OKX Ventures Monthly Investment Report: Continued Optimism for ZK Ecosystem, LSD Sector, Multi-chain Interoperability, and Storage赛道
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OKX Ventures Monthly Investment Report: Continued Optimism for ZK Ecosystem, LSD Sector, Multi-chain Interoperability, and Storage赛道
OKX Ventures is optimistic about the development of the Ethereum ecosystem, multi-chain ecosystems, Bitcoin ecosystem, infrastructure construction, and innovative applications in the coming months.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsOKX Ventures Investment Bimonthly Report (2023.1–2023.2)
Over the past two months, the crypto industry has developed rapidly, and we have witnessed many achievements:
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Ethereum's Shanghai upgrade is progressing smoothly, with preparations for testnet upgrades completed;
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Layer2 development has exceeded expectations—Arbitrum briefly surpassed Ethereum mainnet in daily transaction count in January, while zk rollups such as Scroll achieved major version updates, bringing them closer to mainnet launch;
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On-chain data remained stable, with monthly on-chain transaction volumes hovering between 160–170 billion during January and February;
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The BTC ecosystem experienced rapid growth, with Ordinals NFTs driving Taproot adoption from 1.7% to around 10% recently;
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The multi-chain Cosmos ecosystem also saw fast growth, with Lambda 9 upgrade imminent and infrastructure across the multi-chain ecosystem expanding rapidly.
During the past two months, OKX Ventures has maintained close attention on the industry, continuing to back key areas including the zk ecosystem, LSD赛道, cross-chain interoperability, and decentralized storage, investing in projects such as Scroll, Diva, LayerZero, zkPass, and Permaweb.
Scroll
Investment Rationale:
Scroll is positioned as an EVM-equivalent zk-Rollup, representing a Type 2 zkEVM as defined by Vitalik in his classification of four zkEVM types. OKX Ventures has strategically invested in Scroll, which has made strong progress recently—the Pre-Alpha testnet received over 300,000 unique addresses in its first week and surpassed 600,000 unique addresses by the end of January, processing over 400,000 transactions per day.
From a developer perspective, Scroll’s EVM-equivalence ensures bytecode-level compatibility with Ethereum. Additionally, Scroll uses Ethereum as its native data availability layer.
Scroll is compatible with numerous applications and tools. Technically, it delivers minimal trust assumptions, high throughput, and fast finality through its solution. Scroll embodies core Web3 values: decentralization and community ownership.
From the outset, Scroll has focused on solving the challenge of decentralized verification. The current phase emphasizes hardware acceleration to enhance prover performance and achieve prover decentralization. The next step involves decentralizing the sequencer, enabling anyone to run a node.
We support Scroll’s roadmap and vision—a general-purpose L2 network that achieves superior EVM compatibility, enabling complex functionalities such as smart contract deployment and general computation. Once zk efficiency ceases to be a bottleneck, significant opportunities will emerge in Ethereum’s scaling infrastructure architecture.
LayerZero
Investment Rationale:
LayerZero is an interoperability protocol designed for message passing, enabling any cross-chain contract call with payload support.
At the asset bridging level, LayerZero enables full liquidity transfer across chains via omnichain communication, significantly improving shared security across bridges. Built to operate under an absolutely secure model, LayerZero allows immutable contracts with comprehensive security parameters, including immutable verifier libraries, relayer sets, and hyperparameters.
By combining the low cost of third-party validation networks with the high security of light nodes, LayerZero’s Ultra Light Node offers robust security at low cost. This cost-effective approach reduces developers’ learning and operational burdens, significantly lowering user fees and giving dApps built on LayerZero a strong competitive edge.
Moreover, Stargate—built on LayerZero—demonstrates product usability and growth potential. Using Delta Algorithm and soft partitioning, Stargate breaks the blockchain trilemma. Liquidity providers benefit from improved capital efficiency and scalability, enabling more efficient capital utilization and higher returns. Users enjoy secure, zero-slippage cross-chain transfers at lower costs.
LayerZero effectively addresses critical challenges in cross-chain technology: security, heterogeneity, and fragmented liquidity. OKX Ventures supports and endorses LayerZero’s innovation and contributions to cross-chain infrastructure.
zkPass
Investment Rationale:
zkPass enables users to selectively prove their verifiable data from Web2 and Web3—including legal identity, financial records, social connections, experience, education, and skills—to third parties via zkSBTs, without revealing any private details. It accurately targets and solves identity issues in the Web3 world, enabling secure and verifiable interactions while preserving privacy.
OKX Ventures believes there remains substantial unmet demand for privacy protection in the crypto market, particularly in personal identity. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are an ideal technical solution, and zkPass leverages ZKPs to resolve the problem of identity information leakage during KYC verification. Any project requiring KYC can use zkPass to publish verification campaigns, while users can generate verified credentials via zkPass to obtain access rights. By leveraging ZKPs, zkPass delivers robust privacy protection and identity verification services for both projects and users.
Diva
Investment Rationale:
The Ethereum LSD sector is a key narrative in 2023, with immense market potential. Compared to other PoS chains with staking rates of 60%–80%, Ethereum’s staking rate remains below 20%, indicating substantial room for growth. In contrast to high-inflation models seen on chains like Cosmos (60% staked, 15.4% inflation), Ethereum has effectively entered deflation, enhancing the appeal of staking.
Compared to mainstream single-operator LSD models, Diva improves redundancy and reduces single points of failure, representing a superior long-term technical approach. On decentralization, Diva introduces Liquidity Pooling, lowering the staking threshold to just 1 ETH, further democratizing participation. For liquidity, Diva offers DivEth, a staking token that unlocks innovative financial use cases.
The upcoming Ethereum Shapella upgrade will unlock staked ETH and enable trading, presenting a massive one-time opportunity for new entrants. We are bullish on the LSD sector and excited to back innovative, decentralization-focused projects like Diva.
Permaweb
Investment Rationale:
Permaweb DAO is a native application within the Arweave ecosystem, representing infrastructure innovation for content and creator ecosystems.
By building WordPress-like products, Permaweb lowers entry barriers—content creators can build platforms without writing frontend code, and seamlessly integrate podcasts and arweave.news to enrich the content ecosystem.
Economically, Permaweb DAO pioneers new incentive models beyond PSTs, introducing PSC tokens to incentivize content ecosystem growth. PST tokens grant governance rights, immediate liquidity, and interest from app usage, while PSC-based projects can be explored on communityXYZ, the profit-sharing community hub.
OKX Ventures supports Permaweb DAO’s efforts to increase Arweave’s C-end user base, attract creators, expand influence, and engage developers.
Summary:
OKX Ventures firmly embraces the future of decentralized development, consistently betting on decentralization and upholding our mission to serve the crypto innovation ecosystem. We are not traditional financial investors—we don’t just “provide funding,” but also “deliver services” and “offer resources.” We are committed to growing alongside all our “entrepreneurial partners.” We aim not only to identify outstanding teams, products, and technologies, but also to empower them. At the same time, OKX Ventures serves as a bridge between portfolio projects and the broader OK Group. Supported by the OKX ecosystem—including OKX Wallet, NFT Marketplace, and OKX Chain—OKX Ventures leverages years of industry expertise to offer multidimensional platforms and support for project growth.
Despite an unfavorable global macroeconomic environment and recurring black swan events, OKX Ventures focuses on the industry’s intrinsic development rather than bull or bear markets. We prioritize genuine theoretical innovation, practical new applications, measurable user growth, and tangible expansion of the industry’s scale. We remain optimistic about the development of Ethereum’s ecosystem, multi-chain ecosystems, Bitcoin ecosystem, infrastructure, and innovative applications in the coming months.
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