No Longer Doubling Down on Infrastructure, What Crypto Consumer Apps Has 1kx Backed?
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
No Longer Doubling Down on Infrastructure, What Crypto Consumer Apps Has 1kx Backed?
The next largest economic opportunity, bigger than Ethereum itself, is not launching another L1/L2, but building consumer products and virtual worlds that have never existed before.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: 1KX
Compiled by: TechFlow
“Infrastructure everywhere—ghost cities—but nobody building real crypto applications,” was once a complaint from an investor in the crypto industry. Yet this hasn’t stopped capital from doubling down on all kinds of infrastructure plays. Recently, overseas知名 crypto VC 1kx published an article stating they are now focusing on consumer-facing applications. Peter, an investor at 1kx, said that the next largest economic opportunity, bigger than Ethereum itself, isn't launching another L1/L2, but building consumer products and virtual worlds that have never existed before.
Which areas in crypto consumer applications has 1kx already invested in, and what domains will they focus on next? Below is a summary of the key points.
Two years ago, 1kx began expanding its focus into the consumer赛道. While our infrastructure portfolio remains core, it’s clear that the infrastructure technology stack is maturing, and the path toward viable mass-market products is becoming increasingly evident.
Our Current Investments
Since then, we’ve made over 30 investments across all consumer categories, leading 13 of them, including projects in gaming/virtual worlds, creator economy, community coordination, social, payments, and intellectual property. The image below provides a brief overview of the portfolio:
What's Next
While we approach consumer investments with an open mindset, we are actively seeking founders operating in the following areas to invest in and collaborate with:
Social & Attention Economy
As the number of on-chain applications, content, and creators grows, we believe the need for shared social spaces for end users has never been stronger. We are particularly interested in:
-
Activity feeds that surface targeted content to end users based on their on-chain holdings or connected social graphs. We’re excited about on-chain activity feeds emerging as new discovery layers for content, creators, and social interaction. The number of non-financial collectible NFTs is growing rapidly—we see this as an exciting yet underexplored opportunity.
-
New social games built around collecting and owning, designed for crypto natives, existing on-chain content, mass market audiences, and off-chain content creation. We believe digital property rights enable new forms of social expression regardless of audience. We’re especially excited about teams building photo-sharing, tokenization, and collection mechanics.
Creator Platforms, Tools & Markets
We remain highly enthusiastic about how NFTs and digital property rights empower creators to monetize and build stronger communities, especially:
-
Vertical creator platforms and markets focused on discovery of new on-chain creators and community-building. We’ve long admired how SuperRare/KnownOrigin (art), Artblocks/fxhash (generative art), Sound/Catalog (music), and thematic platforms like Metalabel have pioneered adoption within their respective categories.
-
Dynamic NFT infrastructure that gives holders deeper, more meaningful experiences, transforming on-chain assets into ongoing engagement channels rather than static metadata.
-
General-purpose tools and infrastructure helping creators do more on-chain. For example, better products for managing issuance, communities, royalties, and other aspects of on-chain assets. We’re excited about NFT storefronts, minting engines, community coordination tools, capital formation, and any creator tools enabling richer multi-player collaboration between creators.
Intellectual Property & Composability
We believe there are still many untapped opportunities in using on-chain technologies and tools to create new IP and tell better stories. We’ve done extensive thinking on the design space:
-
Community-owned intellectual property that deeply involves community members from the earliest stages of creation. While first-generation crypto-native IP largely failed to meet expectations, we believe the next wave of metaverses is being built right now.
-
Platforms and creator tools that make it easier to build composable content on top of existing IP that already exists as NFTs. We’re excited about leveraging IP with established end-user and community resonance as starting points for new content.
Virtual Worlds & NPCs
We’re excited about space and 3D as a new medium through which end consumers will interact with ownership-based virtual experiences, particularly:
-
Highly interoperable spatial 3D worlds (with infrastructure supporting GLB/GLTF, VRMs, wallet indexing) where content creators can build without friction, regardless of technical skill. Many projects in this space so far have overly focused on scarce land models that restrict creator participation—we want to see projects remove these barriers while establishing new domains or game loops to drive initial attention.
-
NPCs and AI agents that leverage digital property rights to create deeper, interactive relationships between virtual worlds and end users.
Autonomous Worlds & On-Chain Games
We’re incredibly excited about creating entirely new worlds and on-chain driven experiences that would otherwise be impossible:
-
On-chain games that financialize player outcomes from traditional non-financial casual game loops.
-
Worlds that are built from day one as developer or creator platforms—playgrounds that allow anyone to extend and build upon them.
Other Areas of Interest & Research:
-
Mass consumer experiences and goods;
-
Luxury and consumer experiences.
Through blockchain-backed digital property rights, we believe crypto offers a new opportunity to rethink and reimagine the consumer internet experience. We’ve never been more confident in the consumer赛道.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
1kx
