Roundtable 23: CEO night — Opportunities in 2023

Participants

Host

Woody from NEST Protocol

Cohosts

Vera from iPollo

Acty from Whale Coin Talk

Guests

Alper, COO of NFTb

Master Li, Founder of LegalDAO, Web3 Lawyer.

Leon, CEO & Founder of CrossSpace

Amanda Budran, CEO of CoinW

Kisson; Founder of Anima AI

Chen Wu, Co-Founder of Busy Whale

Conference recording

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1YpJkgAMlnrJj?s=20

Session 1: Questions from Host

1. We’re seeing the industry recovery; how do you think the current situation in Defi/ NFT/ Exchange？

Leon: There are a lot of new products launched recently in social which draw a lot of attention. I think most of people will agree that the next bull market need more people, a mass adoption. Instead of leverage, we need real use cases and ventures. Therefore, Dapps and community would be interesting.

Amanda: DeFi has seen significant growth over the past year with the rising trend of decentralized exchanges and lending borrowing protocols. Whereas exchanges play a crucial role in the cryptocurrency industry with a growing number of centralized and decentralized exchanges offering a wide range of services. There may be growing trend of legitimizing cryptocurrency transactions.

Alper: NFTs are going wider obviously, and to be more specific, it would become very more mainstream than it is currently right now like polygon’s expansion into meta-Instagram. In addition, NFTs are going to more verticals, like gaming right now is one of the biggest use cases. And I expect more non-custodial elements in defi where people feel more security.

Chen: This year is not for the recovery; it is the involvement. We need to involve to another level of complete and solid mechanism for all kinds of products, so we deploy ore and more different trading mode to activate more products, more commodities and more liquidities. The good thing is people going back to think about the basic fundamental things and how to improve it.

Woody: Chen, do you think it would be easier for you to find users of your defi protocol this year?

Chen: To be honest, I think it’s much easier this year. We are now in the bear market; we can catch more people’s attention.

Kisson: At last year the settlement volume on the stable chain already exceeded 7 trillion us dollar and this year, it is likely to exceed, especially with more regulations making the industry healthier for DeFi and exchanges. And here’s my own predictions, I think there are 3 types of NFTs in general that will take off this year. The first is those with close combination with the apps, so the utility-driven NFTs. Another is the collaborative form of content. Last is virtual being NFTs.

Master Li: What happened last year did draw a lot of attention, Luna, FTX etc. This year, the biggest opportunities are to build some sort of a product that can help solve that systematical problem or providing a better compliance solution.

Woody: How do you think about Damus?

Leon: It’s a simple version of Twitter based on decentralized infrastructure. Now we are not sure what it’s quality of content and the users. It’s a good story but let’s see.

2. What do you think of the differences of starting business in blockchain industry?

Acty: 2023 is going to be a year for builders because as we experienced the downtrend last year, we are only left with the builders who actually care about building good products and creating utilities. And it is going to be easier and easier for the builders to onboard as we have so much experience now. So, if you want to build something, just reach out to anyone.

Alper: I see many people, like lawyers, developers, designers, they are there to be getting onboarded to web3, so there is eagerness and now the gap is being formed. There evolve two main things. One, it is still new regulations, so things might immediately change. Another is an advice to new business, consider launching a talk.

Master Li: Some projects are aiming to solve the accounting issues of web3 projects to get funds.

Kisson: The biggest difference is that blockchain makes everything attributable, fast, and composable. It allows talented individuals to focus on what they are best at without having to worry about trust earnings or anything and so we can see a lot of talents coming to web3, especially creators, service providers, professional consultants and builders.

Chen: The positions of builders in web3 is totally different from the traditional finance or any other industries.

Woody: Yes, I see many young people doing really great in this industry.

3. How do you plan to grow your business in this year?

Amanda: CoinW encourages cryptocurrency adoption, education, and profit. We aim to accelerate the mass adoption of cryptocurrency, empower liberty equality and sovereignty back to each individual and attain immeasurable impacts on people’s live, economic structure and society.

Acty: I have a short answer and the answer is network. Just go out there find the people that you resonate with find the same builders that are doing something similar. Do not be afraid to be exposed to different opinions. Just put yourself out there because there are still a lot of people looking for a great opportunity.

Chen: I can see a great drive of the next bull market from the community to DAO. The 2023 is the first year we see so many DAOs and communities just growing up from everywhere, all of them have their own idea and targ3t to pursue. So, 2023 people no doubt can just gather on the cross space to seek for different kinds of corporations and to have better tools for all the founders.

Woody: But some of the people are not DeFi users. How do you incentive them?

Chen: Yes, a lot people are not financial guys, but our mode is quite like a commodity other than financial targets, so if a community could issue something like tickets or voucher to its own members to enjoy some show or internal sharing something, it could also be a kind of the permission that be traded in the marketplace.

Kisson: We started building AI framework sine 2019, so in 2023 it is going to be a sprint as we see more and more AI related projects taking off. We would focus on use cases, applications and communities building by collaborating with other projects. We think the best way to counter those big corporations in traditional AI firms like Open AI, will be an AI DAO.

4. What are the biggest challenge and opportunities you see this year?

Amanda: Coming from a centralized cryptocurrency exchange, I view the cryptos exchanges really revolutionary. I see this an opportunity and endgame of digital currencies being a point where we can freely exchange one currency for another and complete the derivatives from other fiat currencies. An interesting fact is that the crypto is now the second most wirelessly owned asset class for young women age between 18 to 34 years old. The biggest challenge this year would be getting over the trip to winter feared and induced spirit.

Master Li: From my perspective, the biggest challenge is the security commission of the United States. I do hope their approach can change a little bit to a sort of avoiding to a characterize Ethereum as security of sort of limited their extra territorial jurisdiction to every transaction on Ethereum.

Chen: I based in Hong Kong and we know it has some policy support to the web3. This is the biggest challenge and also opportunity for me. Building the channel is import to new liquidity which is the old money to web3. This one is very challenging and I think if we want to embrace the liquidity, we need to compliant to the policies and legal laws. I think this is the profession of the LegalDAO. We really need to equip ourselves to get ready to the exposure to this kind of the complex environment,

Kisson: I think the biggest challenge will still remain to be the macroeconomy and the regulation side. But I do see more opportunities than challenges, especially many web2 founders entering web3, they bring in a lot of users. I think there is a prediction saying that there will be 600 million to 800 million users in web3 and blockchain this year.

Session 2: Q&A

Jack: Do you allow suggestions and feedbacks from the community? Do you put your community into consideration for decision making?

Master Li: We are basically building our products together, but for the very scenarios, we have to have a centralized team to working on some very technical products. We would propose something to the community members to ask whether you want to join to build it together, and we do have a lot of volunteers. Once the products are launched, we would build governance system for voting and contributions.

Delioriz: What is your economic model for the long terms? Do you have any bushings to keep your project for long run?

Chen: I think all projects are generating some value to their members and to people outside of the community. I think more and more marketplace and environment and tools are provided by the issuers and builders for all the communities and DAOs. You can just utilize this kind of the market and platforms and tools to achieve your own value and you will grow your own place.

Woody: For NEST, we are doing a perpetual decentralized future trading system, so when people by futures, NEST would burn the token we charged, and when users want to settle the profit, NEST would generate the token. So, the model relies on the market and the common users.