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The top 10 Web3 technology teams, responsible for developing over 90% of the market value of cryptocurrency projects.

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In the trillion-dollar market of the cryptocurrency industry, over 90% of the market value is generated by top projects.

Original title: "The Top 10 Strongest Web3 Technology Teams in the World, Developing and Guarding Over 90% of Cryptocurrency Projects' Market Value?"

Original source: "Plain Language Blockchain"

According to statistics from Cailian Press Venture Capital, the total number of global Web3.0 financing in November was 71, with a total financing amount of 1.034 billion US dollars, an increase of 21.65% compared to October's 850 million.

Nowadays, Web3 is a hot topic in the Internet industry. From top-tier VCs to Internet entrepreneurs, everyone is talking about it. International well-known venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Goldman Sachs have started investing heavily in this area. Some people who have resigned from Internet giants have also gone all in on Web3. Of course, these giants themselves, such as Tencent, have also entered the Web3 gaming field.

In fact, in the nearly trillion-dollar market of the encryption industry, more than 90% of the market value is generated by the top projects. Today, Plain Language Blockchain will take you through the top 10 teams with the strongest Web3 capabilities and the greatest contributions...

1. Bitcoin Core Team

In 2011, the missing Satoshi Nakamoto handed over development permissions to Gavin Andresen. Subsequently, the Bitcoin project migrated to Github and in 2014, the Bitcoin project was officially named "Bitcoin Core", with the development team behind it also known as the Bitcoin Core team.

On Github, anyone can contribute to Bitcoin Core, so the Core team is not a real company in the true sense. It can be said that it is a decentralized technical development organization designated by Satoshi Nakamoto to take over and continuously absorb new developers through the Bitcoin community. These people who are engaged in Bitcoin development come from professional fields such as economics, politics, cryptography, and computer science.

Bitcoin core, as the development team that has received the most support from the Bitcoin community for a long time, has been called the most talented Bitcoin development team in the world by outsiders. Currently, the Core team is still focused on maintaining and developing the Bitcoin system, laying the foundation for future technological upgrades and development of Bitcoin.

In order to prevent centralization in technical development, the Bitcoin core team has decentralized the code merge submission permissions to five individuals. These five individuals are Wladimir J. van der Laan, Pieter Wuille, Jonas Schnelli, Marco Falke, and Samuel Dobson. All merge submissions must be signed with their trusted PGP keys in order to be verified and deployed.

In addition, there are hundreds of people who have contributed to the Bitcore Core project. When the current maintainers of Core believe that a certain development contributor has outstanding abilities, is reliable and proactive, and can handle the responsibilities of a maintainer, they will grant that development contributor the permission to submit commits to their Github account. Over the years, the chief maintainers have been:

中本聪（Satoshi Nakamoto）: 2009/01/03-2011/02/23

Translation:

Satoshi Nakamoto: 2009/01/03-2011/02/23

Gavin Andresen: 2011/02/23-2014/04/07

Wladimir van der Laan: 2014/04/07-present.

The reason why the Bitcoin network has been able to develop steadily to this day and become the world's most successful peer-to-peer payment system is precisely because these people have contributed to the Bitcoin project technically and silently behind the scenes.

2. Ethereum Core Team

Similar to the Bitcoin Core team, the development team of Ethereum is also decentralized. Previously, the article "What happened to the 8 founders of Ethereum who split up?" introduced the early founders of Ethereum. The earliest Ethereum core team was composed of these people. Later, as the Ethereum community continued to grow and develop, it gradually attracted members from all over the world with "professional skills" to participate in the construction of the underlying technology and ecosystem of Ethereum.

Many people have always thought that Ethereum is a small workshop of technical developers led by Vitalik Buterin and a few buddies. Actually, for a long time, the Ethereum community has maintained multiple open-source execution clients that can interoperate, developed by multiple independent teams using different programming languages. Most of the development work of the Ethereum core team can be said to be carried out by these multiple teams.

Currently, there are 8 teams dedicated to Ethereum 2.0 client development. They are ChainSafe Systems, PegaSys, Harmony, Parity Technologies, Prysmatic Labs, Sigma Prime, Status, and Trinity.

It is precisely because of the diversity of clients and the various technical teams in different directions that the network becomes stronger, more diverse, and decentralized. In each major upgrade of the Ethereum network (including the POS merger), it was completed by different client teams repeatedly testing and adjusting on multiple testnets. They have done a lot of work behind the scenes and ultimately submitted a satisfactory "answer sheet".

Thanks to the support of so many powerful technical development teams, Ethereum has become the most powerful Web3 infrastructure in the world (perhaps without equal).

3. ConsenSys

Initially, ConsenSys was just a venture capital studio. Its founder, Joseph Lubin, was one of the co-founders of Ethereum. Later, he helped establish the non-profit Ethereum Foundation and focused on building the Ethereum network. ConsenSys has built a large number of corporate relationships and soft power that can be leveraged, becoming a bridge between blockchain and government value exchange.

Currently, ConsenSys has successfully incubated over 50 projects that support the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem, covering development tools, infrastructure, core components, platform applications, DeFi, DAO, NFT, storage, decentralized digital identity, and venture capital, among others. These include well-known infrastructure projects such as the MetaMask wallet and Infura.

The Little Fox Wallet quickly became popular shortly after its release. For over six years, the MetaMask team has been dedicated to creating a product that, while not perfect, is effective enough. It is also a trusted original program for developers. Through these efforts, MetaMask has helped millions of users and thousands of developers enter the world of web3.

And another product under its umbrella, Infura, provides tools and infrastructure that allow developers to easily deploy their blockchain applications from testing to scaling. Infura can solve many pain points for blockchain developers.

Some people say that ConsenSys is just another Ethereum, although this analogy is a bit exaggerated, the importance of ConsenSys to Ethereum is undeniable, because it serves as a lobbying group, incubator, and technological driving force. Moreover, because ConsenSys is not only related to Ethereum, but also establishes connections through government, regulation, and industry, it has made great contributions to the entire cryptocurrency industry.

4. Polygon

Polygon Technology, also known as Polygon, was founded in 2018 and is a blockchain internet company.

At the beginning, several founders were dedicated to another scalable blockchain called Matic Network. In February 2021, the team announced that Matic Network would be renamed to its current name, Polygon, and declared it as the Ethereum cross-chain hub, establishing a new goal to become a company that provides a large number of multi-chain services.

Polygon's product, Polygon SDK, reduces transaction fees and increases speed, while also supporting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Existing Ethereum applications can be relatively easily migrated to Polygon. Therefore, in addition to obtaining an experience comparable to Ethereum, users can also enjoy high throughput and low costs.

Currently, Polygon has deployed some popular decentralized finance DApps, such as Aave, 1INCH, Curve, and Sushi. Of course, there are also some Polygon-specific native applications, including QuickSwap and Slingshot, in addition to its focus on providing Ethereum with expansion capabilities through Zero Knowledge technology.

Nowadays, the Polygon ecosystem is powerful and can be considered a leader in the current Layer 2 space. Additionally, the project team is mainly composed of Indians, and is also jokingly referred to as the "Indian Ethereum".

5. StarkWare

In the Ethereum scaling roadmap, ZK Rollup, a zero-knowledge proof, has always been highly anticipated. Early zero-knowledge proof projects such as Zcash and Monero have done well in terms of privacy protection, but can only serve as a means of value storage and are difficult to carry other applications.

Later star projects include StarkWare, ZKSync, Aztec, etc. Among them, StarkWare completed a $100 million D-round financing with a valuation of $8 billion in May this year, making it one of the highest valued projects in the primary market, far exceeding the popular Layer1 public chains Aptos and Sui.

However, the time of StarkWare's establishment is not very long, it was created in Israel in 2018. But its team is strong and comprehensive, composed of world-class cryptographers and scientists: the core member Eli is the former chief scientist of Zcash, a leading figure in the field of zero-knowledge innovation for many years, invented zk STARK, and was a professor at the Israel Institute of Technology, one of the world's most outstanding cryptography experts; CEO Uri is a serial entrepreneur with a keen business sense and fundraising negotiation skills.

Currently, StarkWare's product system is divided into two parts:

One of them is StarkEx, which serves as a ToB service. StarkEx has established a business model of scaling as a service and has been officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet since 2020, achieving profitability. It has served top clients in the industry such as dYdX, Sorare, ImmutableX, and DeversiFi.

Secondly, as a general L2 solution, StarkNet can deploy any smart contract without the need for custom development for specific applications, unlike StarkEx. It is currently under development and testing, with the possibility of decentralizing nodes and handing them over to the community for operation, becoming a fully decentralized version.

Overall, the StarkWare team is the inventor of mainstream zero-knowledge proof technologies zk SNARK and zk-STARK, and is based on STARK's zk rollups technology. Compared to optimistic rollups, zk rollups provide a better user experience with faster withdrawal times.

As one of the best companies in the zk rollups field, StarkWare provides solutions based on STARK technology for the blockchain industry. Its leading scaling technology is highly anticipated.

6. Cosmos

Cosmos was founded by Ethan Buchman and Jae Kwon in 2014 with the aim of creating an interoperable blockchain.

In the early stages, Cosmos established the non-profit organization Interchain Foundation (ICF) based on the model of Ethereum to promote the development of the ecosystem.

Founder Jae Kwon announced his resignation in early 2020, followed by the departure of core member Zaki Manian. This turmoil once caused their coin ATOM to plummet.

However, Cosmos is a star in the cross-chain industry, known as the "Internet of blockchain". Interoperability and scalability are the biggest features of Cosmos' project. Additionally, there are two major innovations:

Firstly, the proposal of technological innovation Tendermint is put forward. It is a solution that packages the network and consensus layer of blockchain into a universal engine, allowing developers to focus on application development rather than complex underlying protocols. It is easy to get started with.

Secondly, there is the security innovation Cosmos SDK, which allows developers to easily port any existing blockchain code library already present in Golang onto it, thanks to its modularity and security features.

Therefore, although the development of the Cosmos team has experienced ups and downs, they have never forgotten their original intention since its establishment. They have been committed to solving issues such as scalability, message transmission between different chains, sovereignty & shared security, and improving speed. They have also made significant contributions and efforts to Web3.0.

But can Cosmos reduce the threshold for developers, optimize user experience, and increase the value capture of ATOM? The upgrade of Cosmos 2.0 may help it maintain a leading position in the future public chain market, but whether it can break through the competition among public chains still needs to be tested by time.

7. Polkadot

In 2016, Ethereum experienced a fork crisis. The Parity team considered creating an independent shard version of Ethereum, while Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood realized that Ethereum 2.0 would take at least 5 years, or even 5-10 years, to become a reality. So he decided to leave Ethereum and start from scratch to create Polkadot.

In October 2016, the first draft of the Polkadot whitepaper was released.

The Polkadot project has caused a frenzy in the industry since its inception. In 2017, during its first private sale, Polkadot raised 485,331 ETH in just 7 days, which was worth approximately $144 million at the time. This was all for a project that was still just a whitepaper at the time.

Although Ethereum is known as the world computer and enables the flourishing development of DeFi through smart contracts, its performance is limited and network congestion can easily occur due to too many contracts; another issue is that Ethereum has gradually formed a closed ecosystem. When Bitcoin users cannot use the DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum, it is not beneficial for the entire blockchain industry.

Therefore, Gavin Wood proposed such a concept: the world cannot have only one Ethereum. He believes that in the future decentralized world, there will be multiple public chains, and these public chains need to be interconnected, otherwise isolated public chains will become "information islands", and the bridge to connect these public chains is cross-chain technology.

So Polkadot brings an important feature, cross-chain. By the way, when it comes to Polkadot, it is also referred to as the "cross-chain duo" along with Cosmos.

Cross-chain technology breaks through the traditional thinking of a single blockchain at the design level, expanding from a single ecosystem to a network that can connect many ecosystems. In addition, Polkadot is a scalable heterogeneous multi-chain system that does not provide any inherent functional applications itself, but mainly connects various chain protocols, maintains effective and secure protocol communication, and saves these communication information. These greatly improve scalability and interactivity while ensuring shared security.

Based on the outlook for Web3.0, Polkadot is making significant contributions to Web3.0 at both the physical architecture and protocol levels.

8. Dapper labs

Speaking of "CryptoKitties", this name is well-known in the industry. It blocked Ethereum as soon as it went online at the end of 2017. In the past two years, there have been a series of news such as Cheese Wizards, Dapper Wallet, cooperation with NBA and UFC, huge financing, and Flow public chain. All of this is attributed to the team behind it - Dapper Labs.

Counting the development history of Dapper Labs, every new project has broken the previous records. Therefore, the saying "Dapper Labs produces only the best" has become popular in the industry. In fact, in the cryptocurrency industry, few teams can simultaneously develop blockchain, wallets, and launch popular applications. The Dapper Labs team has done an outstanding job in completing these tasks. So what is the magic of this team?

Established in February 2018, Dapper Labs' original intention is to advance towards the goal of "how to make blockchain more accessible to mainstream users". With this goal in mind, Dapper Labs has innovated and developed in terms of users, developers, and innovative business models.

Dapper Labs team is led by Roham Gharegozlou, Dieter Shirley, and Mikhael Naayem.

Roham Gharegozlou was born in Iran and started working with the internet in high school, creating websites. In 2012, three years after graduating from Stanford University, he founded an internet-related studio. Later on, by chance, Roham Gharegozlou, who had mined Bitcoin at home, and Mikhael Naayem, who had developed his own mobile gaming platform (later sold to Animoca Brands), joined Roham Gharegozlou's studio. At this point, they began to realize that blockchain technology could potentially change society and provide new freedoms, so the studio shifted its focus to the development of encryption technology.

So in 2017, the world's first blockchain game Cryptokitties was born in this studio. Because the game became popular after its release, the team transformed the studio into Dapper Labs, leading to subsequent exciting stories.

As Dapper Labs' mission states: Blockchain is for you. If the blockchain industry has ushered in the era of NFTs, then Dapper Labs is driving the NFT industry forward.

9. Yuga Labs

Speaking of the story behind the establishment of Yuga Labs, it's quite simple. Gordon Goner and Gargamel, who were in their early twenties, were friends. They made a fortune through cryptocurrency in 2017, but then "lost everything" due to leverage trading. So they started thinking about doing something in this industry. Coincidentally, they were inspired by the works of their predecessors in the NFT community before the NFT summer in early 2021. They contacted two other engineer friends and together they created an NFT project with a monkey theme, which unexpectedly sold very well. As a result, on April 23, 2021, with the launch of the BAYC Club, Yuga Labs was born.

"Yuga" comes from a wizard in the game "The Legend of Zelda" who can turn himself and others into 2D artworks. The founder of BAYC used it as the name of their studio, symbolizing the team's extraordinary creativity.

After the huge success of the BAYC NFT series, Yuga Labs has also become a well-known name in the cryptocurrency industry. Later, the Bored Ape Kennel Club, a derivative project of BAYC featuring pet dogs, also became very popular, and then BAYC spawned the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, which is still very popular.

As the most influential NFT project in the industry, BAYC has a landmark significance in the development history of NFT, so many players even regard BAYC as the Ethereum of the NFT field.

Earlier this year, Yuga Labs acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits series IP. This means that the two major head blue-chip IPs have merged and all the income is in one pocket. The reason why Larva Labs, the developer of CryptoPunks, is willing to sell is that they believe that compared to themselves, Yuga Labs is better at operating and developing image-based projects and their community ecology.

Acquiring star NFT IPs such as CryptoPunks and Meebits is just a glimpse of Yuga Labs' business operation capabilities. Yuga Labs is also extending its brand peripheral operation capabilities further. On March 12th of this year, Yuga Labs announced in a joint statement that Yuga is building a monkey universe, with BAYC as the center of this universe. The project is called "MetaRPG", with the goal of expanding the BAYC world through gaming and welcoming non-BAYC holders to join.

Actually, BAYC evolved from a simple JPEG NFT to a broader ecosystem due to the project team granting special rights to NFT holders: including participation in various activities organized by the project team, the right to share various services and products provided by the project team, and more.

For the team, Yuga Labs is constantly pushing the boundaries of the NFT ecosystem. In addition to the BAYC series, Yuga Labs is also building a highly loyal product system and is preparing to promote its products through influencers in various fields. The future of the ape metaverse is worth looking forward to.

10. Axies developer Sky Mavis

Sky Mavis was founded in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in early 2018. It is a technology-focused game studio that builds the infrastructure for the future virtual world, making it possible. Therefore, Sky Mavis can also be seen as an infrastructure builder.

In 2017, after playing CryptoKitties for a few months, CEO Nguyen became obsessed. Then, he realized he could create his own blockchain-based game. With the help of a group of friends, Nguyen created Axie Infinity in just a few months.

After Axie Infinity's game went viral, according to Token Terminal's data, Axie Infinity generated a revenue of up to $334 million in just 30 days, surpassing the revenue of $231 million generated by "King of Glory" in July 2021. Axie Infinity became the darling of the blockchain gaming industry at that time.

In traditional games, the equipment, props, pets, and coins we obtain in the game appear to belong to us. However, in reality, these virtual assets belong to the game development company, and the data represented by these virtual assets is also controlled by the company.

Sky Mavis is attempting to integrate blockchain technology into games, making in-game coins into Crypto and in-game equipment, props, and pets into NFTs. The data of these digital assets is also stored on a decentralized blockchain, giving players ownership of these virtual assets. It may seem like a simple integration of blockchain technology into games, but this approach is actually changing the nature of the game itself.

It can be said that Sky Mavis' success on Axie Infinity has brought new concepts to the gaming industry and validated new directions of development. Sky Mavis not only launched a successful game, Axie Infinity, but more importantly, its explorations have brought a disruptive innovation to the entire gaming industry, leading to a huge transformation.

Summary

During the 13-year history of the encryption industry, 2022 is one of the most difficult years ever, with external financial environment panic and many internal events triggering a chain of failures. However, only by eliminating the losers can the industry achieve a more stable future.

However, with the groundwork laid by these predecessors, we can still be certain that those who continue to build will persist. We believe that after a tumultuous year, the cryptocurrency industry will emerge even stronger, rather than fading away.