DFG and a Vanguardist View of the Blockchain Ecosystem
James Wo shared with the World Crypto Conference audience DFG’s positions and ideas about the blockchain ecosystem.
He began reviewing the current state of the global crypto market, emphasizing both the 1.5x increase in investment firms observed in the market when compared with 2017 and the important gap between USA investment firms which account for 48% of the industry when contrasted to Chinese and Hong Kong firms that take up 9% of the industry, however this difference will be increasingly balanced in the upcoming years with noticeable rise in firms found in China and Asia.
Also examining the conditions of the leading investment firms within the ecosystem, he established the clear difference between the crypto market capitalization which accounts to less than 1% when compared to traditional fund assets, defining the industry as one at a very early stage. With funds being mostly allocated in sectors such as exchanges, blockchain and trading infrastructure projects, while at the same time seed funding decreasing and Series A & B funding increasing.
He then immersed the listeners in a comprehensive analysis on the stages of funding the company has had since its beginnings where DFG has noticeably maintained investment in a select group of 20 projects while venturing a big amount to each one, which brings the total of AUM (Assets Under Management) to approximately $550M, between primary and secondary markets, with specific projects that illustrate DFG’s philosophy in the past and the positive results these strategies have produced, such as important partnerships with Ethereum Classic Labs, Circle, and LedgerX among others.
James also stressed the importance that the CFTC Chairman, Heath Tarbert’s, statements referring to ETH and consequently similar assets, such as ETC, as a commodity and how this could strengthen the state of investments in the ETH/ETC ecosystem for the upcoming years. In addition, he highlighted his optimism regarding the future of ETC. Firstly, by asserting ETC’s market capitalization among the top 20 public blockchains, but with its liquidity in the top 10, this being a perfect example of why he considers it to be highly undervalued. On the other hand, with ETC and ETH 1.X teams working closely together, all the ETH functions built on PoW have been implemented on ETC, which means that ETH applications originally built on PoW will be more suitable to run on ETC after ETH switches to PoS.
This was followed with detailed indications as to what investment philosophy the company will apply when exploring new investment opportunities in the future, such as public blockchains with the potential to be ranked among Top 20 on CMC or DApps that count with centralized validated business models.
Finally, James revealed what he considers as key aspects in the future of the blockchain ecosystem, which could deeply affect the conditions on how growth and progress will be achieved, for instance, how all public blockchains ranked under #20 on CMC shall be disappearing, that regulatory compliant projects should have higher possibilities of success and the importance of Ethereum, which is substantially undervalued within the industry.
