Multicoin Capital, known for its influential articles on cryptocurrency investment, gained significant attention and rose to prominence in the last bull market cycle by successfully betting on well-known projects such as Solana. However, after the FTX incident, negative repercussions lingered, and Multicoin, which owes its success to Solana, admitted to substantial losses in December 2022, with its assets plummeting by 90% that year, causing a public uproar.
At the time, there was a constant stream of discussions and accusations regarding Multicoin’s incompetence or innocence. Now, as the controversy subsides and the bull market frenzy ensues, Multicoin is once again taking action and making a comeback in the rising tide of cryptocurrency asset prices.
In a letter to annual investors in March 2024, Multicoin Capital revealed that its cryptocurrency hedge fund, focused on cryptocurrencies since 2017, has delivered a return of 9281% to its initial investors. This return is enough to compensate for Multicoin Capital’s previous loss of 91.4% in 2022. Tushar Jain, Kyle Samani, and Matt Shapiro, executives at Multicoin, stated in the letter, “In 2023, cryptocurrencies did what they do best, once again overcoming death. The market rebounded in an astonishing form, and our hedge fund was able to capture the market reaction, significantly outperforming the market.”
Looking at Multicoin’s investment portfolio, it is clear that they have a preference for public chains and DeFi infrastructure. At the same time, they are also a bold lead investor in various types of funding and financing. Foresight News will now present an overview of their ecosystem.
L1
Algorand
Algorand was founded by Silvio Micali, a pioneer in cryptography, Turing Award winner, and professor at MIT. Algorand is the first blockchain to offer instant transaction finality. Its transaction throughput is also comparable to large-scale payment and financial networks.
Aptos
Aptos is a Layer 1 public chain built by former members of the Meta (formerly Facebook) development team, using Diem’s Move programming language and Diem-BFT consensus technology.
Arweave
Arweave has been under construction since 2017 and is a distributed storage network where users pay a one-time upfront fee to store data permanently.
Ceramic
Ceramic is a decentralized data network designed to bring infinite data composability to Web3 applications.
Dfinity
Dfinity is a project aimed at creating a decentralized internet computer. It allows developers to build and run various applications on a distributed network platform without relying on traditional cloud services, databases, or payment interfaces.
Flow
Flow, developed by the team behind NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs, aims to support large-scale projects such as NFT collectibles and blockchain games.
Fluence
Fluence is a decentralized computing network for building, hosting, and running peer-to-peer applications and protocols.
Mina
Mina has designed the entire blockchain using advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs. It is about the size of a few tweets, approximately 22 kb. It enables efficient execution of zero-knowledge smart contracts (zkApps) and simple programming. With its privacy features and the ability to connect to any website, Mina is building a private gateway between the real and crypto worlds.
NEAR
NEAR was co-founded by Alex Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin in 2020 and aims to achieve global-scale scalability through sharding and a consensus mechanism called Nightshade. NEAR is committed to providing predictable costs for applications and offering developers tools at the protocol level.
Nervos
Nervos solves the scalability trilemma by separating state generation and state verification/storage in a layered architecture.
Sei
Sei was announced in May 2022 and was founded by Jayendra Jog and Jeff Feng. The two founders previously worked as software engineers at Robinhood and risk investors at Coatue Management. Sei Labs aims to become the fastest network for exchanging digital assets. The built-in technologies of Sei, such as Twin-Turbo consensus and transaction parallelization, reduce transaction latency and increase transaction throughput. As the network matures, Sei Labs plans to upgrade Sei V2 and subsequent parallel stacks to further differentiate Sei and achieve growth.
Solana
Solana is a blockchain built for scalability and is a high-performance network that can be used for various use cases, including finance, NFTs, payments, and games. It operates as a single global state machine and has characteristics of openness, interoperability, and decentralization.
Tari
The Tari platform aims to enable anyone to write complex rules for digital assets and ensure that these rules are enforced. Tari makes it possible to manage, use, and transfer almost any type of digital asset (from tickets to loyalty points to virtual goods, etc.).
XION
XION is a public chain built for mainstream adoption with a broad abstraction. XION predominantly utilizes Cosmos development toolkits, including the CometBFT consensus mechanism, Cosmos SDK, IBC, and CosmWasm. In addition to existing tools, XION’s features include integration with USDC at the infrastructure level and abstracting technological complexity for user convenience.
L2
StarkWare
StarkWare, established in 2018, has two main products: the scalability engine StarkEx, built on the Ethereum mainnet, and the decentralized ZK-Rollup StarkNet. StarkEx features include fast withdrawals, ERC-721 and ERC-20 support, L2 NFT minting, DeFi Pooling, dAMM (distributed AMM), real-time oracle price streams, and the new v4.5 version that supports hybrid on-chain and off-chain data solution Volition. StarkNet was deployed on the mainnet in November 2021 and supports the independent deployment of smart contracts, allowing any developer to write and deploy smart contracts without permission.
Skale
SKALE aims to enable developers to run high-speed, low-cost smart contracts on layer two. SKALE’s elastic sidechains aim to provide all the advantages of standard full-capacity sidechains while maintaining the security guarantees of a truly decentralized network. Elastic sidechains have high performance and configurability.
Worldcoin
Worldcoin was co-founded by Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI. The team designed a biometric identity verification system called World ID, which uses the Orb eye scanner to verify identity by scanning the user’s iris. Worldcoin plans to launch the Ethereum Layer 2 network called World Chain this summer, which will be built on the OP Stack. It will provide priority block space and gas allowances for temporary transactions to users who scan their irises to obtain a “World ID” digital passport. With the new network, Worldcoin will directly integrate machine review into its DNA, allowing wallets and applications outside of the World App to integrate World ID. Both WLD and ETH can be used to pay for gas on World Chain.
Cyber
Previously known as CyberConnect, Cyber transformed into a social re-staking modular L2 in May this year. Cyber is built on top of the OP Stack, launched in collaboration with Altlayer, and integrated with secure custom infrastructure provided by Eigenlayer’s Active Verification Service (AVS). It has already launched its developer mainnet.
Fhenix
Fhenix is an L2 based on fully homomorphic encryption, aiming to bring encrypted data computation into Ethereum’s virtual machine smart contracts.
Infrastructure
Cross-Chain
LayerZero
LayerZero is a cross-chain interoperability protocol that aims to achieve lightweight message passing across chains. LayerZero is committed to providing real and secure message passing with configurable trustlessness.
Wormhole
Wormhole was born out of a hackathon and was launched by blockchain infrastructure company Certus One in October 2020, initially in the form of a direct token bridge between the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems. In August 2021, developers from Jump Crypto launched the second version of the protocol, utilizing a proof-of-authority (PoA) guardian network as an oracle and a permissionless relay network for cross-chain message transfers.
Oracle
Pyth
Pyth currently provides over 350 price data sources covering cryptocurrencies, forex, metals, ETFs, and US stocks, among others. With near real-time and extensive coverage of assets and blockchains, DeFi applications can now offer financial products that were previously impossible to achieve with other oracle solutions, such as perpetual contracts.
MEV
Eden Network
Eden is a priority transaction network designed to protect traders from the impact of front-running transactions, adjust the incentive mechanism of block producers, and redistribute miner extractable value.
Jito Labs
Jito Labs is an MEV infrastructure company that is building high-performance systems to scale Solana and maximize rewards for validators. Its total TVL has exceeded 2 million SOL.
FastLane
FastLane is a MEV solution for the Polygon ecosystem.
Wallets and Payments
Math Wallet
MathWallet supports over 50 blockchains, hundreds of tokens, and decentralized applications through an integrated suite of mobile, web, and hardware wallets.
Lore
Lore is a multi-chain wallet collective that pools funds through group chats. It allows users to buy and sell meme coins, participate in airdrops, buy blue-chip stocks, and share private placements.
Superfluid
Superfluid is an asset streaming protocol that enables real-time encrypted transfers for global DAOs, Web3 enterprises, and DeFi games.
TipLink
TipLink is a lightweight wallet that aims to make transferring digital assets as simple as sending a link. People with cryptocurrencies can create a TipLink and send it to anyone, regardless of the platform (SMS, Discord, email, etc.).
Bitcoin Ecosystem
Arch Labs
Arch Network is a parallelized PoS network that enhances Bitcoin’s native programmability using ZK proofs. The network consists of a Rust-based zkVM (called ArchVM) and a decentralized validator network. It features programmability, parallel execution speed, and trustless interoperability and composability.
Mezo
Mezo, launched by the Thesis studio, which has years of experience in BTC ecosystem development and is the creator of tBTC, aims to deepen the functionality of Bitcoin infrastructure by assisting in achieving cheaper and faster transactions without deviating from the network’s underlying principles.
AI
Alethea AI
Alethea AI is an artificial intelligence company that uses iNFTs (intelligent NFTs) to enhance interaction between artificial intelligence and humans by embedding AI personalities into NFTs.
io.net
io.net is a decentralized cloud computing network that allows machine learning engineers to access distributed cloud clusters at much lower costs than centralized services.
Render Network
Render is a provider of decentralized GPU rendering solutions. Render allows anyone with a GPU to contribute their rendering power in exchange for RNDR, significantly increasing the GPU compute scale and availability for artists, designers, and researchers.
DAO
Alpha Venture DAO
A builder DAO that explores and innovates at the edge of Web3 and brings significant value to Web3 users, ultimately returning alpha to the Alpha community.
CabinDAO
CabinDAO is an online and real-life community utilizing blockchain technology to assist creators in making a living online.
Salad Venture
Salad is a builder family dedicated to unlocking future economic opportunities using blockchain. Through the Arcaden platform and Apollo Academy, Salad provides not only gaming and education but also a gateway to new possibilities.
Seed Club
Seed Club is a DAO focused on building and investing in communities. They aim to capture value created by communities on the internet for users rather than platforms.
DeFi
Lending
Timeswap
Timeswap provides flexibility for borrowers and lenders to determine their risk allocation through flexible interest rates and collateral factors.
Hubble
Hubble is a DeFi protocol built on Solana. Hubble allows users to borrow USDH by collateralizing a variety of assets. USDH is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Borrowing USDH allows users to unlock liquidity (cash) using the tokens they hold long-term.
Swivel
Swivel offers borrowers the ability to lock in fixed income or otherwise increase their yield.
DEX
THORChain
THORChain is a decentralized cross-chain protocol that aims to decentralize cryptocurrency liquidity through a series of public THORNodes and ecosystem products. Its native and cross-chain liquidity is open to individuals, products, or institutions.
Saber
Saber is a cross-chain stablecoin and wrapped asset trading platform on Solana. Saber aims to achieve low slippage trading and maintain high capital efficiency even for large transactions, providing efficient capital utilization for liquidity providers.
MarginFi
Marginfi is a decentralized margin protocol built on Solana for trading portfolios. The protocol provides traders with a unified account for accessing margin and managing portfolio investment, improving capital efficiency in underlying trading protocols.
dForce
dForce aims to build an integrated and interoperable open finance and monetary protocol matrix, including asset protocols (USDx, GOLDx, dToken), liquidity protocols (dForce Trade), and lending protocols (dForce Lending).
Coin 98
Coin 98 is an integrated DeFi platform that offers a full suite of products, including the Coin 98 Wallet, Coin 98 Exchange, and Space Gate (cross-chain bridge). Coin 98 aims to meet the unmet needs in the industry and become the preferred gateway connecting traditional finance users with any DeFi services or blockchains.
Derivatives
Drift Protocol
Drift is a decentralized perpetual contract trading protocol on Solana.
Perpetual Protocol
Perpetual is a decentralized perpetual contract protocol for all assets.
Strips Finance (now renamed RabbitX)
