Messari 2022 Crypto Industry Report Chapter 2 "Top 10 Crypto Influencers"

原文标题：《 Crypto Theses for 2022 》

原文来源： Messari

原文编译：Amy Liu，  比推资讯 

This article is Messari  2022 Encryption Trends Research Report chapter 2 [Top 10 Cryptographic influencers list] translation version, the subsequent translation will continue to update.

1. "We Can All Do It" (WAGMI)

"We Can All Do It" has been my favorite crypto "meme" for years, and it embodies the cultural shift in cryptocurrencies from "bring down the government and move to the castle" to "Let's create the future with better technology and consistent incentives."

If you're still skeptical of cryptocurrencies, it's no big deal. Just don't be openly hostile and closed about its potential, as vicious critics like Jamie Dimon are.

[Seriously, though, Dimon's thoughts on cryptocurrencies have been constant and wrong for years. He called it a "horrible store of value" (2014), said it "will not survive", "will be stopped" (2015), "nowhere to go" (2016), "a scam" (2017), and told an interviewer "I really don't care" about cryptocurrencies (2018). Then launched a JPMCoin pilot (2019), then repeatedly dismissing it this fall, saying "I have no interest in it," it's "fool's gold" and "worthless." Let's not be like Jamie.]

2. Look at these big guys: Samani, CMS, Su Zhu

It's been a bumper year for the whales, especially the big investors who rode out the 2018 bear market unscathed to post their biggest wins in 2021.

Kyle Samani's Multicoin Capital had a historic year, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for crypto funds. The Graph, Helium, Arweave and Solana all hit $1 billion in network value this year, and Multicoin is rumored to have more than $10 billion in AUM over that period. Retail investors jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon.

Another giant is on the rise. Su Zhu's Three Arrows Capital, one of the most prominent hedge funds in the crypto community, revealed its position in the Greylevel Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) in its latest SEC filing.

Then there is CMS Holdings, a proprietary trading service that trades highly liquid cryptocurrencies, tokens and digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as offering long-term equity investments in the crypto industry. He sent $5,000 worth of Girl Scout Cookies to one of our analysts. He pays people to tweet nonsense and live debate. CMS and the team may also be the fastest traders/and fastest investors in cryptocurrencies. CMS and the team may also be the fastest and most responsive investors in cryptocurrency trading. May you all have as much fun in the New Year as CMS does every day.

3. Emilie Choi, Coinbase

One of the things I find most remarkable about Coinbase is how resilient they have been in the face of almost total leadership turnover in recent years. With the exception of Brian Armstrong, few of the early employees remain. Fred Ehrsam remains on the board, but his focus is on Paradigm. Many other employees have gone on to start new companies or venture funds.

I think the two people other than Brian who are most responsible for the company's continued success are former CTO Balaji Srinivasan (although his tenure was only one year, he helped move the company in the right multi-asset strategy direction, Since 50% of Coinbase's revenue now comes from trading pairs other than BTC and ETH) and Emilie Choi.

The story behind Coinbase Ventures is striking: There are no full-time employees. But even more impressive are the large corporate acquisitions it has made. The company acquired Earn.com for $100 million, and Balaji Srinivasan, president of Earn, will become Coinbase's CTO. The company paid $55 million for Xapo in 2019 and doubled the assets under Coinbase's custody.

Trading revenue from the core exchanges will continue to drive the business for the foreseeable future, but Coinbase's distribution and regulatory positioning means they can also make other significant incremental purchases in the New Year. Neutrino and Agara are likely to upgrade the back office, but I would expect bigger deals to open up new revenue streams.

Under Emilie, the early victories were spectacular. Start-ups should remember that this is both an opportunity and a threat.

4. Devin Finzer, OpenSea

As a lucky early investor in the company, I can tell you THAT I've never seen anything like OpenSea's financial performance. Despite the competition to come, the world's dominant NFT market is cashing in on the NFT boom. Coinbase has 3 million users waiting for its upcoming NFT platform (four times OpenSea's historical total). FTX has launched a Solana-based NFT platform. Gemini already owns the Nifty Gateway. Almost all other exchanges will follow suit and launch their own products.

I will provide some thoughts on the company's current trajectory and the future of the NFT market in chapter 6.

For now, I just want to say how impressive it is that OpenSea continues to expand out of chaos. Keep the site up and running while the end market grows exponentially month by month, with occasional errors and soaring Ethereum Gas charges.

I think OpenSea could eventually become a $100 billion company (or network), and their critics are underestimating its lead (I've found Coinbase to be the same).

(Check out Devin's two Bankless podcasts from March and October to see how OpenSea is progressing. Bid on the NFT in this report!)

5. Dan Robinson & Dave White, Paradigm

More investors? ! ? Come on!

Last year, I included Paradigm's white hat hacker Samczsun in our top 10, and he had another great year, saving DeFi users from nine hacking attacks (Samczsun now tops the Ethereum Foundation's bounty list).

Uniswap V3 Automated market maker (which we will cover in more detail in Chapter 7) was largely spawned by Paradigm's Dan Robinson. Floor Perps and Ricks& Mortys and others aim to address the challenge of illiquidity in the NFT market. Power Perps, TWAMM and Everlasting Options could bring bigger, more sophisticated investors to the DeFi market. In fact, Paradigm's team has plenty of useful results. And that's just what we know so far. I look forward to seeing what they have up their sleeve in 2022.

6. Jeff Zirlin "The Jiho", Axie Infinity

Over the past year, Jiho has rewritten the playbook for building crypto communities. Mission? Conquer the world. Secret weapon? An obscure Pokemon like Trojan horse NFT card game that propelled Axie Infinity to the top of the crypto world.

As head of development and community at Sky Mavis, the game studio behind Axie, Jeff has found and nurtured a new audience for Axie in the Philippines. Every day, thousands of people play Axie for entertainment and income subsidies. The Philippines now has 40 percent of the entire Axie user base, and Sky Mavis recently topped 1 million daily active users. There's no shortage of Axie evangelists, as native token AXS returned 125,000% over the past year.

Axie Infinity itself is the launch mechanism for Sky Mavis' Ronin Exchange, an Ethereum-linked side chain designed to facilitate cheap and player-friendly trading. Since May, Ronin has generated $1 billion in revenue and holds over $9 billion in assets, making it the second largest blockchain by sales in the NFT secondary market. Sky Mavis, one of the fastest growing game studios in history, recently secured a $152 million Series B funding round led by A16Z. The company launched the token $RON and decentralized exchange Katana this fall. They are now ready to launch a new Web3-oriented games and applications studio for fans. Axie's success has made crypto games and play-for-money games suddenly important, with an estimated $1.4 billion pouring into related NFT projects in the third quarter alone. Meanwhile, Ronin has become one of the case studies for the modular expansion of cryptocurrencies.

Jay Graber, Bluesky and Tess Rinearson, Twitter

If any big tech company were to disrupt itself with Web3, it would probably be an underprofitable, founder-led social media company with the most thoughtful crypto supporters.

Of course, I'm talking about Meta.

When I started writing this section, I expected 30 minutes of commentary and a quick introduction to Jay Graber's Bluesky plan to take over Twitter this summer. When I started to really dig into Bluesky, I noticed something different. So far, there is relatively little movement within the Bluesky "community" (compare their Github/Gitlab to Diem!). "Makes me wonder if Twitter is really trying to disrupt itself and unlock its honey pot of user data.

Given the current throughput constraints of cryptocurrencies, "full-stack decentralized media" may not be an appropriate near-term goal for Twitter. It may be too early to expect that from an early project like Bluesky. Instead, the project appears to be focused first and foremost on connecting data between other decentralized platforms such as Mastodon, IPFS, Audius, etc.

This is so interesting. This is an important foundational work for decentralized networks. For Twitter, this is not as self-disruptive as I originally thought.

As of now, Amazon is not facing any Web3 threat. First, Apple still dominates hardware. YouTube could theoretically incorporate a Web3 component, but this seems unlikely as they already share revenue with creators.

Meta, on the other hand, is different. Their rebranding is not just about embracing the future of Web3, but also about flying higher for political reasons. Even to survive. Will we see Libra Diem Novi integrated into Meta's Messenger and Whatsapp products? They are working on it. Will we see NFT on Instagram or Oculus? Will Facebook's Blue App open up its backend and start allowing users to license their data directly to third parties? (Maybe!) .

I'm not an apologist for Mark Zuckerberg. I just think that necessity is the mother of invention, that past performance is a good predictor of future success, and that no other major tech company has all the ingredients to make Web3 part of its core business model.

I'm not a fan of Twitter's embrace of decentralized technology (except for Jack's obsession with Bitcoin). But again, it's all up to Jay and the BlueSky team. I want them to surprise us.

Update: They did surprise us! When I wrote this a few weeks ago, Tess Rinearson had not yet been announced as the engineering lead for Twitter Crypto. I'm very excited about BlueSky/Twitter 2022. There are now two related teams, one of which is an internal team that reports exclusively to the CTO. And Jack just quit! -- Keep an eye out for Jay and Tess.)

8. Kristin Smith, Blockchain Association and Katie Haun, A16Z

I have an important policy section, and there's a reason for that. With three years left in the Biden administration and the successful passage of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill (and its disastrous cryptocurrency provisions), our industry's policy leaders have a lot on their plate. That makes Kristin Smith and Katie Haun key figures for the New Year.

Kristin runs the blockchain Association, the industry's largest professional trade association. Kristin's group was one of the driving forces behind intense 11-hour negotiations during parliamentary debate this summer to amend the crypto broker terms language. While that effort failed, the fight helped the association increase its financial and human resources substantially. Membership fees have tripled, and full-time staff such as Former Compound general counsel Jake Chervinsky and a new head of government affairs, Dave Grimaldi, have been added.

Let's meet Katie Haun and her policy team at A16Z. Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor, Coinbase board member, and now general partner of a16Z's giant crypto fund, recruited a Biden adviser, a former Cryptocurrency expert at the Treasury Department, and former SEC and CFC commissioners as advisers.

A16z covers a lot of ground and so far their policy work is moving fast. Their recently announced Web3 Policy Center provides a good start for policymakers, most notably laying out why encryption should be a policy priority for lawmakers, what specific legislative proposals could form the backbone of new encryption laws that address core policy issues without impacting industry, And how employees can be educated and catch up on encryption.

We need unity and speed now. The approach of blockchain Association and A16Z provides us with a good start to the New Year.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce

During Jay Clayton's tenure as president, Peirce was affectionately known as "Crypto Mom." Today, she's more like the commander of the Cryptocurrency Night Watch.

Winter came, and Peirce was the last line of defense against Chairman Gensler. Peirce criticized a lack of clarity in the SEC's enforcement action against Poloniex. Since 2018, she has been the voice of dissent advocating spot cryptocurrency ETFs. At the same time, she insisted on the SEC's investor protection mandate and advocated modernizing reporting rules.

She tries to find solutions rather than blanket restrictions on anything that seems new and useful. Crypto investors notice and appreciate thoughtful policies. Crypto lawyers like policy leaders to come up with workable legal solutions.

We want more of that!

Most crypto professionals welcome thoughtful regulation, as long as we believe it will be applied fairly and consistently, is technically feasible, and is not unconstitutional.

Peirce began to win over open-minded policymakers because her positions were clear, consistent, and solution-oriented rather than jurisdiction-oriented.

10. Do Kwon, Terraform Labs

In writing this section (November 8), I want to highlight this year's "fast horse" in the highly competitive "tier 1" race. Ethereum's nearly tenfold rise this year is nothing to sneeze at, as it faces block space congestion, high fees, and the subsequent explosive growth of its tier 1 competitors. Avalanche is up 25 times year on year, Solana and Polygon 110 times, and Fantom 160 times. But Terra dominates, returning 170-fold.

I put Do Kwon here for a few more reasons: 1)Terra is one of the largest crypto investments in Asia, it is a Top 10 Layer 1 project and has the deepest influence in the huge Korean crypto market. 2)Terra is actually being used on a large scale as collateral against the second largest crypto stabocoin, UST, with a current market cap of $7.2 billion. 3) The breadth of Terra's infrastructure is comparable to any blockchain outside ethereum, and may be built on a more stable and interoperable technology (Cosmos' inter-blockchain communication protocol) in the long run.

Most importantly, Do Kwon gained recognition against his rivals because he was willing to fight back. At Messari 2021, he received a subpoena from the SEC, but shrugged it off and decided to file a countersuit with the SEC. This is a battle he may win, whatever the outcome, which is encouraging.

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