Author: Peter ‘pet3rLianGuain’, 1KX; Translation: LianGuaicryptonitive
Two years ago, we started expanding our focus at 1kx into the field of investing in cryptocurrency consumer applications.
While infrastructure investment is our core business, it is clear that the infrastructure stack is maturing, and the path to viable products for the mass market will only become clearer.
Investment Landscape So Far
Since then, we have made over 30 investments, with 13 of them being led by us, covering all categories of cryptocurrency consumer applications, including virtual worlds, gaming, creators, community coordination, social, payments, and intellectual property.
- Multicoin Capital Why We Invest in Fhenix
- OP Stack and Superchain Vision What are the existing OP Stack projects?
- Overview of 1kx’s investment landscape in encrypted consumer applications What areas will be focused on in the future?
Here is a brief overview of our investments in cryptocurrency consumer applications so far:
1kx Cryptocurrency Consumer Application Portfolio Overview (As of September 2023)
What’s Next?
While we maintain an open attitude towards investing in cryptocurrency consumer applications, we actively seek and are willing to collaborate with founders in the following areas:
Social and Attention Economy
As the number of on-chain applications, content, and creators continues to grow, we believe the demand for shared social spaces has never been more urgent for end users. We are particularly excited about the following ideas:
1. Providing end users with targeted content based on their on-chain holdings or connected social graphs. We are excited about on-chain activity sources becoming emerging discovery layers for content, creators, and social interactions. The number of non-financial NFT collections is only increasing, and we believe this is an exciting but underappreciated opportunity.
2. Creating new social games with collecting and owning as core gameplay loops that cater to both crypto-native users with existing on-chain content and mass-market users and their respective off-chain content. We believe digital property rights enable new forms of social expression, regardless of the ultimate audience. We are very excited about teams building products in areas such as photo sharing, tokenization, and collectibles.
Creator Platforms, Tools, and Marketplaces
We remain very excited about how NFTs and digital property rights empower creators to monetize and build stronger communities, particularly in the following areas:
1. Vertical creator platforms and marketplaces that focus on introducing new categories of creators on-chain and building communities. We have been impressed by how platforms like SuperRare/KnownOrigin (art), Artblocks/fxhash (generative art), Sound/Catalog (music), and theme platforms (Metalabel) drive adoption in their respective categories.
2. Dynamic NFT infrastructure that allows end holders to have deeper and more meaningful experiences and turns on-chain assets into channels of recurring attention rather than current meta.
3. General-purpose tools and infrastructure that help creators better accomplish tasks on-chain, such as better facilitation of the issuance of on-chain assets, their communities, their royalties, etc. We are excited about NFT storefronts, minting engines, community coordination tools, capital formation, and creator tools that enable more collaborative work.
Intellectual Property and Composable Narrative
We believe that we can use on-chain primitives to create new intellectual property and tell better stories. We have considered the following design spaces:
1. Community-owned intellectual property that closely involves community members in the earliest stages of creation. While the first wave of first-generation native crypto intellectual property failed to live up to expectations to a large extent, we believe that the next meta is under construction.
2. Platforms and creator tools that allow for easier creation of composable content on existing intellectual property that already exists as NFTs. We are excited about intellectual property that already has resonance with end users and communities, which can serve as starting points for new content.
Virtual Worlds and NPCs
We are excited about how space and 3D as a new media will interact with ownership-based virtual experiences as end consumers, especially:
1. Highly interoperable spatial 3D worlds (infrastructure that supports GLB/GLTF, VRMs, wallet indexes), where content creators can effortlessly create regardless of technical skills. So far, many projects in this field have focused too much on a scarce land model that restricts creator participation. We hope to see projects that remove this entry barrier while building novel experiences or game loops that guide initial attention. We have gained a lot of inspiration from Jin and M3.
2. Interactive NPCs and AI agents that use digital property rights to create deeper relationships between virtual entities and end users.
Decentralized Worlds and On-Chain Gaming
We are very excited about bringing completely new worlds and on-chain gaming experiences that were previously impossible:
1. On-chain gaming that turns the player outcomes of traditional non-financial casual game loops into financialized results. We are particularly fond of projects like Words3.
2. Building a world that establishes itself as a developer or creator platform from day one, as a playground for permissionless scalability.
Other Areas of Interest and Research:
1. Mass market consumer experiences and goods (we have gained inspiration from Kiki’s work in women’s beauty and Pudgy Penguin’s toy releases).
2. Luxury goods and consumer experiences (we are excited about Trame’s work in transforming generative art into physical objects).
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