OKX Ventures 2024 Outlook: Key Projects and 7 Major Predictions

Author: OKX Ventures

Introduction｜ 「 The best time was yesterday, the second best time is now.」*

Over the decades, Bitcoin has demonstrated immense creativity and resilience in challenging market environments, injecting innovative genes into the modern monetary system, internet technology, and the financial sector, ultimately successfully entering the ranks of global mainstream assets.

On January 11, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) made a definitive decision, officially approving 11 Bitcoin spot ETFs. Behind this milestone victory lies the profound contemplation, innovative practice, and patient perseverance of builders in the crypto industry regarding the vision of a future digital society. Capital has played a key role in this process, never wavering in its faith and pursuit of the future even during the prolonged two-year bear market. Instead, it has solidified its strength with funding, turning the tide during project crises and collaboratively painting a beautiful picture of the digital future, becoming the most powerful engine driving continuous innovation in the crypto industry.

In 2023, the crypto industry saw a regulatory pivot, with a total market capitalization reaching $1.761 trillion. Bitcoin has returned to the global top 10 assets with a market cap of $836.3 billion. The total number of institutional financing rounds reached 1,178, totaling $9.13 billion, with OKX Ventures deeply involved.

This year, OKX Ventures remained steadfast during the challenging times of the primary market, increasing investments against the trend, with total annual investments exceeding $50 million. On one hand, it has engaged in deep cooperation with ecosystems such as Solana, Near, Polygon, and Avalanche to jointly establish ecological funds to support developers in building core on-chain components and participate in community co-construction. On the other hand, it has collaborated with Gitcoin and Blockbooster to host hackathons in San Jose and Hong Kong, discovering innovative high-quality projects and providing comprehensive support through its differentiated capabilities and resources. Additionally, OKX Ventures is gradually expanding its support for teams deployed on X1.

In the Year of the Dragon, the improvement in the macroeconomic situation resonates with the innovation cycle of the crypto industry, opening a new round of bullish expectations. With favorable catalysts such as the Federal Reserve's interest rate expectations, the crypto industry's Cancun upgrade, Bitcoin halving, and the accelerated global adoption of BTC through ETFs, a bright 2024 is anticipated. As a leading investment institution in the crypto industry, OKX Ventures has set its visionary investment sights on numerous potential projects and, after in-depth research on industry innovation and changes, has predicted the seven most explosive tracks for 2024.

2023 Key Project Review

OKX Ventures' investment projects cover core areas such as infrastructure, GameFi, DeFi, Web 3.0, the Bitcoin ecosystem, and AI. In terms of quantity, 50% are infrastructure and DeFi projects, while 20% are GameFi projects, reflecting a focus on infrastructure. The infrastructure of the crypto industry provides a secure, efficient, and reliable operating environment for crypto assets and blockchain technology, and its completeness directly relates to the development and sustainability of the entire industry. Strong infrastructure will help promote innovation, attract more participants, and lay a solid foundation for the long-term prosperity of the crypto industry.

In 2023, the crypto industry gradually emerged from its slump, but due to the toll of a two-year bear market, the primary market also faced relatively difficult times. During this period, OKX Ventures insisted on investing in high-quality entrepreneurial teams and projects, leveraging its expertise and thriving exchange ecosystem to provide diversified and comprehensive support for highly potential innovative projects, with last year's total investment exceeding $50 million.

Investments included numerous high-quality projects such as Polyhedra, Celestia, Kakarot, MegaRollup, Altlayer, Bitsmiley, Bewater, Babylon, Cetus, Ethena, Flashbots, HUG, Moonbox, Mocaverse, Matr1x, Orbiter, RepubliK, Rage Trade, Sei, Taiko, TRLab, and ZKM.

Next, we will select a few representative innovative projects for a brief share based on different tracks.

1. Layer 2 Scaling Solutions

Layer 2 has brought significant improvements to the Ethereum network, enhancing its scalability, transaction efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, while alleviating pressure on the main chain. Numerous solutions have developed, including ZK Rollup, Optimistic Rollup, Validium, and Plasma, playing an increasingly important role in enhancing privacy protection and reducing transaction costs. Here, we will focus on two projects: Scroll and Taiko.

1) Scroll: is Ethereum's native zkEVM Layer 2 solution, representing Type 2 zkEVM. It achieves native compatibility with existing Ethereum applications and tools. Scroll processes off-chain transactions and publishes concise correctness proofs on-chain. Compared to Ethereum's base layer, this will bring higher throughput and lower costs.

2) Taiko: is a decentralized Ethereum-equivalent ZK-EVM and general ZK-Rollup. Its goal is to allow developers and users of dApps developed for Ethereum L1 to use Taiko without any changes. Therefore, dApps can easily be deployed to L2, inheriting Ethereum's security while incurring lower transaction fees than L1.

2. MEV Track

MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) refers to the maximum profit that miners or block producers can potentially obtain during the transaction execution process on the blockchain due to differences in transaction order, packaging, and confirmation methods. While optimizing transaction order can maximize participants' profits, it has also sparked discussions on a series of security and network effect issues. Currently, developers and communities are working together to find fairer, more efficient, and safer MEV solutions.

1) Flashbots: a mainstream MEV solution aimed at mitigating the negative externalities and risks that MEV brings to smart contract blockchains, providing a permissionless, transparent, and fair ecosystem, including three goals: democratizing the acquisition of MEV income, bringing transparency to MEV activities, and redistributing MEV income.

3. Cross-Chain Track

Cross-chain bridges solve interoperability issues between different public chains, facilitating the flow of crypto assets and applications, providing users with greater choice and flexibility, thus helping to build a more robust, diverse, and interconnected blockchain ecosystem.

1) LayerZero: is a full-chain interoperability protocol designed for lightweight cross-chain messaging, providing trusted and guaranteed messaging with configurable trustlessness.

2) Orbiter Finance: is currently the most used Rollup bridge on Ethereum for transferring Ethereum's native assets. It proposes an inter-chain messaging protocol, providing an aggregated middle layer for zk-rollups, enhancing Layer 2 and reducing gas consumption.

4. Cosmos Ecosystem

More and more high-quality projects such as Celestia and Sei Network are built on Cosmos, which is an open platform and ecosystem aimed at solving blockchain interoperability issues, allowing secure and reliable cross-chain communication between different blockchains. By providing efficient cross-chain communication and connectivity tools, Cosmos offers developers and users a broader choice, and its ecosystem continues to grow.

1) BeraChain: is a Cosmos Layer 1 built on EVM architecture, adopting PoL (Proof of Liquidity) consensus, introducing a three-token system for the Bera network, which includes the network gas token BERA, the ecological stablecoin HONEY, and the non-transferable Bera governance token BGT.

2) Sei Network: is a high-performance Layer 1 specifically for trading digital assets, boasting the industry's shortest transaction latency, with a minimum of 300 milliseconds, and has a built-in order matching engine (OME) that helps trading applications scale, while its anti-front-running mechanism can resist MEV. Recently, its parallel EVM narrative has sparked market interest.

5. AI + Web3 Gaming Track

Web3 games return data ownership to players, meaning players can fully own and freely trade the crypto assets they earn in games, and can participate in game improvements, new feature development, and economic model adjustments through voting rights, thus engaging more deeply in the game's ecosystem. The development of Web3 games is driving the gaming industry towards a more open, transparent, and user-friendly direction.

Matr1x: is a metaverse brand that includes self-developed high-quality games or collaborations with third parties, game IP development partnerships, and global esports events. Matr1x will showcase its gaming trilogy (Cyber Earth---Mars Colonization---Interstellar Exploration) through three large games with a unified worldview: Matr1x FIRE (first-person shooter), Matr1x WAR (shooter + MMORPG), and Matr1x EVOLUTION (SOC).

6. Bitcoin Ecosystem

In 2023, the birth of Ordinals and BRC20 activated the Bitcoin ecosystem, creating a new narrative for Bitcoin beyond value storage, trading, and payment, increasing miners' income, alleviating users' concerns about the end of Bitcoin halving or its impact on network security, and igniting the prosperous development of inscription ecosystems on other major public chains. Bitcoin has thus broken the stereotype of being merely "digital gold," with various L2s, token protocols, cross-chain bridges, etc., thriving, and market attention beginning to return to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Bitmap Tech (formerly Recursiverse): is an innovative project aimed at building an intelligent, decentralized, and composable digital world through the Ordinals network and Bitcoin's first layer (layer 1). This project embodies a firm commitment to creating a valuable metaverse ecosystem and has launched products such as BRC420, recursive index Inception inscriptions, and Bitmap.Game.

B^2 Network: is a Layer 2 solution on Bitcoin that combines ZKP's BTC rollup, allowing aggregated storage and ZKP to be written into BTC inscriptions, achieving higher authenticity and usability for BTC Layer 2.

Babylon: is a proposed Bitcoin staking protocol that allows Bitcoin holders to stake their idle Bitcoin to enhance the security of PoS (Proof-of-Stake) chains and earn rewards in the process, aiming to integrate Bitcoin with the PoS economic system.

BitSmiley: is the first native stablecoin project in the BTC ecosystem, a comprehensive financial protocol built on the Bitcoin blockchain, as part of the Fintegra framework.

OKX Ventures' investment projects cover popular tracks such as L2, the Bitcoin ecosystem, the Cosmos ecosystem, and AI + Web3 gaming, providing stronger support for the development of innovative projects in the crypto industry by comprehensively mobilizing resources. In particular, the emphasis on infrastructure, including networks, protocols, and hardware, plays a key role in supporting the development and stability of the entire crypto ecosystem.

2024 Seven Predictions

As a technology-driven field, the crypto industry continuously sees new technologies and solutions emerging to drive industry development. OKX Ventures focuses on long-term value investment, actively embracing industry innovation and change, and has predicted the seven most explosive tracks for 2024.

1. BTC Scaling and Application Explosion, On-chain Activity Enhancing Network Security

The narrative of Bitcoin halving, combined with the interest rate reduction cycle and the approval of spot ETFs, has objectively accelerated BTC adoption. Currently, the number of global crypto asset users has grown from 5 million in 2016 to 420 million today, with the cumulative number of Bitcoin addresses exceeding 1.2 billion. According to Token Terminal data, Bitcoin's monthly active user count is approximately 13.7 million, with on-chain transfer data around 17.5 million, showing a growth trend. Additionally, as on-chain data grows, the size of Bitcoin's blockchain is about 507GB, an increase of approximately 70% compared to three years ago.

Currently, the on-chain activity of Bitcoin's ecosystem is in an explosive state. This year, Ordinals exploded, essentially empowering the Bitcoin network with asset issuance capabilities and promoting large-scale applications such as inscriptions. As of now, the cumulative number of BRC-20 transfers has exceeded 45.4 million, with cumulative BRC-20 fees surpassing 4,290 BTC, and the total number of inscriptions exceeding 53 million, with cumulative fees from Ordinals exceeding 5,383 BTC. OKX Ventures believes that in the future, Bitcoin asset issuance protocols will become more diverse, supporting more native innovations.

Innovative asset protocols such as Ordinals, BRC-20, RGB, Taproot Assets, Runes, Taro, and Atomicals, combined with new potential scaling solutions, will bring more possibilities to the ecosystem. Investments have already been made in projects supporting native DeFi like Bitsmiley, supporting POS scaling like BabyLon, and supporting Layer 2 scaling like Bitmap Tech and B^2 Network.

In 2024, there are many anticipated innovations in the Bitcoin ecosystem, with user privacy and transaction efficiency expected to be greatly enhanced. Particularly, the development of the Lightning Network, such as using MuSig2 for single taproot channels, payment splitting and switching (PSS) to improve network throughput and reduce the risk of balance probing attacks, interactive multi-signatures (MuSig2), and aggregating multiple HTLCs to lower on-chain costs and enhance resistance to interference. The combination of Taproot assets and RGB provides a new on-chain mechanism for tokens. Through soft fork proposals like OP_VAULT and version 2 of the BIP324 P2P transmission protocol, security and privacy have also been strengthened. The assumeUTXO feature of Bitcoin Core aims to improve the experience for new full nodes, among other innovations. All these innovations herald a more robust, efficient, and user-friendly Bitcoin network.

2. Ethereum Cancun Upgrade Enhances Layer 2 Usability, Leading the Industry Forward

For Ethereum, 2023 has been a challenging year. In the bear market atmosphere, many of Ethereum's metrics have declined compared to 2022, but TVL has become an exception, growing from $4.95 billion to about $20.5 billion, and in the last few months of the year, Ethereum's various metrics have seen growth, ending the year strongly.

The number of Layer 2 projects increased from about 18 to over 34, with daily active users on Layer 2 exceeding those on Layer 1; DeFi has become Ethereum's primary use case, with gas usage share rising from 31% at the beginning of the year to nearly 50% by year-end, with Uniswap accounting for 11.7% of Ethereum's transactions for the year; NFT-related gas usage dropped from 32% in January to 7% in December. Notably, the Shanghai upgrade drove a 82% increase in staking, with over 24% of ETH staked, and the use cases for staked ETH are continuously expanding, becoming an important source of credit driving ecosystem growth.

The Cancun upgrade is the most significant positive development for Ethereum in 2024. Through the implementation of the EIP-4844 Proto-Danksharding proposal, it brings essential performance improvements to Layer 2 projects, while introducing Blob space resolves the limitations of calldata. Layer 2 can significantly increase the number of transactions submitted to the mainnet at once, bringing lower fees to users. Future competition in Layer 2 may revolve around operational capabilities and the realization of decentralization, such as Restaking Rollup, DA innovations, decentralized sequencers, and decentralized provers.

Ethereum continues to lead the industry's in-depth research, addressing key issues such as ZK applications, modularity, EOF, and account abstraction. The emergence of Ethereum's scaling solution, Rollup, over the past few years has undoubtedly been a significant breakthrough in the industry. Despite facing market fluctuations and challenges from competing chains, Ethereum still plays a leading role in promoting in-depth research and technological innovation in the industry. OKX Ventures expects that multiple EIPs will play a crucial role in Ethereum's development next year, such as ERC-4337, EIP-4844, EIP-3074, EIP-5003, Verkle Tree, and the corresponding Prague/Electra upgrade plans. From all aspects, Ethereum remains firmly at the forefront of industry innovation, continuously providing momentum and direction for the development of the entire blockchain industry, both in technological research and ecosystem building.

3. Alt-layer 1 Ecosystem Represented by Solana Will Benefit from Industry Recovery

Rather than saying that blockchain is a network, it is more like a collection of cities. Solana and Move-based public chains have reserved a large amount of new infrastructure, and as more users flow into the industry, the low-cost, high-capacity characteristics of these cities will be fully displayed. Therefore, single-chain Solana, represented by Solana, and Cosmos are experiencing a resurgence, with increases in developers, market capitalization, and active users.

The performance of Solana's developer ecosystem has exceeded expectations, with approximately 2,500-3,000 monthly active developers, making it the second-largest ecosystem in terms of total monthly active developers in the industry. Its developer retention rate over three months has risen from 31% to over 50%, maintaining a steady influx of new developers, more than half of whom have at least three years of development experience, indicating a higher level of contribution and more mature applications.

Image: Tokenterminal

Solana charges status rent from DApp teams and voting fees from validators, creating additional value for SOL beyond transaction fees, providing a different token value mechanism compared to Ethereum. This shifts costs from users to DApp teams and infrastructure providers for better scalability. This not only enhances user experience (by lowering user transaction costs) but also provides value-driven benefits to the Solana network. Compared to Ethereum, Solana offers better performance metrics at the cost of higher hardware requirements. This does not directly lead to centralization but helps achieve high throughput and fast transaction confirmation times.

Solana's smart contracts operate through standardized structures like Metaplex, reducing the due diligence burden on users and developers, and promoting entrepreneurial activity. The standardization of innovation and contracts may bring lower costs to developers and users.

The Solana ecosystem offers more possibilities, with projects like Teleport, Helium, and Render Network leveraging Solana's scalability and efficiency to redefine traditional models in ride-sharing, IoT communication, and GPU rendering. Solana's role as a speed catalyst, reducing transaction costs and scaling the network architecture, makes it the preferred choice for entrepreneurs navigating a decentralized future. As these projects seamlessly integrate with Solana, they not only address the limitations of centralized systems but also point the way toward building a more inclusive, resilient, and dynamic decentralized physical network.

4. AI Narrative Closely Integrates with Web3 Technology, New Applications Emerge

The years 2022 to 2023 are referred to as the year of the AI explosion. In October 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, which accumulated 1 million users in just five days. According to Delphi's statistics, ChatGPT continuously breaks records, becoming the fastest application to reach 100 million users. Against this backdrop, artificial intelligence is gradually integrating into the cryptocurrency market. According to CMC data, the market capitalization of the Generative AI sector has exceeded $67 billion, with trading volume surpassing $600 million.

AI projects in the crypto industry mainly apply to decentralized computing power, decentralized AI public chains, AI model trading markets, AI applications, ZKML, and more. Among them, OKX Ventures believes that decentralized computing power, AI Agents, and AI + Web3 applications are areas worth continuous attention.

In terms of decentralized computing power, the decentralized nature of blockchain helps reduce costs. The higher the degree of decentralization of computing power nodes, the lower the price of unit computing power. There is enormous imaginative space in introducing Web3's unique token economic governance model, model training, inference, or optimizing and allocating computing power.

AI Agents are intelligent agent programs with autonomous decision-making and execution capabilities. By simulating and playing human roles, they can enhance the information communication capabilities between blockchain and the outside world, intelligently selecting the most suitable cross-chain solutions for user needs, thus breaking the "information island" problem caused by the prosperity of public chain ecosystems, providing users with a better cross-chain experience.

Image: OKG Research

In terms of AI + Web3 applications, AI applications are more reasonable in enhancing user experience and improving development efficiency, or as an important part of the blockchain market, integrating with existing blockchain applications, such as AI combined with DeFi, Game, NFT, etc. The technological integration of AI and Web3, supported by a compliant environment, is expected to change the current user behavior habits in Web3, accelerate mass adoption, and jointly build a trustworthy digital society.

AI is also one of the key tracks that OKX Ventures focuses on, having already participated in investments in projects like Flock and MyShell. For example, MyShell leads in multimodal voice models, with its GitHub already having over 12k stars, 420,000 registered users, 50,000 creators, 70,000 private bots, and 900 public bots, becoming a model of the integration of AI Agent applications with Web3.

5. Blockchain Gaming Explodes into a New Paradigm, FOCG Breakthrough

Blockchain gaming has not yet seen an explosion in 2023, but due to good data and the property attributes that can accommodate a large number of users, blockchain games remain a high-potential quality track. Over the past year, the gaming industry disclosed a total of 133 transactions, raising $1.18 billion, with the total number of gaming projects reaching about 2,500 to 3,500. Additionally, according to Footprint data, the total number of users in the GameFi sector reached 340 million in 2023, with total trading volume exceeding $3.2 billion and total transfer counts reaching 7.4 billion. Gaming projects generated on-chain transaction volumes 23 times higher than average DeFi protocols. For instance, Sweat Economy, supported by NEAR, is one of the most widely used mobile earning applications globally. In the past 30 days, it had 1.04 million UAW. Currently, there are over 145 million users who remain active and healthy while earning cryptocurrency.

Image: Delphidigital

With the arrival of AAA gaming opportunities, blockchain gaming will become a new user growth point. From the supply side, after a year of development in 2023, a large number of high-quality games are poised to launch. One can imagine that with the backing of AAA game IPs, traditional game users will transition more smoothly into the Web 3.0 world, gradually opening up a new landscape for the gaming industry.

OKX Ventures expects that 2024 may witness the revival of blockchain gaming, leading to a user competition battle among various games. Currently, there is great optimism regarding AAA games' ability to capture users and asset value, with investments already made in a series of game projects such as BIG TIME, Ember Sword, and Shrapnel. For example, the timing of the BIGTIME token launch was perfect, coinciding with the market beginning to warm up, allowing players to earn in-game token rewards daily, with the token price also seeing a good increase, making it one of the more successful investments.

In the future, FOCG (Fully Onchain Game) will also become a new growth point in the gaming field. FOCG refers to games where assets, settlements, and game logic all occur on the blockchain, creating a new and more complex on-chain application paradigm that will bring financialization and composability. Currently, the FOCG track is in a relatively early stage, still awaiting development and construction, with applications and assets appearing somewhat barren, thus presenting enormous growth opportunities. OKX Ventures is optimistic about FOCG and has focused on projects like Curio in this direction to support industry innovation. It can be expected that FOCG will continue to thrive around engines, game content, and surrounding ecosystems such as wallets and trading platforms.

6. DePIN Continues to Maintain High Growth

DePIN is a physical infrastructure grid that utilizes blockchain technology to transparently and efficiently manage real-world services and has seen an explosion in 2023. Currently, DePIN's market capitalization exceeds $20 billion, with a growth rate of over 50% since the beginning of the year, trading volume at $11 billion, generating approximately $15 million in annualized on-chain revenue. According to a DePIN report released by Messari, the total number of DePIN ecosystem projects exceeded 650 in 2023, covering six major segments: computing, AI projects, wireless, sensors, energy, and services. Notably, DePIN's revenue is based on utility rather than speculation; compared to other cryptocurrencies that have seen declines of up to 70-90% during the bear market, DePIN's revenue has only decreased by 20-60% from its peak, showing a more moderate and supportive trend.

Image: Coinmarketcap

OKX Ventures believes that in terms of applications, 2024 is expected to see DePINs begin to explore new directions in deeper integration with AI, ZK, gaming, and other fields. For example, ZK-verifiable GPU cloud services could be realized on-chain within 1-2 years, while centralized providers will be unable to offer such services. In terms of narrative, the infrastructure of the DePIN track and specific Layer 1s in the DePIN direction are promising.

Considering advantages such as high throughput, low fees, and large developer communities, most DePINs are currently built on general-purpose chains like Solana or Polygon. Projects like Helium and Render Network have already migrated to Solana, bringing a large number of users to it. According to Dune data, the cumulative number of users on IOTex has reached 440,000, while Helium has over 180,000 users on Solana. From the user demand perspective, by 2024, specific Layer 1s for DePIN are expected to launch and expand, leading to the emergence of dedicated chains serving DePIN.

7. Positive Macroeconomic Environment, Entering a New Era of Crypto

With the establishment and improvement of regulatory systems for the crypto industry in various countries and regions globally, including El Salvador, Canada, Dubai, and Brazil, the crypto industry is making significant strides toward compliance, which may lead to a more favorable development environment and broader adoption in 2024. Especially with the SEC's formal approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs, this means traditional financial investors will officially gain exposure to Bitcoin, further catalyzing the compliance and scaling development of the crypto industry, while also compelling traditional finance to embrace innovation, jointly promoting fairness, security, and transparency in the financial sector.

According to Blockworks data, as of January 12, 2024, the trading volume on the first day of the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF listing reached $4.6 billion, with Grayscale's GBTC trading volume exceeding $2.1 billion, BlackRock's IBIT over $1 billion, and Fidelity's FBTC over $680 million. Bloomberg's senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas stated that in the two days following the Bitcoin spot ETF listing, nine issuing institutions absorbed $1.4 billion in funds, surpassing the $579 million outflow from GBTC, with a net inflow totaling $819 million. Whether from traditional macro funds or ultra-high-net-worth individuals, substantial liquidity continues to flow into the crypto industry.

From another perspective, the volume of on-chain stablecoins is also continuously increasing, indicating that new funds are beginning to flow in steadily. DefiLlama data shows that the total market capitalization of stablecoins has reached $133 billion, hitting a new high, with USDT's market cap at $94.9 billion, accounting for 71% of the market.

Image: DefiLlama

With the backing of capital, the crypto ecosystem will accelerate its development toward a more complete direction. Blockchain infrastructure has developed rapidly over the past few years, and with the catalysis of VC capital, it has created the necessary conditions for new applications and innovations. From 2017 to 2022, approximately $73.4 billion flowed into crypto-related enterprises and projects. In 2023, the total financing amount reached $9.13 billion, with a total of 1,178 financing rounds.

Image: ROOTDATA

From January 2020 to January 2024, financing has largely flowed into infrastructure, Games, NFTs, and DeFi, apart from CeFi. These types of projects accumulated sufficient funds during the bear market, ensuring a certain guarantee in product delivery, becoming new targets for the next wave of innovation.

Image: ROOTDATA

Conclusion

The rise of the crypto industry has become the engine driving significant changes in internet technology and the financial sector, opening the door to the future world. In this challenging and opportunity-filled field, builders in the crypto industry have become creators of the digital future. Their profound understanding and unique insights into blockchain technology, along with their innovations and dedication, have led to the tremendous success of the crypto industry today. However, these builders are not satisfied with the status quo; they continuously push the crypto industry forward. They participate in open-source projects, lead startups, actively engage in community building, and promote the prosperity and development of the entire industry. Their spirit of dedication not only inspires more young people to join this field but also injects fresh blood into the entire crypto economy.

Furthermore, as new technologies and solutions continue to emerge and the global crypto regulatory system gradually establishes itself, the relationship between the crypto industry and the traditional financial system is evolving. The interaction between the two is shifting from competition and cooperation to a fusion relationship, thereby influencing and promoting market liquidity between them. It is evident that the crypto industry will reach new heights in 2024. However, the influx of large-scale liquidity is not an overnight process; the crypto industry is showing a rapidly changing development trend, and the innovative projects emerging require professional support in terms of funding, technology, and strategy.

As a leading investment institution, OKX Ventures has long been rooted at the forefront of the industry, serving diverse innovations, aiming to support industry builders, and these high-quality startup teams and projects. With a deep understanding and insight into the blockchain industry, as well as professional post-investment management experience, it has gradually forged a differentiated approach of "innovation + empowerment" for its global team. Through integration and cross-border cooperation, it has connected OKX's resources across traffic, trading, public chains, and technology, building a complete OKX resource system that can provide one-stop connections for invested teams, offering multiple services and resource integration. Additionally, OKX Ventures is not a traditional financial investor but plays dual roles as both a "discoverer" and an "enabler," growing together with "entrepreneurial partners" to accelerate the promotion of industry creativity and innovative development.

Looking back at history, since Bitcoin's birth in 2009, it has experienced several economic cycles and market fluctuations, but it has ultimately rebounded and created new highs. This performance has strengthened the confidence of long-term value investors in Bitcoin, including OKX Ventures. In the rapidly changing market environment, OKX Ventures keenly perceives market trends, flexibly responds to market changes, and adjusts strategies, while consistently increasing investments in industry innovation projects. It has successfully navigated through several bull and bear cycles, reaping rich rewards. In the future, OKX Ventures will continue to delve into the primary crypto market, providing support for industry builders and these high-quality startup teams and projects.