TOKEN2049: Chênh lệch gia tăng, mạnh càng mạnh
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TOKEN2049: Chênh lệch gia tăng, mạnh càng mạnh
Bốn ông vua mới của ngành tiền mã hóa đã xuất hiện, kẻ mạnh càng mạnh, người yếu lâm vào迷茫, hiệu ứng Matthew dần bộc lộ.
Chuyên sâu báo cáo Web3Bài viết: Châu Chu, Foresight News
“Nhiệt độ chênh lệch lớn hơn rồi.” Nhà đầu tư cấp một Romeo nói.
Romeo trong năm nay đã thành công đầu tư vào các dự án khởi nghiệp tiền mã hóa nổi tiếng như Solv, Puffer, Sonic. Trong thời gian diễn ra Token 2049, anh nhận thấy ngành tiền mã hóa đang trải qua một số thay đổi lớn. “Các hệ sinh thái như Solana, Base, TON ngày càng mạnh mẽ và thu hút nhiều sự chú ý hơn, trong khi nhiều lĩnh vực khác, có thể trước đây từng là những dự án sao sáng, nay lại trở nên im ắng hơn.”
Những lĩnh vực trong ngành tiền mã hóa bắt đầu phân hóa rõ rệt. Một số lĩnh vực ngày càng nóng lên, một số khác dù vẫn còn tồn tại nhưng thực tế đã nguội lạnh.
Bốn hệ sinh thái Solana, Base, TON và BTCFi đã trở thành "tứ đại thiên vương mới" trong lòng nhiều chuyên gia ngành tiền mã hóa, hiệu ứng Matthew dần xuất hiện, kẻ mạnh càng mạnh. Ngược lại, những lĩnh vực từng được kỳ vọng như NFT, game đa chuỗi, (ngắn hạn) AI… trong nửa năm qua phát triển chậm hoặc thậm chí đình trệ, chịu nhiều hoài nghi hơn, nhiều dự án bị bác bỏ, người làm nghề cảm thấy lạc lõng hơn.
Ngoài các lĩnh vực trên, một số hiện tượng mới khác cũng đang diễn ra.
Kay, người phụ trách Hashkey Chain, sau khi tham dự TOKEN 2049 có cảm nhận trực tiếp rằng: “Tinh thần của các nhà khởi nghiệp người Hoa đã mạnh mẽ hơn.”
Tại Token2049 năm 2022, các chuyên gia người Hoa tự xưng là “Do Thái trong Web3”, mang tâm lý tự ti và bất an, như cỏ rêu không gốc rễ, lo lắng ở châu Á không có chỗ đứng, đến phương Tây lại sợ bị vốn và hệ sinh thái phương Tây loại trừ, tiến thoái lưỡng nan.
Nhưng tại Token2049 năm 2024, các nhà khởi nghiệp người Hoa trở nên bình tĩnh và tự tin hơn. Sau khi tác giả trao đổi với nhiều nhà khởi nghiệp người Hoa và phương Tây từ Base, Solana, TON, tôi nhận thấy một phần rất lớn lập trình viên và người sáng lập trong ba hệ sinh thái này đều đến từ cộng đồng châu Á, và trong lĩnh vực BTCFi, nhóm người Hoa thậm chí chiếm vị thế thống trị tuyệt đối.
Năm nay, ánh mắt toàn cầu không còn đổ dồn hoàn toàn vào hệ sinh thái tiền mã hóa chủ đạo tại Mỹ nữa, mà khu vực châu Á với Singapore, Hồng Kông, Nhật Bản, Hàn Quốc làm trung tâm đa cực đã trở thành trung tâm đổi mới mới của ngành tiền mã hóa toàn cầu.
Sự kiện Token2049 tại Singapore năm nay vẫn náo nhiệt như thường lệ, được coi là “Tết Nguyên đán của giới tiền mã hóa” không ai tranh cãi. Khác biệt nằm ở chỗ, các nhà sáng lập hoạt động trong những hệ sinh thái phát triển mạnh mẽ trở nên tự tin và kiên định hơn, trong khi một bộ phận người làm nghề khác lại cảm thấy lạc lõng hơn.
1. Chênh lệch nhiệt độ tăng, kẻ mạnh càng mạnh
Four ecosystems — Solana, Base, TON, and BTCFi — have emerged as the top-performing ecosystems over the past year. Founders in these four ecosystems have shown significantly stronger confidence about the future.
Over the past year, these four major ecosystems have continuously produced innovative projects and hit applications, leading the development of the crypto sector. Whether in terms of capital attracted, user numbers, or project volume, these four ecosystems have maintained a clear advantage. This has made them the hottest markets, with founders showing the strongest confidence.
Each sector has seen several tokens enter the top 100 by market cap, with Solana-related tokens reaching as high as seven. Base, TON, and BTCFi each have around three to six new tokens entering the latest top 300 cryptocurrency market cap rankings.
The prosperity of these ecosystems naturally extended to event activity during Token2049. During the five hottest days of Token2049 (September 16–20), Base and TON hosted one to two events daily, all fully packed; the Solana Breakpoint event was considered by many attendees to be the best, liveliest, and most vibrant event held outside the main Token2049 venue.
Yet at the previous Token2049, these four ecosystems were still quite “weak.”
At TOKEN 2049 in 2023, Solana had just recovered from the FTX incident, with SOL barely stabilizing around $20 without further decline. Ethereum remained the blockchain hegemon, and few could foresee that within just a year it would again challenge Ethereum’s dominance—today, many professionals believe Solana may surpass Ethereum. Four months before the last TOKEN 2049, Ordi continuously dropped, losing four-fifths of its market cap, down to just $3, leading many to think the Bitcoin ecosystem was dead. No one expected that two months later Ordi would list on Binance and then surge upward, sparking successive small waves in the Bitcoin ecosystem such as L2s, staking, and runes.
Even less mentioned were Base and TON—these two ecosystems were practically “invisible” during the last TOKEN 2049. But over the past half-year, through repeated successes, they’ve been firmly chosen by many entrepreneurs.
As Solana, Base, TON, and BTCFi gain momentum, they attract more capital and top-tier developers, making the rich get richer and the poor poorer—the Matthew effect is becoming evident. Meanwhile, outside these four ecosystems, many other sectors in the crypto industry are growing increasingly quiet.
2. Mass Adoption, a Glimmer of Hope Appears
“After seeing TADA, I got excited—felt like I saw a glimmer of hope for mass adoption,” Kay said.
At this TOKEN 2049, many professionals were actually disappointed with the overall progress of the crypto industry over the past year. There hadn’t been enough mass adoption products emerging. Yet, upon arriving in Singapore for TOKEN 2049, Kay and many other crypto professionals were pleasantly surprised to find a new way to hail rides—people could now seamlessly use crypto to pay for taxi fares.
TADA is Singapore’s second-largest ride-hailing app. It launched a mini-program called TADA mimi on Telegram, integrated with the cryptocurrency TON, allowing users to directly pay for rides using TON. Throughout the entire Token 2049 period, many Web3 practitioners experienced their first real-world payment using crypto. Bitget exchange participated in this initiative, offering users at least one free ride, a promotional campaign that encouraged more people to use TADA.
Kay had noticed TADA years ago when she was in charge of listing reviews at Bybit. She learned that TADA’s founder is a Korean who previously operated cross-border transportation in Hong Kong—a field inherently close to crypto. TADA entered crypto early; its token MVL debuted as early as 2018 and currently holds a market cap of $100 million.
Now that Kay has moved from Bybit to HashKey, she finds HashKey also deeply collaborating with the TON ecosystem, being one of the earliest institutions to prioritize development within TON. Now overseeing Hashkey Chain, Kay aims to bridge Web2 and Web3, attracting more users. From my understanding, exchanges including Binance, HashKey, Bitget, OKX, Bybit, and Huobi are all deeply involved in cooperation with TON and Telegram. This has helped exchanges that entered TON partnerships early attract large numbers of users.
Professionals are finding potential pathways toward mass adoption within the Telegram and TON ecosystems. With Telegram's product highly overlapping with Web3 users and practitioners, its 900 million user base on Telegram has become a coveted market.
In some unpredictable scenarios, mass adoption products are slowly being validated.
Polymarket, a prediction market platform on Polygon, is breaking through the barriers of the crypto industry, bringing in more external participants—for example, Bloomberg Terminal has already integrated Polymarket. The market is growing rapidly; according to DefiLlama data, Polymarket’s TVL was under $10 million at the beginning of the year but surpassed $110 million by September.
A Polygon engineer told me: Polygon places great importance on Polymarket, investing significant resources and actively embracing new prediction market platforms. Other ecosystems have also recognized the potential of this market—platforms like Blast, TON, Base, Wintermute, DYDX, and BitMEX have recently launched prediction markets. From what I gathered at this conference, even more ecosystem projects are planning to integrate prediction markets into their offerings.
Besides prediction markets, I also spoke with Taki, a Korean entrepreneur from the Warpcast ecosystem, and Yawn, founder of StepN—the product most likely to achieve mass adoption in the previous cycle. Both shared deeper reflections on Web3 social and whether social features can drive mass adoption of blockchain products.
Web3 social remains a market full of imagination. Despite continuous failures, more participants keep innovating in this space. Yawn brought up friend.tech and shared his thoughts on Web3 social. “How to do ‘connect to earn’ well, make map-based social fun, without crashing the entire ecosystem economy—that’s a topic needing further exploration and validation,” Yawn said.
3. Confusion Still Lingers at TOKEN 2049
Although the strong rise of Solana, Base, TON, and BTCFi over the past year has given professionals much confidence, many still feel lost about the future, especially after four consecutive months of post-halving downturn, which came as a harsh blow.
Investors are confused. This year, very few “VC coins” outperformed BTC. Meme coins beat most so-called “value coins.” Statistics show only 42 projects performed better than BTC this year, with 11 of the top 15 being meme coins, rendering so-called value investing a joke.
Founders are also confused. Over the past year, many once-hot sectors have been proven invalid—full-chain gaming, NFTs, Web3 social, Ethereum L2s (most of them)... due to repeated setbacks over the past six months, these sectors have slowed or stalled, leaving practitioners pessimistic and confused.
During this TOKEN 2049, I observed that many “serious” project teams and investors have begun shifting into meme-related sectors.
“98% of AI+Web3 applications have been proven invalid,” primary investor Romeo told me. “I’m very optimistic about the future of AI and Crypto—I believe there will definitely be an AI project on par with Ethereum—but current AI projects are all memes,” Romeo said bluntly.
When asked why he doesn’t invest in social, Romeo replied: “Building Web3 social is too hard. This sector usually has only one winner. Can you even call a sector with only one winner a real sector?”
Investors are confused, founders are confused, builders and retail investors are even more confused.
One so-called “future of crypto” sector rises, then quickly collapses. Watch them build mansions, watch them host banquets, watch their mansions crumble. Too many sectors and projects have been hyped up, only to be disproven shortly after. Especially in the four months following the halving, many secondary market investors felt the crypto market was like hell-level difficulty.
4. Awakening of Chinese Crypto Power, Rise of Multi-Center Asian Ecosystems
During this TOKEN 2049, more and more Chinese teams are showcasing their strength on the biggest stage.
SynFutures, the largest contract platform on the Base ecosystem, was founded by a Chinese team, with many employees appearing at Base-hosted events; Catizen, one of the largest Web3 games on the TON ecosystem, was created by a Chinese team, actively participating in TON-organized events; Jupiter, the largest DEX on the Solana ecosystem, and Solana’s first L2 Sonic, were both founded by Chinese teams—they are active across various Solana events...
Exchanges, RWA, stablecoins, blockchain ecosystems... behind almost every scenario, there are deeply involved Chinese teams, not missing any potentially successful crypto sector.
In 2022, the Chinese crypto ecosystem was in a very weak position, stemming from the fact that nearly all notable innovations in the previous cycle originated from Europe and America, with the U.S. dominating the narrative of the entire crypto industry. But in this cycle, I see Chinese teams occupying core positions in all hot sectors, not being eliminated. They’ve even initiated their own movements, successfully launching the Bitcoin ecosystem as a major sector.
During TOKEN 2049, I also met many entrepreneurs and investors from South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. These four Asian crypto ecosystems each exhibit distinct characteristics.
The South Korean market is highly enthusiastic, with Upbit becoming the current exchange with the strongest listing effect, even surpassing Binance and Coinbase in listing impact. Japan’s Web3 ecosystem is rising rapidly—in the StepN walking event, I saw many loyal Japanese users, and institutions like Sony and SoftBank have recently made moves in the crypto industry, leading many to believe Japan’s crypto ecosystem has the potential to become the next rising star.
The Singapore and Hong Kong markets are also developing in different directions. Singapore boldly experiments in institutional services with forward-looking vision—one executive from a Singaporean bank told me that 20% of his fintech department’s business now comes from crypto, with rapid growth. The integration of TADA and TON gave many Web3 attendees a big surprise. The Hong Kong market, backed by China, holds greater imaginative potential if breakthroughs occur in areas like RWA and stablecoins, making it highly anticipated.
The Asian crypto circle, with multi-centers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea, has become a new global innovation hub for the crypto industry.
The crypto industry is like a massive jigsaw puzzle—no one can accurately know its full picture, but through an “information center” like TOKEN 2049, its true image is gradually unfolding.
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