the initial stage, the team was willing to share the cake, and the portion of the cake that could be divided was relatively large. Similarly, cake eaters are selected during the period of labor pains, have some beliefs, and are not willing to retreat after eating dry wipes. This is not an obstacle to the subsequent rise. Founders need to achieve 100% in a certain aspect instead of doing projects based on arbitrage ideas, so that they are more likely to succeed in this cycle.

ENA It is difficult to have a version like this based on the consensus of the whole market, but only the developers who have accumulated a lot of experience will have the opportunity. Just getting started.

Xterio is a very interesting project. There are many stories about the experience of this project. The source is that Binance lab announced an investment of 15M at the beginning of the year. At that time, it was like a king. The existence of , top VC backed, awesome gaming industry bosses starting businesses, and being Binance’s favorite gaming track, it’s like a through train script has been written. But when everyone thought there were no surprises, something unexpected happened. Due to the poor performance of several junk game projects, the currency listing of the entire game track stagnated, and the Chosen One fell into the mortal world.

For a while, the whole world was obsessed with Fud Xterio. The NFT prices of the two previously released sub-games plummeted, the released chain problems occurred frequently, the team left, and investors reacted. Water, a lot of bad things have happened in the past two or three months (a digression, this is Crypto, when you do well, everyone will treat you like a father, and when you do not do well, everyone will treat you like a father) The son will step on it). Most teams would start to falter at this point, but Xterio did not give up.

To be honest, I don’t know where the turning point is, but the current situation is that the team has survived Fud and is about to issue coins. Although the popularity is not the same as at the beginning of the year There was a lot of difference, but let’s look back at the fundamentals. Binance Lab’s investment has not been withdrawn, and Founder’s resources and connections in the gaming circle are still there. In addition to games, AI narrative has been added, and the most important new narrative in this cycle is what they are best at. Michael is a serial entrepreneur. He worked for Hong Kong Dianping Openrice, participated in NetEase and Funplus early on, and has been dealing with distribution and traffic. How to introduce high-value traffic and convert it reasonably should be easy to grasp.

Xterio has undoubtedly gone through a lot of experience, and I can’t give an answer for the time being whether it can flourish. The success of the coin issuance event is full of too many unknown factors. In the endIt may be attributed to luck. I agree with @qiqileyuan on this point, @fat_leopard never doubted that he would succeed from the first time I met him, because his appearance is so good.