Partnered With:

OKX Ventures April investment review, covering the public chain, ZK ecology and other tracks

Read this article in 16 Minutes

OKX Ventures has invested in Berachain, Taiko, Sei Network, Cetus and AlienSwap in the past two months

Source: OKX Ventures

Over the past month, the crypto industry has been growing rapidly, and OKX Ventures has seen many results:

The upgrade of Ethereum Shanghai was successfully completed. After the initial short withdrawal peak, the number of pledges and validators continued to increase. A large number of users tried to participate in the pledge, and ETH deposits far exceeded the number of withdrawals. Staking, staking, staking, staking, staking, and staking staking will make tracks bigger.

Rapid ecological development of ZK Layer2. Since the launch of zkSync in March, the development momentum of zkSync Era has been rapid. TVL exceeded 100 million on April 10th, only 17 days after the launch of the main network. Currently, TVL exceeds 250 million. DeFi, cross-chain bridge, NFT and other track projects are numerous. The cumulative number of addresses has exceeded 500,000, and the number of cross-chain interactive wallets has reached up to 40,000 per day (the third day of the main network's launch). Scroll also exceeded expectations, with 4 million unique wallet addresses now handling more than 500,000 transactions a day. StarkWare has released StarkEx V5.0, introducing features such as multi-asset trading, support for ERC-1155 and ERC-20 Token casting.

BTC ecology has ushered in rapid development, and BRC20 and Ordi ecology have ushered in huge attention. At present, there are more than 18k kinds of ordi tokens in the market, with more than 630million MarketCap. As a result, new technological innovations, BTC capacity expansion technologies such as side chains, status channels, Rollup, and client verification are constantly being iterated, and OKX, together with partners such as Unisat, will continue to explore technological advances in the industry.

In the past 2 months, OKX Ventures has continued to pay attention to the industry, and continued to be optimistic about ZK ecology, infrastructure, multi-chain interconnection, Web3.0 and other tracks. It has invested in Berachain, Taiko, Sei Network, Cetus and AlienSwap.

Berachain

Project Overview

○Berachain is a native Layer 1 blockchain based on DeFi. The project is built on the Cosmos-SDK through Cosmos Native consensus mechanism Tendermint combined with Berachain's own Proof of Liquidity, Enables it to provide faster transaction speeds, lower transaction costs, and immediate final certainty. Berachain creates a new layer of interoperability between the consensus engine and the virtual machine, which is responsible for maintaining the original stablecoin of the "consensus mortgage" chain and improving the efficiency of the pledged capital. Compared with traditional proof-of-interest blockchain (POS), increased witch resistance level.

Project Highlights

○Berachain has an innovative economic model: Three native Tokens. They are BERA as a gas Token, BGT as a governance Token, and HONEY as a native consensus mortgage stabecoin. Berachain's "Tri-Token system" stems from the team's belief that each decentralized economy has three main components that are critical to functioning. One is the medium (gas) that both prices the units of work and performs the said work in the form of smart contract execution. The second is a medium (governance) that uses democratic functions to organize and reach consensus and make decisions about the future of the network, and the third is a medium that trades through a common stable denomination (stablecoins).

○ Users will be able to pledge various L1, Stablecoin and blue chip DeFi tokens to the verifier, and will receive block rewards in the form of Bera, providing liquidity to the ecosystem while protecting the network.

By binding the Token economics of BERA and BGT Tokens to the base layer of the chain, and driving fees to the pledge, the team aims to create inherently valuable assets for long-term supporters of the ecosystem, while working to solve the issues facing Token governance in the DeFi 2.0 era.

○Berachain says that each of the protocols built to run on liquidity proofs will have a vested interest in the future of the network, as their TVLS will generate BERA premium Token rewards while improving security and witch resistance.

Taiko

Project Overview

○Taiko Labs aims to unlock Ethereum for the masses. Taiko LABS is developing Taiko ZK-EVM: a fully decentralized ZK-Rollup equivalent to Ethereum. By fully implementing the Ethereum Yellow Book specifications and decentralizing the proposer/prover from day one, Taiko is able to deliver a superior developer experience without the need to introduce additional assumptions of trust. Also, given that Taiko is comparable to Ethereum, all existing Ethereum tools should work out of the box, and any additional audits or code changes would be superfluous.

○ To date, Taiko has had two successful test networks, over 2,000 proposers and about 200 validators, and a community of over 60,000 people on Discord. The team is currently preparing for their next test net (alpha-3), with the goal of launching the main net in 1Q24. They are also actively growing their ecosystem, inviting builders and projects to deploy on Taiko and getting in touch with the team.

○ZK Rollups extend computing by executing, aggregating, and proving transactions off-chain, relying on Ethereum for data availability and proof of validity verification. The biggest drawback of the ZK Rollups currently under development is that they do not fully support EVM's generalized computation, but are mainly used for specific applications, which results in breaking the compatibility of existing Ethereum L1 smart contracts and DApps. And makes it harder to build new contracts that provide the same type of composable, better experience.

Project Highlights

○ The classic blockchain triangle is that between decentralization, security, and scalability, you can only have two. Ethereum's equivalent of ZK-rollup allows you to choose all three to the letter. Taiko added the missing piece, "scalability," to enhance the Ethereum ecosystem while respecting the experience and habits of its participants.

○Taiko was the first ZK-EVM network to claim Type-1. The priority is perfect Ethereum EVM equivalence, not ZK-proof generation speed. It is considered the Holy Grail of Layer 2 extension solutions because it does not compromise on security or compatibility.

Sei Network

Project Overview

○Sei Network is an order book-specific Layer1 blockchain built using Cosmos SDK and Tendermint cores with built-in CLOB (CLOB, Central Limit Orderbook) module. Other Cosmos-based blockchains could also use Sei CLOBs as shared liquidity centers to create trading markets for different assets.

Sei plans to become the infrastructure and liquidity center for the next generation of DeFi products in the Cosmos ecosystem, and the underlying infrastructure for DeFi transactions connecting the whole ecosystem in the future. The vision is to become the NASDAQ for on-chain digital asset transactions

○ Compare this to universal chains (like Ethereum and Solana), which are not optimized for any specific application, or Cosmo, which are optimized for DApps. The Sei is a tradeoff version of the blockchain, intended to be an optimized Layer 1 blockchain "designed for DeFi"

Project Highlights

○Sei Network is the first parallel Cosmos chain, allowing simultaneous processing of independent transactions, improving overall throughput and latency;

○Sei Network implements parallel order matching system and multilevel order bundling, which means that order matching processes in different markets (trading pairs) can run simultaneously, while minimizing gas costs;

○Sei Network optimizes block broadcast mechanism to speed up to 600 ms;

Sei Network built-in native price predictor to provide high quality and reliable data feed;

○Sei Network is naturally anti-MEV, and avoids MEV problems by means of "frequent lot auction" mechanism. Sei gathers each order together at the end of the block and executes these orders at the same price to prevent early trading;

Sei Network is development-friendly: Cosmos Eco-power, modular design, high freedom of development;

Cetus

Project Overview

○Cetus is a Move ecologically based Dex and liquidity protocol that uses algorithms similar to uniswap V3 to build concentrated liquidity protocols and a range of subsidiary features to provide DeFi users with the best trading experience and higher capital efficiency. At the same time, SUI's unique ecological characteristics were utilized to create composable functions that were different from Uniswap's.

○Cetus already has complete products including Swap, unlicensed liquidity pool, and cross-bridge.

Project Highlights

○Cetus is the bottom layer of mobility in the Move ecosystem, across the Aptos and Sui ecosystems, providing users with efficient tokenswap and LP services. Cetus team is a team with mature product delivery ability, strong ecological BD ability and operation ability. OKX Ventures believes Cetus has a high potential to become a leader in SUI's unique ecosystem.

AlienSwap

Project Overview

AlienSwap is a communalized NFT marketplace and aggregator. In the past few months after the Beta version was released, the accumulative trading volume has exceeded 50 million dollars, the accumulative wallet registered users exceeded 670,000, ranking the third in the Ethereum network daily activity and the fifth in the daily trading volume. This round of financing will push AlienSwap to officially start scaling growth, growing into the NFT trading platform at the head of the blockchain network.

Project Highlights

○ The AlienSwap product experience is excellent and there are many innovative features for NFT players.

NFT Heat Map: AlienSwap supports the industry's first NFT Heat map feature, making it easy for NFT players to quickly discover the highest daily increase in the collection of NFT, making Alpha value discovery easier.

Order Book mode: To make it easier for professional players to trade and break through the barriers for TOKEN and NFT players, AlienSwap pioneered both Sweep and order book modes. Users can buy and sell NFT in bulk through the order book and support limit/market buying and selling, making NFT trading as simple as Token trading.

Professional data analysis: AlienSwap support comprehensive professional trading data analysis function, in addition to heat map, players can view NFT history price curve, order depth, address position distribution, blue chip index and other hard data through AlienSwap, used to assist trading decisions.

Extreme GAS optimization: AlienSwap has deeply optimized the trading contract layer to trade Gas at 50% of Blur's cost. In addition, customers can save 10-15% on Gas costs by buying in bulk through AlienSwap, and cancel NFT orders for no Gas.

○OKX Ventures is long-term bullish on the growth potential of the NFT market, which is an incremental track with billions of users. The expertise, experience and innovation of the core AleinSwap team will enable AlienSwap to introduce tens of millions of new users to the industry and become the industry's leading NFT transaction infrastructure.