Waterdrip Space Panel No.4 recap- Bear Market Survival Guide For Investors and Projects
Topic: Waterdrip Space Panel №4 recap- Bear Market Survival Guide For Investors and Projects
Date: 2022/6/12
Speakers we invited:
Nelli Orlova — the Founder of InnMind
Sarah — Project Manager of RockTree Capital
Jademont — Managing Partner of Waterdrip Capital
Doug Witt — the CEG Leader of Metis
Kevin Tseng — the Founder of NAOS Finance
Cohost：
Elaine — Investment manager of Waterdrip capital
Yihao Wei — Marketing Director of BlockBeats
Sponsorship:
$300 worth $Metis Token From Metis
200USDT From NAOS Finance
Q1: Since 2022, the bear market is the most discussed topic that cannot be ignored in the crypto world. What is your strategy for the primary market ? Will you still invest in early projects , or will you stop the investment for a while?
Jademont:
Yes. I’m quite familiar with the bear market because this is where I have gone through, and I’ve survived. There have been 3 cycles since 2013. So basically we’re still investing. But we’re slowing down,
Actually, because there are not many projects as last year. For last year, we signed one or two every week, but now our frequency for signing is two to three each month. So this is a big decline. And most entrepreneurs are very smart, so they can feel the bear market, and they don’t want to start their fundraising in the bear market.
I think we had over a thousand decks or slides for the past year, you know. It is a lot of work. So, I hope we can take a break and go visit some partners and talk with some teams face to face. So we can go through this bear market, and we can expect the next bull market.
Sarah:
For RockTree, we are coming from the traditional investment world. Since we came to China in the 90s. We have been in the market from bear to bull for many rounds already. So the answer is positive.
First, we are still investing during the bear market. We do invest in good companies and projects during the bear market. It’s very easy to spot who is swimming naked. A lot of noise will be illuminated from the picture when I try to look for a new project to invest in. And also the prices for good projects are more reasonable compared to the bull market. You can check our portfolio. You can see we have invested quite a lot of projects in both bull market and bear market such as Phantom, the Graph. Chainlink. We invested in those projects during the previous “Crypto Winter”. But now, it turned out to be a very good investment.
Besides the investment in the project, we also looked at the value beyond the money that we can bring to the project that we invested. Money is fungible. As RockTree. We want to bring more value in all aspects to the project to help them to achieve success. Will bring a wealth of expertise to each investment from our legal, finance, and marketing to facilitate the growth of the blockchain investment. The bull market does not last forever. That is the bad news. But the good news is, that the bear market also does not last forever. So just don’t panic, take the risk off the table and take some cash. When you buy things later, you will find the things at a better price, and you will also find out it is easy to find better projects to invest in.
Nelli Orlova:
I really like and fully agree with what Sarah from RockTree Capital. I hope it doesn’t sound like hypocrisy. I think the bear market is a really healthy figure. We do continue investing in the seed sector and for startups fund-raising. We just made our largest lead investment so far in Eva Protocol with 300k, and we have 3 more deals on the table. Hope to close down by the end of this month. Nothing changed in our investment strategy. For the infrastructure projects and our long-term projects, they have the same added value between the bear market and the bull market.
A few other positive changes that I see now is, in bull market, investors compete with each other for good startups. Sometimes there exist a lot of confusion by startups. They get very much spoiled by not only high valuations, but also super speedy deal closure and funding offers that they receive every day or every hour from different VCs, pools, etc. Sometimes it really breaks their mind.
Right now, it’s absolutely different story. Startups compete for good investors. Therefore, there is much more time now to think, to do due diligence, to have numerous calls with founders to analyze the market and also to make entrepreneurs to prepare better for fund-raising. However, I didn’t see many valuations fell down. I didn’t notice that, but I expected it to happen. Maybe in a few months.
Kevin Tseng:
In a bear market, not only we talk about valuations, we talk about what investors are really focusing on: a sustainable business model.
In a bull market, it’s pretty easy to lose track on what’s important, what type of project has a sustainable business model and their go-to market strategy. In a bull market, you just don’t think about these things.
In this current market situation, the topic has changed quite dramatically from “What’s hot in the market?” to “What will survive the bear market?” You really get a chance to evaluate on the business model, tokenomics, team structure and spending. DAOs and a lot of different projects are being more transparent on how they handle their treasury.
In a bear market, the most important thing is confidence. How do you instill trust in your community and investors?
From the investors’ perspective, they’re definitely looking for value. They’re looking at projects that have a viable business model in both bull and bear markets.
For projects, the focus has been shifted from “How do I get my community excited” and the potential partnership that never come to fruition. Now this is a time for us as projects to really sit down and communicate with the communities and share more on what we have in mind, and this is what I am dealing with everyday. The bear market is a really good opportunity for a project to come forward to the community and share development updates. In a bull market, we often focus on token price, not on what’s really important for the long term health of the project.
Doug Witt:
More transparency, especially a solid team. And these are times when things really kind of slow down. It’s really important to communicate to your community with your road map and what you have planned to do.
As a hype kind of fades away, you just need to stress quality in general across the Crypto markets, especially but even within a project? What you’re trying to do, the value you’re trying to bring. Your vision is you going to communicate that vision and I can execute on it. We are essentially an infrastructure project ourselves, but kind of the big problem with the bull market is a lot of hype, a lot of kinds of vaporware, a lot of promises, a lot of evaluations and a lot of people just investing blindly when you have seen the bear markets.
The true infrastructure projects, the ones that really have their vision, are really dedicated to moving crypto forward as a whole. Look at the top 20 projects today, almost all of them started in the last bull market. Bear markets are the last market for that. So that is the shining light and gives people faith in that.
Q2: As the founders or the operators of the projects, what is the biggest risk of bringing the project to the table during the bear market? Or, would that be a good chance for the projects to have a bigger picture during the bear market?
Sarah:
Finding good projects, staying focused on financing development, and user adoption during the bear market. Focusing on the fundamentals and generating the value of the project.
For the market strategy of investors, we would suggest doing it at the end of the bear market or the beginning of the bull market. Ideally, you can buy the things when it has a big discount and sell t it when the market condition is favorable.
For projects, according to the rhythm of the cycle of market, it will increase the chance to succeed.
Doug Witt:
Raising enough money in the bull market, knowing how to get you through the cycle, spending those funds wisely, growing a strong team and also growing your community. The community is just as important as a team, and it’s really important that you communicate your vision to the community. It will support you both of the bear market and the bull market. Not only that, they don’t necessarily have to stay investing. They can still be in the community and put their money in stables and just wait for the right entry.
I definitely think the biggest risk for any project is the mismanagement of funds. We just started the bear market, but you’re going to see a lot of projects die off for various reasons, but the number one reason being that they don’t have the funds to continue.
Kevin Tseng:
This is time for communication. As a project, I wouldn’t consider anything as a “risk”. In a bear market, no one is thinking about the expansion. Everyone is thinking about cutting back on marketing. You’ll see a lot of projects keeping their heads down and start building for the next bull. That’s a smart move, in this market, the most important thing we need to focus on is value proposition.
The time for triple-digit “risk-free” yield is over. NAOS Finance’s value proposition is to bring real world asset on chain and provide dollar based yields that are fixed and sustainable. The yields are not from NAOS token subsidies, but from interest-generating assets such as corporate bonds, account receivables and supply chain financing. It’s uncorrelated from crypto market volatilities.
Many blue-chip DeFi protocols are taking closer looks at real world assets as a way to diversify and stabilize their portfolios. For example, MakerDao is actively increasing the composition of real world assets in its portfolio to further stabilize DAI.Q3: As we can see today eth’s price decreases a lot because of steth‘s Mortgage liquidation. What do you think about this steth’s black swan event? and even many nft ‘s floor also drop a lot, it is kind of double kill of eth. What can retail investors do based on this deep beer market?
Jademont:
I don’t think the price decrease of eth is due to the depaging of steth. If you know the scheme of Lido， the steth is 1 to 1 tracked by real eth. Don’t worry about it. steth is not Luna, it is not USDD. They are safe.
I think the price decreases are due to the bear market. Everything is decreasing. The price of Bitcoin, Ethereum and everything. The liquidity of the whole market is drawing out, but I don’t worry about it. The bullish market will eventually come back. What we need to do is to make sure that we stay alive and don’t die.
From my observation, it is very hard for retail investors to earn money as their first bullish bearish cycle. They might be lucky enough to get a lot of money at the beginning of their crypto career from randomly investing in some projects in a bull market, but they were paid it back during the bear market also by randomly investing.
What I would like to suggest is to keep calm, keep learning, keep building with your favorite projects and grow with these great projects. When the next bull market comes back, you will stand out and win.
Sarah:
As Jademont said, it won’t be an issue, it is 1 to 1 back. Lido itself has several factors that lead to asset losing parity, such as the crack of terror UST, the wide deleveraging of the market and the withdrawal from the lending platforms.
So basically, people lost quite a lot of confidence in the bear market. steth has just begun to lose parity. It remains to be seen whether more factors will come. Right now, don’t be panic. It is different from Terror & UST.
Regarding the retailer investors, they should be aware that the bear market is here and there are a lot of things. Price will adjust according to the market conditions and market confidence. We should do our risk control and also adjust our investment or trading strategy accordingly. Stay alive first. That’s all.
Nelli Orlova:
For my advised to retail investors is to spend time on learning curve. I am sincerely disappointed that a lot of retail investors who participate in the last bull run are lack knowledge. There are so many opportunities to increase your understanding and help you to analyze projects. How to start and get involved in the early stage, how to support projects, analyze them, contribute to the development of the ecosystem and so on. This is what I would definitely recommend to any retail investor: Switching from hype mindset to more investor mindset.
Q4: As the market goes down, we can see there are numbers of Defi projects that are oversold. With the price drop, what is your opinion of Defi in the future? Will the investors buy the dig from the second market?
Kevin Tseng:
My personal opinion is that the DeFi is here to stay. People haven’t been talking about Defi for a while. If you’re really looking at the essence of what blockchain and what crypto can do, it’s designed to revolutionize the existing financial system.
When you’re looking at the global credit gap, and the unmet borrowing demands from real businesses. I truly believe DeFi is the solution.
Let’s take NAOS Finance as an example, we are building the infrastructure for real world assets, but we can’t do everything alone. If you’re thinking about replicating the entire financial system, DeFi must have banks, insurance companies, legal supports, accounting firms and collection services. All these things are part of a working ecosystem.
Yet, DeFi today is only about lending. For starters, we only have a handful of insurance protocols are capable of providing coverage for real world asset. To build that ecosystem, we’re working with the MakerDao, Chainlink and Tidal. Over the last year, we’re excited to see that “real world asset” has become a focus for many new protocols. We’re meeting new projects that are solving the same problems as NAOS Finance on a daily basis, this is the true spirit of DeFi.
Defi has accomplished so much over the last 2 years. But for DeFi to take another step forward, real world asset is the key. Goldman Sachs is exploring tokenizing securities. J.P. Morgan is doing the same. Circle, Coinbase are working on digital IDs for regulated DeFi.
On the compliance side, we’re seeing that Japan and Eastern Europe are taking steps in providing more clear regulatory guidelines. When DeFi no longer dance around the grey areas, a lot more new protocols will enter the space, and accelerate the growth of the entire DeFi space.
Jademont:
I would like to talk about why the traditional Defi since 2020 will not last. Most of these top tier Defi projects decreased 90% from 2 years ago either on their token price or their TVL. The reason is simple. Liquidity mining as the engine of last Bull Run is turning into liquidity flooding. There are too much inflation, and they don’t know where is the buying power. The true reason is that the underlying assess which are stuck in those different protocols have no profiting ability. They are just playing the Ponzi game, so you stick some tokens, and you get more tokens. They cannot do this kind of game forever. Therefore, the traditional Defi projects have no future in my opinion. I think the solution is that we need to bring more assets that are independent with the Crypto market.
So far as I know, as Kevin said, NAOS is staking traditional banks related commercial papers from real world which have interests from some kind of commercial activities. These activities like real estate borrow and their loan to others. Also, I see some other different products, they’re using their NFT as staked assets, which are also not directional related to Eth or Bitcoin prices. I think this kind of Defi also has great potential.
Q5: As we can see that recently layer2 solution Optimism launched token, this year many top VCs focus on layer2, but due to bear market, are we really need layer2 solution ? What’s your opinion on layer2?
Sarah:
Ethereum Blockchain is the most widely used blockchain with huge ecosystem. But it comes with some shortcomings, so Layer 2 solutions are important. Because they allow the scalability and increase the throughput while still holding the integrity of Ethereum blockchain, allowing for complete decentralization transparency and security wire. Also, they’re reducing the carbon footprint, less gas and less energy used. We do need layer 2 solutions.
Doug Witt:
For the last year, the big narrative was the Alternatively layer 1. They were superfast, super cheap but just, of course, going back to the Blockchain Dilemma. They sacrificed decentralization and sacrificed security, and I think we really saw that with somebody pretty much all of the Later ones. They had their big run-ups then they started going down.
There was a speaker Edward Snowden that consensus and he kind of spoke on it about the financialization of Blockchain and kind of the core of what he was saying was we really need to get kind of get back to our roots. I truly believe in decentralization without the end, and any smart contract platform theorem is by far the most decentralized. And sure it might sacrifice scalability, but that’s why we have layered 2. I think in the future, we’re going to see layer 2s really grow and ethereum kind of transition to becoming from a business-to-consumer blockchain to just being for primarily, either a business-to-business blockchain or Ethereum permanent transacts just with Layer 2s.
Nelli Orlova:
For sure, we need layer 2. All of us know that bear market is a temporary thing. We don’t know how long it will take, but Ethereum survived already from the past bear markets. Its history and the problems as Doc mentioned remain scalability. Security, speed of transactions as cost of transactions and many, many other things. Even those layer 2 solutions that we have these days, they are not completely solving the existing issues, we definitely need the existing Layer 2s. We definitely need new ones. We need those that are solving also interoperability problems and many, many others. So for sure, just shortly answering: Yes, we need it.
Q6: Under “the winter of crypto”, the bear market is taking away the attention and the confidence of the retail investors. The searching data of “crypto” and some related fields like “NFT”, “crypto” from Google had a cliff fall. What would the projects do to win back the attention and the confidence of the investors?
Kevin Tseng:
I think it’s a crowd mentality. When a topic becomes daily news, people will get curious and start asking questions. But they’re not your target customers. I wouldn’t worry about search results. It’s a temporary social phenomenon.
It comes down to value proposition. How will DeFi provide a better alternative and experience than what they were accustomed to. This is definitely a really hard problem to solve.
The important thing is for the project to stay true to what their mission statements, and not get distracted by the market sentiment.
We spent the last 6 months talking to different institutions. We are upgrading our products, optimizing process flow, and onboarding different KYC and lending partnerships. Behind the scene, we’ve also built an admin page for our borrowers, so they have a one-stop access to their loans, repayment schedules, bills and protocol updates. Everything they’re accustomed to in traditional finance.
The key here is not to get distracted. The toughest thing a founder must do in this market is to keep the team at bay, and convey that “Hey guys, I know this is a tough time but we need to stay focused, and keep pushing because we’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In the bear market. I wouldn’t spend too much on marketing. Bear market is a time to instill confidence and to build. To publicize and share with the community what you’ve done and what you’ve accomplished.
Q7: Many Gamefi projects have also achieved good results in the last bull market. But because of the impact of the bear market, many gamefi’s valuations and related data affected a lot. As an investor, in this round of bear market, Is Gamefi facing an important turning point like any chance for Gamefi ? What is the future of Gamefi? And What feature would you expect a Gamefi project to have in the future?
Sarah:
We believe Gamefi is still going to be a very important domain in the future. During the last Bull Run, a lot of Gamefi projects got overpriced. So now it’s time for Gamefi project to stay calm and stay focused on the development and the delivery. We should shift the focus from how much money they can make to what product they can build and deliver and the product’s value.
Jademont:
So far as I know, for most of that gamefi projects, they have a decline either in the token price or the TVL. The reason is the token economy. They only have an inflation factor, but they lack the token consuming scenario. There are some good gamefi projects who keep their token prices quite stable these days. No matter how. If there is more Bitcoin as the price is going up and down, they’re quite stable because they have their independent token economy.
For example, there is a game, their play to earn is not from inflation. It is from the other players. That means the total number of liquid tokens doesn’t increase a lot. Another good enough good example is adding randomness into the process of play to earn. Sometimes you even lose tokens. The players will focus more on the game itself. If you focus too much on the earning part, it is not Gamefi, it is Defi. I think for the next Bull Run, the gamefi projects which have the consumers’ scenario will be found by most of the crypto users.
Nelli Orlova:
I expect Gamefi to switch more from play to earn mindset to play and earn mindset, which exactly consider more and focus on gameplay itself. I was reviewing the top Crypto Gamefi projects by the number of effective users, and actually I did not find transparent statistics on how many daily active users are there. This means nothing actually because there is not much proof and when we try to analyze data from a few specific projects. A lot of traction generated by gamefi projects during a bull market was not because they managed to attract a huge and loyal gaming community of people who really loved to play this game, but because they managed to use the hype around and the greatness of end users willing to earn something while spending time on the game.
I hope that by the next bull run, we will see more high quality game plays which will be user-centric or player-centric. These games will rely less on game guilds and incentivize gamers to play because of money, but incentivize. Gamers play to have fun and then want to spend money on tokens for improvements in their game performance in order to make a more sustainable economy around the game.
Q8: One important part of web3 & crypto’s big development is that big corporations are stepping into this area, such as Nike, CocaCola, Visa, Apple, etc… But why don’t we see that many pilots between startup companies yet?
Kevin Tseng:
I wouldn’t worry about getting the Unicorns to jump in if they’re not already for web3. When I was at Alibaba Group, my main focus was to build a well-defined ecosystem. and it requires the industry leaders to take the first leap of faith. Alibaba was able to build its ecosystem by starting Taobao, then building Alipay, a payment infrastructure. With these two platforms, the rest just followed naturally.
I’m excited to see Visa and Master entering the space. For DeFi to continue its growth trajectory, we definitely need traditional institutions such as banks, insurance companies, and even investment banks to come in. Not just speculators such as MicroStrategy and Tesla. Think about the ecosystem around PayPal and eBay. What if eBay starts accepting stable coins for e-commerce transactions, it will create a positive loop for the entire DeFi industry.
I can share a little bit more about the work NAOS is doing without diving into the details. We are working with a US based semiconductor company — financing their manufacturing capacity. They have 0 percent loan default over the last 40 years of operations. We’re also onboarding publicly listed companies in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the US. These are exciting opportunities for DeFi to expand into the real world.
I know a lot of protocols are starting to look at real world assets because MakerDao is taking steps in this direction. If industry leaders such as Google and Apple are betting on certain areas, it signals an opportunity for startups to think about how the industry is evolving.
Doug Witt:
I don’t know if they’re necessary, at least at this point I think we can all agree, blockchain and crypto are still super early and we internally as an industry have a lot to figure out and that’s on us. The industry leaders to really solidify the direction we’re going to go and to try and fail and then try and fail again until we get it right, and we’re getting close to it. But once we do, I think that’s really when you’re going to see some of these bigger web 2 and in Silicon Valley, Tech Companies come in. And they are slowly but surely dabbling, and they are investigating the industry and trying to see where blockchain fits in their business model. But I think it really is more for us as an industry to figure out.
At this point, it’s not necessarily needed because it’s on us to kind of plot our own future for the industry.
Nelli Orlova:
We also have a separate business stream working with our corporate partners, with corporate innovation offices of large multinationals. We help them find the interesting startups, innovative technologies for their business units. Since we met, we dive deeper into the web 3 sectors . We also received a lot of requests from corporate partners. Hyundai, MasterCard than many others who are interested to explore collaborations with startups in web 3, Crypto Blockchain space and making pilots together.
During several months. We made some private startups counting, introduced different web 3 startups to corporate partners, collecting feedback. I have an interesting insider from the multinationals side. Majority of them, they summarize their experience on researching among web 3 startups in the following way. The problem is that the corporate launches pilots with startups when there is clear or request from business unit, so the business unit and the corporation needs to understand the value of these technologies or product and be interested to implement or try it in their own business processes. But when you create the Web 3 startups and get connected with the corporate partners, the majority of them are not capable to adjust their client centric presentation. I think this problem is very much connected with an ability to target wider audience and mass adoption as well. You can even quote one of multinationals told us recently that look. We met with the startup and our business units start with burning eyes starts explaining all the technological advantages like whatever problems on all the huge future of the Web 3, they just missed the most important point to explain in simple and clear messages. What value their product in particular can bring to a particular corporate business unit. Simple clear and common words without using all this specific web 3 or crypto terms and words etc. At least in my opinion, this is a huge barrier and that’s what corporates themselves to confirm huge barrier into starting pilots and starting particular use cases with corporate partners. Explaining delivering your value proposition, adjusting goods to end users.
Q9: The average salary of web3.0 employees will be higher than that of web2, and the value of talents is overestimated, so especially for the bear market, reduce the operation fee is quite important. What’s your opinion about this?
Doug Witt:
For one, there’s just a huge talent shortage in web 3. Obviously, the biggest talent shortages is for the developers. The codeing is the ones that know solidity and any other languages, but also just even in business development and market learning curve really is just so high. Even if you’re really good in web 2 and speak those languages, you don’t necessarily translate to web 3. So that’s typically why the at least in the past, the differences in salary were so big. Regarding the bear market, I definitely think teams will slow down hiring, and they will maybe lean up and there is possibility there could be some layoffs. But I don’t really see the differences in salaries changing from rolls.
Kevin Tseng:
Exchanges are hiring aggressively even in the bear market, and that inflates salary structure. I see web3 talents now demanding 25–30% premium on their salaries. But that’s just part of the game.
We’re competing with exchanges and established protocols when it comes to web3 talent hiring. But we’re also hiring talents from traditional industries to evaluate assets and financial statements — and we expect them to grow into DeFi.
We don’t necessarily need to hire DeFi experts, but we always hire problem solvers with passions to learn. The best talents are the most liquid asset in the market. Instead of competing for “top talents”, we look for the “right talents” — people who align with our long term vision, and we build a company culture around that.
We always ask our candidates to look at the business model, and to ask tough questions in the interview. We want to make sure that we hire the right person instead of the best person. Because the best person is liquid, but the right person will grow with the company.Nelli Orlova:
I agree that salaries in Crypto Web 3 are way higher that is Web 2 and I think this is another good opportunity for coming from the bear market adjusting salaries to the same ones. Because we keep very close to our portfolio companies, startups where we invest and advise, and I observed numerous cases during the last couple of years. When the startup struggled with HR hiring people, even after getting funded, even after getting enough money to pay high salaries, they struggled to get people who can execute and deserving these salaries. Therefore, the best way I believe is not to seek specific people with a mind-blowing expertise in Web 3 sector, but to hire good and very motivated professionals from web 2 and actually educate them. This is a huge challenge, but a great opportunity for everyone on this market. Educate your team and educate your users. The best examples what I saw so far, the best performing employees and web 3 startups, were actually those who were coming from professional web 2 sectors, but got inspired and motivated by the Web 3 ideology of the particular product that was developed by this at startup and joined the team and learned together with the team. It also gives an opportunity to reduce the costs for Crypto startups during bear markets.
Q10: As the investors, what would you like to see from the projects during the bear market? Take a big guess, What would be the next hot topic of the next bull market? Are there any fields that have caught your attention lately?
Jademont:
We know the engine of last bull market was Defi and NFT. There are many altcoins that have 10 times or even 100 times in the last bull market. However, the Bitcoin itself was only 3 times higher compared with the big price of 2018. We also know that Bitcoin will take about half of the whole market cap. It means half of the access didn’t experience bull market? I mean “the crazy” bull market. For the next bull run, the opportunity might come from this area. I mean the Bitcoin itself. I have been investigating the development status of Bitcoin. Many people, especially for the newcomers, they think that there’s nothing new on Bitcoin because Bitcoin is Bitcoin. It is just for payment or for value storage. But actually, there are a lot of projects on Bitcoin itself. We know there’s a technology called Lightning Network, which we can recognize it as the Layer 2 on Bitcoin. I was just surprised when I realized that the TPS of lightning network is over 4 million, and I was even shocked. When I realized that there would be some Defi dapps on Bitcoin based on Lightning Network. There will be swaps and dexs and some defi.
I heard either who issued USDT. Back in 2014, the first USDT was issued on Bitcoin by Omni. We know the Omni USDT is due to the high gas fee, and it was almost abandoned by the crypto world. But I heard that Tether will issue their USDT on lightening network, which will have over 400 million TPS and better gas fee. This is very exciting. Just imagine when we have a layer 2 defi Bitcoin network, and we have the layer 2 defi Ethereum networks like optimism. If there is a bridge to link these two layer 2, half of the whole crypto market cap will join. For the next round defi, NFT or whatever, I think even there’s no new money coming into Crypto world, we can take advantage of the Bitcoin access to become the engine of the next bull market. This is very possible in my opinion. This is only my guess, so no financial advice, but I strongly recommend that we can pay attention in this area. Actually, our Waterdrip capital has deployed quite a big fund or quite a big capital in this area. I hope we can bring more news later. Remember to follow our Twitter.
Sarah:
As a fundamental, when we search for a project to invest in, we normally see whether this project and find the pain point and whether they can solve the issue to pinpoint in a fast cheap and good fashion. If the project can do and deliver this, it’s a good project. But of course, whether they can like the field pulse of the market is very important. For us, we’re still looking into web 3 Gamefi, Socialfi, and infrastructure bridges projects. We looked into those areas well, but we also want to open our minds to let new senses to come beyond our imagination . This will help for this bear market and the next bull market.
Nelli Orlova:
I believe in the next future market development, we will see more solutions for real decentralization. There are no fully decentralized apps. We all know that. They are all used from centralized services.
I believe that that could be the next interesting thing on the market are the solutions that allow more complete, more high level of decentralization for developers and for users. Another interoperability is If we speak about gas, I hope that in some future we will see solutions for these everyday hassles when we deal with bridges, swaps, etc. during cross chain transactions. I think that various interoperability protocols and other solutions can be the next big things. Speaking about Verticals. Recently we saw this move to earn concept. I’m not a big believer in it in a long-term personally. But I think there is a huge-hidden potential in online education, self-learning, e-learning, mechanics, and maybe we can see new tokenomics models around that. The fourth thing to highlight here, I truly believe in more data visibility and analytical solutions for our sectors. So I think it’s still missing. We saw during 2021, 22, some good players coming to this market, but they still do not satisfy the full spectrum of demand for good analytics and data around web 3 sectors.
Q11: What can we do to buy the dip from this kind of second market? Just for financial ideas, no financial advice here. Any advice for under estimated token or any advice for the retail investors?
Sarah:
We do suggest people to do their own due diligence and to understand the project or token. For myself as a strong Bitcoin believer, from my own experience, I always believe in Bitcoin.
Doug Witt:
You can never go wrong with Bitcoin. Without taking into consideration, I definitely am a big fan of any infrastructure projects and any projects that we have a strong team. You really gotta do diligence with checking out their tokenomics and you can kind of really tell the goals are. Are they really heavily VC funded? What does release schedule? How much of the token supplied as a team have? In that regard, but essentially infrastructure projects that really kind of power web 3, I think are always solid.
For the second question, maybe taking a little different directions. For retails, just to really focus on the knowledge base and use the opportunities that the bear market gives you to get up to speed more
Jademont:
Usually I don’t give financial advice. For here personally, I have highly back of Metis and NAOS. I would like to recommend them. If the audiences have no else to buy, so you can investigate these 2 coins. You decide whether to buy the dip or not.
Kevin Tseng:
This is not a question for me but I’ll say that WaterDrip is one of the earliest investors and has been a long term holder.
I would suggest to look at what the industry leaders are betting on, and then take a second look at the direction that you’re taking and any other protocols that are developing in the same space.
If I take a step back from the web3 and look at how web2 unicorns evolved, it really provides a clear game plan and strategic direction for all of us.
Nelli Orlova:
First of all for retail investors. I would recommend understanding what kind of investors. Because the word investor especially in Web 3 World is very unclear. Are you an investor for a long term willing to find and identify some opportunities and make diversified portfolio and wait for half a year or one year? I’m not a trader and I can’t advise on any kind of speculative short-term things. I’m speaking about primary markets. Since I’m true believer in infrastructure, try to find an interesting structure solutions that are solving existing problems on the market, analyzed them and join them early and there could be good opportunities. In the primary market, joining it and getting their tokens as early as possible. For the secondary market, I think we are not yet on the bottom and many protocols would be down even more. There could also be good opportunities, because for the next bull run, infrastructure definitely will rise again. So yeah, if we don’t cross the legal borders, that’s all what I can say.
