Boiling 2020: What did the five major cryptocurrency investment institutions in the Chinese region gain and miss?

Preface: 2020 was a boiling year. From the 312 crash to the new high of Bitcoin, from the DeFi craze to the launch of Filecoin. "One bull market can make 10 years of money", but some people also suffered contract losses and caused tragedies. As we usher in 2021 amidst the clamor, don't forget that the freedom of choice is ultimately in our own hands.

The following is Wu’s Blockchain year-end review “Boiling 2020” series 2: Let’s take a look at the engines and drivers of the cryptocurrency industry in the Chinese-speaking region: five top investment institutions.

Investment institutions founded by Chinese or Chinese people have a strong influence in the field of cryptocurrency, and the ranking is as follows: Binance, Huobi, Dragonfly, HashKey, Distributed Capital. DeFi, Filecoin, and Polkadot are the main investment themes this year. As the popularity of these three fields continues, they are expected to remain the core areas of investment next year.

1. Binance is the exchange with the largest traffic in the world, and its investment is huge. In 2020, the investment will focus on three major areas: traffic, global expansion, and Binance Smart Chain.

In the traffic field, Binance acquired CMC, the world's largest market website, for a huge sum of 300-400 million US dollars. This investment was costly, but the effect was not good. Due to personnel changes and reduced credibility at CMC, competitors such as Coingecko gained more users.

Binance acquired Swipe, which provides fiat-cryptocurrency exchange services for European users, and invested in South Korean fintech company BxB and Indonesia's first compliant exchange Tokocrypto. In the DeFi field, Binance invested in 1inch and DODO. Subsequently, Binance began to turn to Binance Smart Chain and established a $100 million seed fund. It has invested in many projects, but most of them are copycats.

Binance’s investment in the DeFi field is quite standard, and Filecoin lags behind Huobi, so it has just launched a $10 million investment fund for Polkadot, trying not to miss the next trend. Recently, Binance led the investment in MathWallet, a leading player in Polkadot, for this purpose.

2. Huobi is the largest investment institution in the Chinese region, with many investment fields. Its investment in 2020 is mainly in the DeFi field. Unlike Binance, Huobi's investment is concentrated in China. Currently, the mainstream ecosystems such as Nervos, Conflux, Nest, and Ontology are all supported by Huobi, and others include COVA, aelf, Theta, etc.

Huobi established a DeFi lab in 2020 and invested tens of millions of dollars of its own funds in DeFi. The DeFi projects that have been disclosed include Cofix, Linear, Dforce, etc. In addition, Huobi has established a fund of 10 million US dollars to invest in Filecoin, and the specific investment projects have not yet been disclosed. Recently, Huobi claimed to have established a 200 million US dollar Heco ecological fund to benchmark Binance Smart Chain, but this amount is too exaggerated and mostly hype.

An interesting point is that Binance’s investment is more like Alibaba, with more acquisitions or integration into its own ecosystem; Huobi is more like Tencent, casting a wide net to support small ecosystems. In terms of investment methods, Huobi seems to be more reasonable. However, Huobi’s investments are almost all limited to China, so it is not a competition with Binance at the same level, and the quality of investment targets is relatively low.

What is strange is that compared with the above-mentioned companies, OKEx, which is also one of the top three, has a very small voice in the field of investment layout. It does not even have an investment manager or investment department that speaks out. It is difficult to see its presence in the ecological layout at home and abroad.

3: Although Dragonfly was established not long ago, it has become the most active VC in the Chinese region in recent years. Its LPs may include Huobi, Sequoia, Bitmain and Meituan (or Wang Xing personally). Successful Chinese projects invested by Dragonfly include Bybit, Matrixport, Amber, etc.

Dragnfly focused on the DeFi field in 2020. Feng Bo said that DeFi is the most important part of Dragonfly Capital's first phase fund investment portfolio, especially Makerdao and Compound. Of course, it has invested in far more projects than those shown in the picture, totaling more than 100, including Wootrade, Cofix, Cozy, DerivaDEX, Opyn, etc.

(Picture from Dragonfly investment portfolio disclosed by Mars Finance)

4. As established capitals, HashKey and Distributed Capital are largely acting in concert, for example, they have jointly invested in Polkadot and Filecoin mining machine manufacturer 1475. However, Hashkey is more focused on the DeFi field, investing in Mask Network, Wootrade, BoringDao, Opium, etc., and claims to have invested in more than 600 blockchain companies since its establishment.

(Picture from Hashkey official website)

5: Distributed Capital's focus in 2020 is on Filecoin and Polkadot, and DeFi has also been deployed. Key projects include Filecoin, Polkadot, 1475Filecoin mining pool, KAVA, PlatON, Ontology, MakerDAO, FalconX, etc. Although Distributed Capital is not as prominent as the first two in the DeFi craze, it still has a strong industry influence. Especially in the Filecoin field, Distributed is one of the core promoters. Reference (Distributed Bao Erye Du Jun Wang Feng: China's Four Major Promoters of Filecoin/IPFS (POC Series 2))

(Note: The year-end review did not receive any form of sponsorship and is based on independent analysis and judgment by the author and team of Wu Says Blockchain)