Author: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
Multicoin Capital, known for its influential articles on cryptocurrency investments, gained significant attention. It rose to prominence in the last bull market cycle by successfully betting on well-known projects such as Solana, a high-performance blockchain. However, after the FTX incident, negative repercussions still lingered. Multicoin, which made gains from Solana, also suffered losses. In December 2022, it admitted to significant losses, with its assets plummeting by 90% that year, causing a public outcry.
At the time, there was a continuous stream of criticism and discussions about Multicoin’s incompetence or innocence. Now, as the controversy subsides and the bull market frenzy ensues, Multicoin has regained its momentum in the rising tide of cryptocurrency prices.
In a letter to annual investors in March 2024, Multicoin Capital revealed that its cryptocurrency hedge funds had generated a return of 9281% for its initial investors since 2017. This return is enough to compensate for Multicoin Capital’s previous loss of 91.4% in 2022. Tushar Jain, Kyle Samani, and Matt Shapiro, executives at Multicoin, stated in the letter, “In 2023, cryptocurrencies did what they do best, once again overcoming death. The market rebounded in a stunning fashion, and our hedge funds were able to capture the market’s reaction, outperforming the overall market.”
Looking at Multicoin’s investment portfolio, it is evident that the company has a fondness for public chains, DeFi, and other infrastructure projects. Additionally, it is a venture capital firm that boldly leads various investment and financing activities. Foresight News presents an overview of Multicoin’s ecosystem.
L1
Algorand
Algorand was founded by Silvio Micali, a pioneer in cryptography, Turing Award winner, and professor at MIT. Algorand is the first blockchain to provide immediate transaction finality. Its transaction throughput is also comparable to large-scale payment and financial networks.
Aptos
Aptos is a Layer 1 public chain built by former members of the Meta (formerly Facebook) development team. It adopts the programming language Move and Diem-BFT consensus technology.
Arweave
Arweave has been under construction since 2017 and is a distributed storage network where users pay a one-time upfront fee for permanent data storage.
Ceramic
Ceramic is a decentralized data network aimed at bringing unlimited data composability to Web3 applications.
Dfinity
Dfinity is a project that aims to build a decentralized internet computer. It allows developers to build and run various applications on a distributed network platform without relying on traditional cloud services, databases, or payment interfaces.
Flow
Flow, developed by the team behind NBA Top Shot at Dapper Labs, aims to support projects such as NFT collectibles and blockchain games on a large scale.
Fluence
Fluence is a decentralized computing network for building, hosting, and running peer-to-peer applications and protocols.
Mina
Mina has designed the entire blockchain using advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs. It has a size of about 22 kb, equivalent to a few tweets. It implements efficient execution of zero-knowledge smart contracts (zkApps) and simple programming. With its privacy features and the ability to connect to any website, Mina is building a private gateway between the real world and the crypto world.
NEAR
NEAR was co-founded by Alex Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin in 2020. It aims to achieve global scalability through sharding and a consensus mechanism called Nightshade. NEAR strives to provide predictable costs for applications and offers tools for developers at the protocol level.
Nervos
Nervos solves the scalability trilemma by separating state generation from state verification/storage in a layered architecture.
Sei
Sei was announced in May 2022 and was founded by Jayendra Jog and Jeff Feng. The two founders previously worked as software engineers at Robinhood and risk investors at Coatue Management, respectively. Sei Labs aims to become the fastest network for exchanging digital assets. Its built-in technologies such as Twin-Turbo consensus and transaction parallelization reduce transaction latency and improve transaction throughput. As the network matures, Sei Labs plans to upgrade Sei V2 and subsequent parallel stacks to further differentiate Sei and achieve growth.
Solana
Solana is a blockchain designed for scalability and is suitable for various use cases, including finance, NFTs, payments, and gaming. It operates as a single global state machine with characteristics of openness, interoperability, and decentralization.
Tari
Tari aims to enable anyone to write complex rules for digital assets and ensure that these rules are enforced. Tari makes it possible to manage, use, and transfer almost any type of digital asset, from tickets to loyalty points to virtual goods.
XION
XION is a public chain built for mainstream adoption through broad abstraction. XION largely adopts Cosmos’ development toolkit, including the CometBFT consensus mechanism, Cosmos SDK, IBC, and CosmWasm. In addition to existing tools, XION’s features include integration with USDC at the infrastructure level and abstracting technological complexity for user convenience.
L2
StarkWare
StarkWare, established in 2018, has two main products: the scalability engine StarkEx built on the Ethereum mainnet and the decentralized ZK-Rollup StarkNet. StarkEx features fast withdrawals, support for ERC-721 and ERC-20, L2 NFT minting, DeFi Pooling, dAMM (distributed AMM), real-time oracle price feeds, and the new version v4.5 supports a hybrid on-chain and off-chain data solution called Volition. StarkNet was deployed on the mainnet in November 2021 and supports independent deployment of smart contracts, allowing any developer to write and deploy smart contracts without permission.
Skale
SKALE aims to enable developers to run high-speed, low-cost smart contracts on layer 2. SKALE’s elastic sidechains aim to provide all the advantages of standard full-capacity sidechains while ensuring the security of a truly decentralized network. Elastic sidechains have high performance and configurability.
Worldcoin
Worldcoin, co-founded by Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, has designed a biometric identity verification system called World ID. It uses the Orb iris scanner to verify identity by scanning the user’s iris. Worldcoin will launch the Ethereum Layer 2 network World Chain this summer, which will be built on the OP Stack. Users who scan their irises to obtain a “World ID” digital passport will receive priority block space and gas allowances for temporary transactions on World Chain. With the new network, Worldcoin will integrate machine review directly into its DNA, allowing wallets and applications outside of the World App to integrate World ID. WLD and ETH can be used to pay for World Chain’s gas.
Cyber
Formerly known as CyberConnect, Cyber transformed into a social staking modular L2 in May this year. Cyber is built on top of the OP Stack, launched in collaboration with Altlayer, and integrates secure custom infrastructure provided by Eigenlayer’s Active Validation Service (AVS). It has now gone live on the developer mainnet.
Fhenix
Fhenix is an L2 based on fully homomorphic encryption, aiming to bring encrypted data computation into Ethereum’s virtual machine smart contracts.
Infrastructure
Cross-Chain
LayerZero
LayerZero is a full-chain interoperability protocol that aims to achieve lightweight cross-chain message passing. LayerZero strives to provide real and guaranteed message delivery with configurable trustlessness.
Wormhole
Wormhole was born out of a hackathon and was launched by blockchain infrastructure company Certus One in October 2020. It initially took the form of a direct token bridge between the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems. In August 2021, developers at Jump Crypto launched the second version of the protocol, utilizing a Proof of Authority (PoA) guardian network as an oracle and an unauthorized relay network for cross-chain message transfers.
Oracle
Pyth
Pyth currently provides over 350 price data sources covering cryptocurrencies, forex, metals, ETFs, and US stocks, among others. With near real-time and extensive coverage of assets and blockchains, DeFi applications can now offer financial products that were previously impossible to achieve with other oracle solutions, such as perpetual contracts.
MEV
Eden Network
Eden is a priority transaction network aimed at protecting traders from frontrunning, adjusting the incentive mechanism for block producers, and redistributing miner-extractable value.
Jito Labs
Jito Labs is an MEV infrastructure company building high-performance systems to scale Solana and maximize rewards for validators. Its total TVL has exceeded 2 million SOL.
FastLane
FastLane is a MEV solution in the Polygon ecosystem.
Wallets and Payments
Math Wallet
MathWallet supports over 50 blockchains, hundreds of tokens, and decentralized applications through its integrated mobile, web, and hardware wallets.
Lore
Lore is a multi-chain wallet collective that pools funds through group chats. It allows users to buy and sell meme coins, participate in airdrops, purchase blue-chip stocks, and share private placements.
Superfluid
Superfluid is an asset streaming protocol that enables real-time encrypted transfers for global DAOs, web3 companies, and DeFi games.
TipLink
TipLink is a lightweight wallet that makes transferring digital assets as simple as sending a link. People who own cryptocurrencies can create a TipLink and send it to anyone using any platform (SMS, Discord, email, etc.).
Bitcoin Ecosystem
Arch Labs
Arch Network is a parallelized PoS network that enhances Bitcoin’s native programmability using ZK proofs. The network consists of a Rust-based zkVM (called ArchVM) and a decentralized validator network. It features programmability, parallel execution speed, and trustless interoperability and composability.
Mezo
Mezo, launched by the Thesis studio, which has years of experience in BTC ecosystem development (including tBTC), aims to deepen the functionality of Bitcoin infrastructure by assisting in achieving cheaper and faster transactions without deviating from the network’s basic principles.
AI
Alethea AI
Alethea AI is an AI company that uses iNFTs (Intelligent NFTs) to enhance interactions between AI and humans by embedding AI personalities into intelligent non-fungible tokens.
io.net
io.net is a decentralized cloud computing network that allows machine learning engineers to access distributed cloud clusters at a much lower cost than centralized services.
Render Network
Render is a provider of decentralized GPU rendering solutions. Render allows anyone with a GPU to contribute their rendering power in exchange for RNDR, significantly increasing the GPU compute scale and availability for artists, designers, and researchers.
DAO
Alpha Venture DAO
A builder DAO exploring and innovating at the edge of Web3 and delivering significant value to Web3 users, ultimately returning alpha to the Alpha community.
CabinDAO
CabinDAO is an online and real-life community that utilizes blockchain technology to assist creators in making a living online.
Salad Venture
Salad is a builder family dedicated to unlocking future economic opportunities using blockchain. Through the Arcaden platform and Apollo Academy, it provides not only gaming and education but also a gateway to new possibilities.
Seed Club
Seed Club is a DAO focused on building and investing in communities. They aim to create value generated by communities on the internet that is captured by users rather than platforms.
DeFi
Lending
Timeswap
Timeswap provides flexibility for borrowers and lenders to determine their risk allocation through flexible interest rates and collateral factors.
Hubble
Hubble is a DeFi protocol built on Solana. It allows users to borrow USDH by collateralizing various assets. USDH is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Borrowing USDH enables users to leverage their holdings of tokens for liquidity (cash).
Swivel
Swivel offers borrowers the ability to lock in fixed income or increase their earnings in other ways.
DEX
THORChain
THORChain is a decentralized cross-chain protocol that aims to decentralize cryptocurrency liquidity through a series of public THORNodes and an ecosystem of products. Its native and cross-chain liquidity is open to individuals, products, or institutions.
Saber
Saber is a cross-chain stablecoin and wrapped asset trading platform on Solana. Saber aims to achieve low-slippage trades with high capital efficiency, even for large trades, providing efficient capital utilization for liquidity providers.
MarginFi
MarginFi is a decentralized margin protocol built on Solana for trading. The protocol provides traders with a unified account for accessing margin and portfolio investments, improving capital efficiency in underlying trading protocols.
dForce
dForce aims to build an integrated and interoperable open finance and monetary protocol matrix, including asset protocols (USDx, GOLDx, dToken), liquidity protocols (dForce Trade), and lending protocols (dForce Lending).
Coin 98
Coin 98 is an integrated DeFi platform that offers a full suite of products, including Coin 98 Wallet, Coin 98 Exchange, and Space Gate (cross-chain bridge). Coin 98 aims to meet the unmet needs in the industry and become the preferred entry point for connecting traditional finance users with any DeFi service or blockchain.
Derivatives
Drift Protocol
Drift is a decentralized perpetual contract trading protocol on Solana.
Perpetual Protocol
Perpetual is a decentralized perpetual contract protocol for all assets.
Strips Finance (now renamed RabbitX)Strips is a derivative trading protocol on Arbitrum. The perpetual interest rate swap (IRS) is a derivative instrument that continuously pays the difference between floating and fixed interest rates. Using IRS, traders can create trading strategy combinations that leverage interest rate fluctuations or capture “swap spreads.”
Liquidity
DFlow
DFlow is a protocol that supports decentralized order flow markets. It solves the problem of fragmented order flow through a token economic incentive mechanism.
Geode Finance
Geode Finance is a liquidity staking solution that can be governed and secured by DAO governance tokens.
Lido
Lido allows users to stake their assets to earn daily staking rewards. Users can stake any amount of tokens with no minimum limit.
Saffron
Saffron is an asset collateralization and custom risk protocol for DeFi.
Sommelier
Sommelier is a cross-chain DeFi gateway built on the Cosmos SDK to maximize interoperability with other blockchains. It aims to automate treasury management to achieve first-class returns while reducing risks.
Glif
Glif is a liquidity leasing protocol on Filecoin. Glif allows FIL holders to deposit FIL into liquidity pools and earn iFIL rewards. Glif was launched in March 2023, shortly after Filecoin introduced its own virtual machine (FVM) to support smart contracts and open up to the world of decentralized applications. The leaders of the Glif team, Jon Schwartz and Peter Andersen, have been building foundational products in the Filecoin ecosystem since 2019.
Stablecoins
UXD
UXD is a fully collateralized decentralized stablecoin supported by the Asset Liability Management Module on Solana. However, the official Twitter account has been inactive since last year.
Privacy
Keep
Keep is a privacy layer that allows the use of private data on public chains without compromising security or confidentiality. Keep is the network behind tBTC, a secure and decentralized tokenized Bitcoin on Ethereum.
MobileCoin
MobileCoin is a privacy payment protocol focused on providing secure and private cryptocurrency wallet services for mobile applications.
NFTs and Creators
Galxe
Galxe is a collaborative credential infrastructure that empowers brands to build communities and products using NFT and credential data in Web3.
Fractal
Fractal is a Solana-based NFT marketplace co-founded by serial entrepreneur Justin Kan, who previously founded Twitch. Fractal hosts Web3 games and provides tools for developers to build new games.
Genies
Genies develops an avatar ecosystem that includes avatars, fashion and collectibles, spaces and places, and social experiences. Genies develops tools that showcase creativity and experiences within an avatar ecosystem.
Heroic Story
Heroic Story is building a collaborative, community-owned game powered by smart contracts and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Hawku
Hawku is a marketplace platform for practical and gaming NFTs.
Juke
Juke is an NFT marketplace for film and TV collectibles. Juke helps thousands of film and TV fans worldwide collect over 10 million of their favorite clips.
Mercury
Mercury was founded in 2021 with the aim of creating unique digital experiences for top university brands, bringing fans closer to their favorite athletes and teams. The company partners with leading university brands across various sports to build hyper-localized platforms that enhance the modern fan experience. Its community includes dynamic conversations with athletes and teams, professional team content, and digital collectibles and passes to unlock special fan access.
Audius
Audius is owned and operated by a global, vibrant open-source community of artists, fans, and developers. Audius empowers artists to share unprecedented music and directly access streaming revenue.
FanTiger
FanTiger is a music NFT marketplace dedicated to creating a decentralized community for artists and their fans.
Metaplex
Metaplex is a more affordable NFT ecosystem for markets, games, art, and collectibles. It currently has over 250,000 collections.
Social and Identity
REALY
REALY Metaverse aims to be an immersive integrated AAA-level metaverse gaming product with deep social, e-commerce, gaming, and trading functionalities.
Spring Labs
Spring is creating a foundational credit system that provides consumers with more transparent and secure services. The Spring network allows users to view all proofs about their credit and identity for free and provides open alert and notification features. Spring aims to achieve a paradigm shift in data security and cost-effectiveness for the benefit of financial institutions.
Web3 Auth
Web3 Auth helps users log in to decentralized applications (dApps) using their OAuth accounts like Google Login and Facebook Connect. Torus uses Distributed Key Generation (DKG) for key management, aiming to work across all browsers and devices and enable seamless account recovery without introducing any new trust assumptions.
Farcaster
Farcaster is an open protocol similar to email that can support multiple clients. Users are always free to move their social identities between apps, and developers can always build applications with new features on the network.
Satellite.im
Satellite.im is a multi-platform chat application built using modern decentralized technology and operates on a peer-to-peer workflow. Satellite.im aims to provide end-to-end encryption without sacrificing quality.
Development and Tools
The Graph
The Graph is a decentralized data protocol for indexing and querying data from blockchains, starting with Ethereum.
Textile
Textile is known for creating the early IPFS-based photo sharing app Textile Photos. Textile also provides a suite of tools, including decentralized databases, real-time application data, communication tools, remote backup and recovery, identity tools, and encryption tools provided through APIs and cross-platform SDKs.
Clockwork
Clockwork allows developers to schedule transactions and automate smart contracts without centralized infrastructure.
Solscan
Solscan is a real-time updated browser for the Solana ecosystem.
Dialect
Dialect is a protocol for intelligent messaging, providing dynamic, composable decentralized application notifications and wallet-to-wallet chat capabilities.
Dune
Dune is a database where you can query Ethereum smart contract data in human-readable SQL, visualize the results, and share them instantly. It also allows browsing, sharing, and copying community-created analyses.
Enso Finance
Enso is an investment app that allows friends to invest in each other and create investment strategies for each other. You can observe your friends’ trades, review past performances, and grow together with the investment community.
Grape Network
Grape Network provides tools to help DAOs manage their communities more efficiently.
Streaming Fast
Streaming Fast is a blockchain API company that focuses on real-time streaming of state updates, high-speed searching, and providing irreversible transaction guarantees. It has been acquired by The Graph.
Zama
Zama is an open-source cryptography company that builds state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain and AI. Zama is a leader in the fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) field, which allows arbitrary computations on encrypted data. The Zama team, consisting of over 30 PhDs and cryptography experts, has made dozens of breakthroughs in the past four years around FHE and has prepared the TFHE-rs and Concrete open-source libraries for production-ready deployment for certain types of computing tasks, particularly in the blockchain field.
Squads
Squads is a multi-signature management tool for the Solana ecosystem. It currently safeguards over $500 million in value and has been upgraded to version 4.
Tableland
Tableland is an open-source, permissionless cloud database built on SQLite. It allows reading and writing tamper-proof data from applications, data pipelines, or Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) smart contracts.
DePIN
Helium
Helium is creating a new global network for connecting billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The network is powered by Helium hotspots that provide wireless coverage and generate Helium tokens. Anyone can set up a hotspot in minutes and use Helium’s new open wireless protocol, LongFi, to connect low-power IoT devices.
Dabba
Dabba is an Indian public WiFi network operator. Established in 2017, Dabba has deployed thousands of hotspots in retail, residential, and commercial locations in India, aiming to provide fast and affordable internet services to users.
Hivemapper
Hivemapper is a decentralized map built with car-mounted cameras using encryption. According to the official website, it has covered over 217 million miles.
Gaming
Community Gaming
Community Gaming is an esports infrastructure designed to provide a seamless user experience and highly scalable payment technology. The platform provides the necessary tools for players, organizers, and game developers to easily create, facilitate, and participate in esports competitions.
Portals
Portals is an immersive social space where you can explore, build your own world, and gather with others to explore games.
Unlonely
Unlonely is a cryptocurrency-based livestreaming platform with fun, gamified features that allows you to launch your own channel, game tokens, and more.
Enterprise Services
Coral
Coral is a Solana ecosystem developer working on Anchor (a development framework), Backpack, and the xNFT protocol on Solana.
Babel Finance
Babel Finance offers professional crypto asset financial services to high net worth individuals and institutional investors, including crypto asset deposits and loans, asset management, brokerage trading and derivative strategies, mining pools, mining farms, and mining finance services.
Bakkt
Bakkt is building an open, seamless global network that enables you to easily, safely, and efficiently buy, sell, store, and use digital assets. Bakkt’s global platform aims to connect investors, merchants, and consumers to make accessing, transacting, and using digital assets easier, faster, and more cost-effective.
Blackbird
Blackbird is developing and building new products focusing on creating software to establish and enhance connections between restaurants and customers. They combine innovation from both Web2 and Web3 to redefine consumer loyalty and the hospitality industry.
Braintrust
Braintrust is a decentralized talent network and AI recruitment platform.
dClimate
dClimate allows participants to buy and share data and contribute to an open ecosystem for data-driven climate adaptation applications.
Delphia
Delphia is a mobile investment platform with algorithms and cryptographic features that reward users for sharing their data. Its “share and earn” data token model rewards users for contributing information, which is then used to make stock selections.
Filebase
Filebase is an object storage platform powered by decentralized storage networks. Their platform unifies multiple networks through an S3-compatible API, making decentralized storage more accessible and usable for everyone.
GMR
General Mining Research (GMR) invests in and trades the hashrate of crypto networks and their derivatives.
Kadena
Kadena spun out of J.P. Morgan to provide a hybrid blockchain platform, including a uniquely sharded and scalable layer-1 PoW public network.
OXIO
OXIO is an Operator-as-a-Service platform that empowers brands and enterprises to create personalized mobile experiences.
Paxos
Paxos is a regulated blockchain infrastructure company focused on building transparent and transformative financial solutions. Paxos introduced the world’s first fully regulated asset-backed tokens (USDP and PAXG) and sets new efficiency standards for settlement.
Sec 3
Sec 3 is a security and research company that provides custom audits and secure software for Web3 projects. Combining leading academic expertise, industry-grade Web2 network security experience, and skills from winning Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions, Sec 3 empowers protocols with scalable security.
Streaming Fast
Streaming Fast is a blockchain API company that aims to stream real-time state updates, conduct high-speed searches, and provide irreversible transaction guarantees. It has been acquired by The Graph.
Tagomi
Tagomi aims to combine institutional-grade services with superior trade execution technology for trading digital assets and cryptocurrencies. Tagomi’s goal is to enable institutional investors to navigate the highly fragmented global digital asset market easily and execute scalable trades across markets at the right times. Tagomi was acquired by Coinbase in May 2020.
Catalog
Catalog aims to provide a secure and decentralized platform for buying, selling, and storing rare and valuable wines and spirits. It offers a personal dashboard for managing collections, providing up-to-date price information, and aggregating a global market of enthusiasts.
The Giving Block
The Giving Block aims to simplify the process of fundraising with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for non-profit organizations. It empowers mission-driven organizations, charities, universities, and various-sized religious organizations to leverage cryptocurrency technology to achieve their missions.
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