Interview with Cobo Labs Head: Building Technology-Driven Infrastructure, Crypto-Native VC Empowers Greater Advantages
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Interview with Cobo Labs Head: Building Technology-Driven Infrastructure, Crypto-Native VC Empowers Greater Advantages
What ambitions lie behind Cobo Labs' evolution from a research team to an investment and research institution? And how will it empower the "rising stars" of the crypto industry?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAs crypto concepts accelerate into the real world, in addition to traditional financial institutions increasingly engaging with crypto assets, more and more consumer brands are actively embracing trending concepts such as DeFi, NFTs, and Web3, clearly indicating a rapid rise in recognition of crypto's intrinsic value. However, the current scale of crypto still cannot rival that of the mainstream. Continuous capture of creativity and innovation remains the long-term driving force behind sustainable growth in the crypto market. Native organizations like Cobo Labs (Cobo’s venture arm) are now unlocking greater crypto innovation through business upgrades, further empowering industry development.
Recently, PANews interviewed Alex Zuo, Head of Cobo Labs, and Ellaine Xu, VP of Investment Research, to discuss the ambitions behind their evolution from a research team into an investment-focused institution and how they plan to empower the "rising stars" of the crypto ecosystem.
Building technology-driven infrastructure through business upgrades, with a focus on DeFi
Diverse market demands are key drivers for business upgrades. Prior to the upgrade, Cobo established an internal project research group in 2018, primarily responsible for blockchain technology and innovation-related research within the crypto industry. Thanks to its research output, Cobo supports the largest number of mainnets and tokens in the market and has provided technical audit and consulting services to over 150 institutional clients, becoming the largest cryptocurrency custody technology service provider in the Asia-Pacific region.
While the crypto space is gaining momentum in the mainstream, the general public still faces high barriers to understanding it. To help more people participate in the blockchain world, Cobo Labs began open-sourcing parts of its research publicly in September last year. Furthermore, amid the accelerating emergence of innovative on-chain applications driven by trends such as DeFi, NFT, metaverse, and Web3, Cobo Labs entered the investment arena in December 2021 to deeply engage with project growth and systematically provide its own technical expertise, capital, traffic, industry connections, and insights.
"Cobo essentially functions as a technology-driven infrastructure enabling institutions. We invest in projects at the traffic end—such as compliant digital banks and communities—and then encapsulate underlying blockchains and assets via API interfaces, delivering them to application layers in a more secure manner. This serves as a deeper extension of Cobo’s existing ecosystem strategy," explained Alex Zuo during the interview.
As Alex Zuo noted, Cobo’s investments mainly focus on打通 upstream and downstream resources and strategic alignment with institutional frameworks. In providing technology-driven infrastructure to institutions, Cobo gains visibility into numerous industry developments and opportunities. Its integration around asset ecosystems helps these innovative forces grow better within the broader ecosystem. Meanwhile, Cobo’s strategic synergies not only enable progress in the primary market but also inject new vitality into future-oriented industry directions.
In terms of investment logic, Alex Zuo, who has traditional VC experience, pointed out significant differences between the crypto sector and traditional fields across multiple dimensions—including time cycles, incubation resources, post-investment services, and investment methodologies. From the perspective of future ecosystem development, Cobo Labs primarily focuses on foundational infrastructure, cross-chain technologies, scaling solutions, and other sectors to meet the entry requirements of large institutions. From an application standpoint, Cobo Labs places strong emphasis on DeFi. It has already invested in projects including Tranchess, Li.finance, Mystiko, Yellow Network, Orderly, Hanlam, and RootAnt.
"Many early-stage projects don’t actually understand whether their products have real-world use cases or even possess a testing ground. Cobo Labs can connect them with platform resources to meet their practical needs. Moreover, when participating in the early stages of certain projects, Cobo Labs contributes in areas such as economic modeling and contract security, helping lay a stronger foundation for their development," said Ellaine Xu to PANews.
Looking at past investments, Cobo Labs has indeed offered multifaceted support. In its investment in the structured fund project Tranchess, Cobo Labs’ internal security team conducted audits, while its 1.5-layer DeFi team became a key early supporter of AUM, contributing over 1,000 BTC in assets. Throughout the project’s operation, Cobo Labs continues to closely monitor code updates and security. Given the lack of bridges between CeFi and DeFi worlds at the trading level, Hanlam—a portfolio company of Cobo Labs—brings rich secondary market expertise from top-tier traditional investment banking’s Sales & Trading divisions. Hanlam aims to bring CeFi’s low transaction costs and sharp pricing capabilities into DeFi through trading mechanisms. Once this bridge is effectively built, it will further consolidate fragmented liquidity in the DeFi space, creating natural synergy with Cobo’s DeFi exploration efforts, rapidly amplifying collaborative effects and capturing market share.
Additionally, in terms of influence and insight, Cobo boasts what the crypto community calls the “Whale Community”—the Cobo 4th NFT Holder. Established in December 2021, this community consists of industry builders, public chain founders, security experts, leading KOLs, VC fund founders, overseas private bank founders, and high-net-worth industry users, featuring a strict screening process and high privacy standards.
As various hot sectors continue to unfold crypto narratives, Cobo Labs’ business upgrade positions it as a key infrastructure player in the crypto space, enabling deeper discovery of high-potential investment targets while further integrating its operations and stimulating innovation within the crypto ecosystem.
With traditional players rushing in, where does native crypto VC hold its edge?
The crypto market has entered a golden age of diversification, with its scale greatly expanding amid rotating waves of DeFi, NFT,GameFi, DAOs, new public chains, and Web3. Crypto’s accelerated path toward mainstream adoption stems not only from the strong breakout potential of native crypto projects but also from growing recognition of its value and prospects by mainstream institutions.
In recent years, judging by both frequency and volume, traditional VCs appear highly enthusiastic about the crypto space, with many even establishing dedicated crypto funds. While traditional investment firms wield influence in capital and resources, Alex Zuo acknowledges their advantages in regulatory compliance and local resources, particularly in large-scale equity-based blockchain projects. However, their ability to add value is limited when it comes to other types of crypto projects, especially in areas such as decentralized protocols and the metaverse. Native crypto investment firms like Cobo Labs have already accumulated experience and advantages in relevant resources and products, allowing them to better empower projects within the ecosystem.
Just as the crypto market continues to evolve, venture capital firms playing pivotal roles are also transforming over time. Currently, pooling capital and sharing investments through DAO structures seems to be one of the dominant themes in crypto investing. However, Alex Zuo believes that purely from a return-on-investment perspective, DAOs are not necessarily optimal. For early-stage projects, the DAO model isn't always superior to individual decision-making, as most successful investments go against conventional wisdom. Additionally, compared to large investment institutions, DAOs may suffer from short-term thinking in market perception, which could constrain investment decisions—especially regarding high-valuation projects. While DAOs might represent one evolutionary path for investment firms, it remains premature given the current lack of maturity in legal frameworks, incentive mechanisms, and penalty systems.
Venture capital is indispensable to the growth of the crypto market, yet with the popularity of Web3, the conflict of interest between VCs and communities has become a focal point of discussion. Former Twitter CEO once criticized on social media: “VCs are the problem in the Web3 world.” This sparked ongoing debate over whether Web3 has become merely a marketing tool for VCs to extract excessive profits. To many, Web3—centered on open-source code, data, and ownership—should see content and applications created and led by user communities.
"Communities may eventually take the lead, but it's crucial whether community members can offer sustained medium- to long-term support for projects. Without stable, long-term incentive distribution mechanisms, communities often pursue short-term gains. Especially during market downturns or bear markets, community participation inevitably declines, making community voting susceptible to whale dominance or vote-buying, thereby undermining the original purpose of decentralization. Therefore, in this exploratory phase of community governance, it's hard to determine whether VCs or communities should take precedence. Ultimately, project success still depends on the founding team—not just investors or the community," Alex Zuo emphasized.
In short, the evolution of VCs and project governance in crypto’s journey still requires time for further exploration and validation. Undeniably, however, crypto trends—including Web3—have become a significant force in the mainstream, prompting many Web2 entrepreneurs to consider launching Web3 ventures. "Beyond product design, operational mindset, community management, token models, and native technological understanding are all new territories for Web2 founders. Those looking to launch Web3 startups should consider joining more centralized institutions first to reframe their thinking and working styles," he advised.
Compared to Web2 professionals transitioning into Web3, the Cobo Labs team comprises individuals with deep Crypto Native DNA, diverse backgrounds, and over six years of深耕 in the blockchain field. Core members come from renowned Asia-Pacific venture capital funds, investment arms of international top-tier exchanges, and experienced technical security developers. Alex Zuo brings extensive experience in frontier tech investments such as artificial intelligence and big data, along with deep roots in the crypto industry—he previously co-founded TokenInsight, a blockchain data and rating agency. Ellaine Xu also possesses solid expertise, having transitioned from bond trader at a major bank and roles in top traditional VCs to strategic investment at a well-known trading platform before launching her own company. This collective background equips Cobo Labs with both strong technical judgment and sharp commercial instincts, enabling comprehensive support and evaluation of crypto projects.
As a leading blockchain investment and technology team, Cobo Labs’ blockchain developers bring years of experience in cybersecurity and vulnerability research, having assisted Google and Microsoft in resolving critical vulnerabilities and receiving acknowledgments from both companies. They have also achieved outstanding rankings in Microsoft MSRC’s Most Valuable Security Researcher program. In addition, to build a robust and diverse global organization, Cobo Labs plans to open offices in the U.S. and other regions by mid-year. The formation of Cobo Labs itself represents an experiment in building investment teams—recruiting interns fully embedded in crypto culture, as well as seasoned professionals with expertise in data, community, and security. (Interested candidates may contact: [email protected]).
At a time when innovation in the crypto market is exploding and it is becoming the "new favorite" of mainstream markets, crypto-native firms like Cobo Labs stand at the forefront of the trend—leveraging business upgrades, native crypto resources, and talent advantages to capture more groundbreaking and impactful crypto narratives, unlocking greater innovation potential to meet increasingly diverse market demands.
Learn more:
Cobo Labs official email: [email protected]
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