Blocktempo list nearly 40 awardees, including outstanding entrepreneurs, option leaders, and Taiwanese with global influence, compiled into “2022 Taiwan Blockchain Influencers list”, and asked them to share their predictions and trend observations for 2023.
This article you will find a detailed list of the “Cefi ＆ VC” and their detailed trend predictions for 2023.
Shortlist：
> Alex Liu / MaiCoin Founder & CEO
> Titan Cheng / BitoGroup Co-Founder & CEO
> Ran Yi / Orderly Network Co-Founder
> JOSH / BINGX Director of Investment Research Strategy
> Chaoming Cho / Bincentive Co-Founder
> David Pan / ACE Exchange Founder
> Jamie Lin / AppWorks Chairman and Partner
> Brian Lu / Infinity Ventures Crypto (IVC) Founding Partner
> Ivan / RED BUILDING CAPITAL（RBC）Co-Founder
Read Full《2022 Taiwan Blockchain Influencers list》
Alex Liu / MaiCoin Founder & CEO
- MaiCoin is Taiwan’s oldest digital asset trading group, providing virtual currency trading services. Its business includes MaiCoin platform, MAX Exchange, MaiCapital, and AMIS.
- MAX is the first exchange to hand over user funds to bank trust insurance. Its AMIS is one of the founding members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. In 2017, JP Morgan’s Ethereum platform Quorum announced the adoption of AMIS’s Istanbul Byzantine consensus algorithm.
Liu’s 2023 predictions and observations:
The past year has been difficult for the blockchain industry. The world took a blow when one of the leading crypto exchanges, FTX, filed for bankruptcy. While the domino effect of FTX’s implosion caused suffering consequences, the industry itself took a greater toll, leading many to reflect and meliorate their practices.
Perhaps indeed, with crisis comes opportunity. As healthier companies continue to sustain the industry, government agencies shall face crypto regulations with the consideration of creating a space for steady development and protecting the rights of investors.
In the short term, trader behaviors will appear risk-averse, taking a more cautious and conservative approach to related investments, and focusing on essential blockchain applications, such as the optimization of algorithms that creates solutions for energy-efficient mining farms.
Recently, Vitalik Buterin proposed the concept of Soulbound Tokens, an excellent case for exclusive memberships. On the premise of not interfering with fiat currency, custodial stablecoins will allow for more efficient transnational businesses, and the realization of digital currency payment will generate new blockchain values in our daily lives. Therefore, we can all anticipate better corporate governance, government regulation, NFT and stablecoin applications, and crypto payments in this coming year.
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Titan Cheng / BitoGroup Co-Founder & CEO
- Bito Group is the oldest exchange in Taiwan with 800,000 effective members. It owns BitoEX wallet and BitoPro exchange.
- Develop the original patented TT Check gift card to realize more diverse application levels of virtual currency.
Cheng‘s 2023 predictions and observations:
2023 will be a year full of challenges and opportunities. According to industry and organization insights, enterprises have started solving practical problems and enhancing to add value to their business offering through blockchain technology. As a result, the blockchain technology will be applied more extensively across industries and can be useful in improving the efficiency and security of services.
Following the approval of digital currencies in more and more countries and regions and the more extensive applications in financial fields, it is easier to get involved in international financial transactions. In addition, the tokenization of more and more real estate is providing businesses with additional financing options.
Also noteworthy is that despite the fact that the definition of and standards for Web3 are not quite clear, the next generation internet will definitely attract the attention of businesses; Web3, the metaverse, and other new, innovative services are expected to boom through blockchain and cryptocurrency technology.
With the support of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, Web3 and the metaverse are expected to bring innovative services and business models. New opportunities are brought to traditional centralized network services, and innovative services and business models are created via community governance and sharing. Therefore, Web3 has gained the attention of enterprises and is actively being deployed in the market.
On the other hand, following the gradual development of applications and cryptocurrency becomes more prevalent and accepted in various industries, the traditional investment institutions are expected to enter the cryptocurrency market, regardless of how cryptocurrency will be recognized in accounting standards or if other assets will be replaced by cryptocurrency, especially in terms of liquidity.
Cryptocurrency has gradually become part of traditional investment institutions. Such institutions still maintain the view of value protection that “Bitcoin fights against inflation”, while Ethereum constitutes the business value of the blockchain network in respect of technological development and applications. Therefore, the mystery of blockchain technology satisfies innovative services such as decentralization and information synchronization at the same time to build a value chain with new business value.
In 2023, the tokenization and financial application of supply chains using blockchain technology is expected to become widespread due to the features of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology have captured serious attention across industries. Therefore the Bito Group’s long-term efforts to use blockchain technology to promote financial inclusion are expected to be realized in the near future. The investment project for high net worth investors of the past may become more accessible to general investors.
Bito Group strongly believes in doing right thing and thoroughly developing altruistic properties that allow hard-working operators to stand out and help build a financial inclusion infrastructure.
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Ran Yi / Orderly Network Co-Founder
- Orderly Network’s seed round of financing received: Pantera Capital, Sequoia Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and Jump Crypto…and other top capital investment of 20 million U.S. dollars, and the current valuation is about 200 million U.S. dollars.
- Orderly Network is a DeFi infrastructure protocol built on the Near blockchain, allowing projects to build DeFi applications and bringing them high throughput, low latency, low fees and composability.
Ran’s 2023 predictions and observations:
The year 2022 has been full of significant, thought-provoking events. From global geopolitical tensions to the collapse of public faith in centralized financial institutions, we were reminded that the future belongs to decentralization.
Looking ahead, DeFi will continue to be one of the hottest topics in 2023, and is confident that more builders will join Orderly Network in this journey. There is excellent potential for decentralized trading protocols and gaming protocols with trading attributes. We hope to see the emergence of more innovative developers and platforms and welcome them to build on the robust infrastructure of Orderly Network to bring Web3 into more people’s lives.
Milestones: Orderly Network completed a US$20 million seeding round led by many venture capital heavyweights, including Pantera Capital, Jump Crypto, Sequoia China, and Dragonfly Capital, as well as a group of strategic partners. Orderly Network became the first crypto project backed by Laser Digital, a crypto subsidiary of global financial services group Nomura. Orderly Network officially went live on NEAR Mainnet on Oct 11, 2022.
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JOSH / BINGX Director of Investment Research Strategy
- BingX officially broke through the 5 million user mark in 2022, and announced the launch of the “Signal Trading” tool, which can receive signals from third-party platforms such as TradingView and automatically execute perpetual contract transactions.
- During the four years since its establishment, BingX has had no information security theft incidents, creating a history of zero wallet theft, and has established a security audit relationship with third-party authoritative organizations such as CERTIK.
JOSH’s 2023 predictions and observations:
After the collapse of FTX, DeFi will go mainstream, and the DeFi regulation will enter into next stage. Conditional DeFi will emerge to meet anti-money laundering, AML/KYC regulations, etc. However, considering that DeFi was still immature in 2022 with low capacity utilization, the new type of DeFi will gradually improve this situation and the way that DeFi will be used more efficiency in larger scale is brewing.
GameFi will gradually get rid of the Ponzi Scheme. NFT will be integrated with Game more closely. Sandbox led by Yuga Labs will continue to develop the metaverse infrastructure and the decentralized identifier (DID) authentication will continue to be explored and applied in DeFi and Metaverse.
The public chain competition is still fierce. Ethereum will continue to develop the diversity narratives capabilities and the individual public chains on L1 will create more diverse. The different fields will develop their own suitable public chains, such as high-speed finance, instant games, privacy-related, etc.
The stablecoin war will still continue, and decentralized stablecoins has become a hot topic. With the brutal development of DeFi, stablecoins will gradually gain the attention and mortgage-type stablecoins or the introduction of RWA concept stablecoins will have a certain degree of centralization. Decentralized finance or stablecoins that have nothing to do with real-world assets is the necessary existence for future.
It can even be said that the APP chain (application-specific blockchain) era is also coming in the multi-chain era. The concept of user payment has been replaced. The gas fee can be paid by the Sellers in the future, and users can experience various services in the blockchain more painlessly. For example, the game can directly use the APP chain to increase the game fluency, and it will not cause the whole chain to be stuck in a traffic jam due to too many players at the same time. Currently, there are quite a lot of L1s that support the APP chain, such as Cosmos, ZKsync, ZKBNB, etc. The users still have many choices.
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Chaoming Cho / Bincentive Co-Founder
- Bincentive launch the innovative investment NFT service “InvestNFT” in 2022. And cooperated with MasterLink Securities to launch NFT Demi Trader, a new type of derivatives that combines securities investment, cryptocurrency and non-homogeneous tokens.
- Its DeFi farm accelerator Hotpot.finance pushes CEX out to DEX services.
Cho’s 2023 predictions and observations:
After the collapse or shrink of many cryptocurrency exchanges and fund companies in 2022, the cryptocurrency industry is facing many challenges. The industry will continue to restructure, and the market trading volume will shrink severely, causing the original bear market to last longer. The main development trends predicted in 2023 are as follows:
1) Investors will pay more attention to the management of asset security and risk diversification, and major cryptocurrency exchanges and asset service providers will also strengthen relevant mechanisms in this regard. At the same time, it is observed that some institutions in the industry have expressed that they will more actively seek opportunities to be included in the regulatory compliance.
2) Many countries may adopt a more active regulatory mechanism for the cryptocurrency industry.
3) The growth of the Ethereum-based Layer 2 application market and the warming up of the halving of Bitcoin mining rewards in 2024 will be important indicators for the recovery of the two cryptocurrency markets in the second half of 2023.
4) The general trend that Web2 and Web3 business entities are interconnected and integrated will not change, but the expected events and time estimates will be adjusted.
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David Pan / ACE Exchange Founder
- ACE won the “Best Centralized Exchange” in the 4th blockchain value authoritative list, and has cooperated with KPMG to prevent money laundering for three years.
- As the CEO of Asia Blockchain Accelerator (ABA), he has driven Taiwan’s blockchain output value to 10 billion in two years.
Pan’s 2023 predictions and observations:
2022 was a difficult year for users and related businesses in the blockchain industry. In particular, the collapse of FTX will once again bring the security of “Centralization”, “CeFi”, and “Crypto Exchange” to the forefront.
However, before Q3, in fact, the main negative narrative in the market was that DeFi was hacked. The total amount of hacks even surpassed last year’s bull market, and “more than 60% came from cross-chain protocols.” Even Ethereum founder Vitalik was also pessimistic about the technical bottleneck of the cross-chain bridge.
But on the other hand, we can see that whether it is zk-EVM or Optimistic Rollup and other layer 2 expansion solutions have made great progress this year. After the merger of Ethereum, it also plans to import the expansion solution EIP-4844 into the next major upgrade. All of these will help to further reduce gas fees, thereby promoting the large-scale popularization of blockchain applications.
Therefore, from the perspective of the above two directions, I believe and expect that with the vigorous development of layer 2 and the continuous bridging of the exchange with various public chains and layer 2, the exchange will become a safe, responsible, and easy-to-access multi-chain relay station. The coexistence and integration of centralized exchanges and Web3 wallets will also be a new trend.
Although the overall structure and ecology of Web3 in the future have not yet taken shape, I think that the infrastructure leading to Web3, whether it is a decentralized wallet, major public chains, NFT, etc., as long as it can be safely and securely connected with Web2 is the greatest winner.
In addition, CeFi platforms such as the ACE exchange have always been policy-oriented with legal compliance, and compliance has become more stringent year after year, but I think DeFi will not be an exception in the future.
This year, the United States Department of the Treasury announced that the tumbler protocol Tornado Cash was included in the sanctions list. This is the first time that regulators have taken action against a DeFi protocol. The protocol developers have also been detained so far. Although the entire process and results are still full of controversy, it is certain that DeFi will also make compromises in regulation in the future. At present, well-known protocols such as Aave and Uniswap have implemented restrictions on specific wallets at the front end. Slogans such as “Without permission” and “Decentralization” may gradually fade away, and I believe that both DeFi and CeFi will eventually reach a perfect balance.
Generally speaking, there will still be some enthusiasm for DeFi projects in the future, and related tokens can be paid attention to. However, due to convenience, the centralized exchange market will still be the mainstream trend. With the improvement of supervision, local exchanges in various countries will spring up like mushrooms. The rise will also attract more novices from different countries to join.
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Jamie Lin / AppWorks Chairman and Partner
- By the end of 2022, AppWorks Accelerator has accumulated 106 active startups and 221 entrepreneurs from the Web3 field, with a combined annual turnover of $1.8 billion.
- The combined annual turnover of all new startups in the ecosystem exceeds $15.2 billion, with an annual growth rate of nearly 10%.
- The scale of three venture capital funds under management is 212 million US dollars.
Lin’s 2023 predictions and observations:
After a wild second half of 2022, web3 has officially entered a bear market. At the same time, true believers and founders in the space are refocusing their efforts on building.
Over the past two bear market cycles, we witnessed the emergence of category-defining platforms and applications such as Ethereum, Uniswap, and NBA Top Shot, many of which have had a huge impact on web3’s growth as an industry as well as human society as a whole. I believe that this bear market will be no exception, with new innovations for the next cycle already being built today.
I am very excited to see the emergence of new layers and applications that define the next web3 era in 2023, especially in the second half of the year.
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Brian Lu /Infinity Ventures Crypto（IVC）Founding Partner
- In Q1 of 2022, IVC announced that it has completed a fundraising of 70 million US dollars, aiming to accelerate the innovation and development of the global GameFi, DeFi and Web 3 fields.
- IVC has invested in nearly 180 companies, covering markets in Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States, including YGG, XY Finance, and Lootex.
- One of the most active funds in the Asia-Pacific region. Investment partners include: Circle, Digital Currency Group, Animoca Brands, Fengxing Capital and Xinyuan Capital…etc.
Lu’s 2023 predictions and observations:
2023 will be a year for building and where projects will have to show that they can generate revenue and have a plan to profitability.
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Ivan / RED BUILDING CAPITAL（RBC）Co-Founder
- The first venture capital company in Taiwan to focus on the integration of blockchain forward-looking technology and digital technology.
- Accumulated investment in more than 40 projects, including: Klaytn, a blockchain project made by Kakao Talk, InsurAce, the second largest DeFi insurance agreement in the world…etc.
- Good at early investment and incubation projects, and created the only project Dappio in Taiwan with the fastest fundraising speed, raising more than 10 million US dollars in three months.
Ivan’s 2023 predictions and observations:
Still expecting for another 1.5 year bear market. Not only crypto but also macro economy. There would be some gems to be found in entire year. I’ll try to find them out and deploy. Time to head down and build like old times!
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