Portfolio Report for the 1st Quarter of 2021 (1) — ArkStream Capital

In the first quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused the fastest price drop in stock market history. 2020 is undoubtedly a year of ups and downs, whether it is in the real world or the cryptocurrency industry.

When the occurrence of black swans became the norm, we gradually accepted the posture of walking in the turbulent sea. In 2021, when the bull market arrives, we are still looking for high-quality crypto projects with the mentality of “searching up and down”.

In the turbulent encryption world, some projects that may lead the change are constantly emerging. We are constantly looking for, hoping to find those unicorns in the Web3.0 era, and ride the Ark together to sail to the other shore.

ArkStream Capital, a token fund founded by BlockArk, invested in more than 10 projects in the first quarter of 2021. We will start with project introduction and track analysis to explain why we invested in these projects.

Dora Factory

Dora Factory Introduction

Dora Factory provides a DAO-as-a service solution and a series of pluggable modular tools for the developer community and decentralized organizations, including incentives, fundraising, donations, governance, arbitration, etc. The infrastructure of Dora Factory will eventually become an open system, and developers can develop governance modules on Dora Factory and get incentives. Through Dora Factory, open-source projects can easily become DAOs, enabling community users and developers to create and manage the structure and funds of the project-including asset management, voting, fundraising, and bounty, etc.

By providing a powerful toolset, Curators can create and launch their own DAO, so as to better interact with developers and promote the development of open-source projects. Dora Factory will provide a series of highly configurable governance modules, which can be used to manage their risk DAO, which can be added at any time according to the needs of the community.

Decentralized governance and DAO

Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is a concept that everyone is familiar with. After the DAO was hacked in 2016 and the Ethereum hard fork, the crypto community has been more cautious about the exploration of DAO until the rise of DeFi in 2020. The decentralized project began to grant governance rights to its Token and turned it into DAO governance, and people in the crypto community realized that the era of decentralized autonomy has finally arrived. More and more DeFi projects have begun to try to use on-chain voting tools like Snapshots to allow community users to participate in governance, and as the underlying facilities such as Aragon and Moloch become more complete, more and more projects have been returned to the community. Different from the original centralized governance, DAO allows users to exercise governance rights through tokens while also locking in a large amount of asset value. We see a rapidly developing market with huge room for development.

Why we invested in Dora Factory

Compared with the building block beds of other DeFi products, Dora Factory is indeed more like a factory. They have built their own production workshops. Through a series of production lines such as DORA Factory, DAOrayaki, DoraHacks, HackerLinks Grants, etc., there is a clear path from decentralized project discovery, to one-stop project incubation, and finally to the governance and development of the project.

In the development of the entire encryption industry, the developer community is an indispensable part. Any public chain or underlying infrastructure needs the support of the developer community to carry applications on it and expand the ecology. Dora masters the resources of the developer community and provides all the support developers need through Dora Factory. It can not only help the developer team quickly adapt to this fast-growing industry, but also help the bottom builders quickly expand their ecology. We believe that Dora Factory, as a provider of DAO-as-a-service, can occupy an advantageous position in the core part of the developer community when we make strides towards the web3 era.

AIOZ

AIOZ Introduction

AIOZ Network is a Layer 1 Blockchain-Based Content Delivery Network, forming a core foundation for the digital content ecosystem using blockchain + p2p + smart contracts. AIOZ Network uses p2p nodes to build a network to store, transcode & delivery digital media content. It utilizes the redundant resource of all computers around the world to build an efficient dCDN in delivery speed, cost & streaming quality.

Streaming and distributed CDN

With the advent of the 5G era, streaming media has become inseparable from our lives. Video and live broadcasting have brought people closer together, allowing people to be in the world without leaving their homes. More and more people are starting to open video software anytime and anywhere. Live video software such as Youtube, Bilibili, Tiktok (Tik Tok) and streaming media platforms such as Netfilix and Tencent Video have increased exponentially in recent years. The amount of users and content is enough to prove this. In 2020, the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought explosive growth to the streaming media industry, and traditional theater companies such as Disney can’t wait to get a share of the pie. We can imagine that with the improvement of VR, AR and other technologies in the future, there is still huge room for user demand to rise. However, with the soaring demand, there is also a huge amount of data and the consequent increase in bandwidth costs. Bandwidth costs often account for more than 50% of the cost of streaming media platforms, which has brought huge obstacles to the development of the industry.

In order to reduce the increasing cost, the proposal of distributed CDN technology and the decentralized incentive scheme brought by cryptocurrency have solved this problem to a certain extent. Distributed CDN technology and decentralized storage build a distributed node network through personal computers, which provide idle bandwidth and storage space like a honeycomb, which greatly reduces the bandwidth pressure of centralized servers and reduces bandwidth costs.

Why we invested in AIOZ

We believe that distributed storage is an indispensable part of the Web3 era. Among the distributed CDNs as its subdivision track, Theta Network has become the leader of the track with a 150x increase in a year, and once entered the TOP20 market value ranking. It is enough to let people see the image of this track. AIOZ innovatively proposed a dCDN solution. Unlike traditional CDN, dCDN can provide a smooth streaming experience without a resource-intensive infrastructure. AIOZ distributes storage, code conversion, and delivery costs among p2p nodes. With the massive adoption of nodes, dCDN can expand indefinitely. AIOZ is a public chain, but it is not satisfied with the construction of the underlying facilities. Instead, it has also developed DApps such as AIOZ Tube based on its public chain, and has a clear product roadmap and video uploader/user expansion path.

At present, AIOZ has 13,000+ active nodes around the world and 32,000 followers on Twitter. The huge community base makes this network more solid and reliable, and it has become a new star in the field of distributed CDN and streaming media.

XEND

XEND Introduction

Xend Finance is a DeFi platform for cooperatives and credit unions. It provides multi-level benefits by optimizing and aggregating different DeFi lending agreements. The purpose is to provide high and stable currency yields for people living in unstable economies with insufficient financial services And token rewards. Xend Finance was established to protect the value of personal savings and contributions using fiat currency from depreciation due to the influence of an unstable economy.

The development of DeFi in Africa

Large countries such as China and the United States can have strong government endorsements and use monetary and fiscal policies to effectively maintain their financial order. For users in these countries, DeFi has more significance in exploring new economic forms. In some countries in Africa, problems such as excessive currency issuance and lack of credit in financial institutions frequently occur. Users in these countries or regions need a decentralized financial system with credit endorsement. This is the best soil for DeFi. Through a trustless decentralized protocol, users can freely use functions such as transactions, lending, insurance, etc., and the safety of funds is guaranteed, and there is no need to worry about the risk of extreme currency over-issue and devaluation. However, the high threshold of DeFi hinders the path for these users to meet their rigid needs. If DeFi wants more users to participate, it needs such a medium to help users who have no basic knowledge of the encryption market quickly enter the DeFi world, and use these DeFi products without risk and convenience.

Why do we invest in XEND

Africa has a population of over 1 billion and is a very large potential market. However, due to various historical problems, the current level of financial market development in most African countries is still low, which provides sufficient space for the development of cryptocurrencies in Africa. Xend is aiming at this core pain point, hoping to help African users enter the crypto world at a low threshold, open the door of DeFi, and let the seeds of decentralization be planted in everyone’s hearts.

XEND is the first project in the Xend Finance ecosystem, which already has more than 55,000 users. XEND is our first investment in an encrypted project focusing on the development of the African market. Its accumulated user base and understanding of the encrypted market, coupled with the blessing of Binance and BSC, can help Xend to further expand their market, which allows us enough I believe they can do a lot in this land.

ACoconut

ACoconut Introduction

ACoconut is a series of open protocols that enable frictionless movement of liquidity between decentralized systems. The ACoconut protocol suite consists of BTC+ and acBTC.

BTC+ is a synthetic plus token anchored to BTC, and each public chain will have its own BTC+. The BTC+ of each chain is supported by a variety of single plus tokens, and these single plus tokens are all supported by BTC revenue tokens. Therefore, BTC+ aggregates the liquidity and income of BTC assets and distributes the income to holders.

acBTC is a synthetic ERC20 BTC backed by a basket of ERC20 BTC tokens on Ethereum. acBTC is the first synthetic asset constructed based on Curve’s StableSwap algorithm. ACoconut users can use WBTC or renBTC to mint acBTC, and then use AnySwap to bridge acBTC to other public chain networks.

BTC and DeFi liquidity

BTC is undoubtedly the core asset in the crypto world. The market value of BTC as high as 50% gives it enough voice in the crypto world. Even to the outside world, BTC is the cryptocurrency itself. Therefore, the development of DeFi will never be able to bypass BTC. A large number of DeFi protocols hope to introduce BTC into DeFi and give it more powerful liquidity and functionality. At present, nearly 1% of BTC in circulation has been transferred to Ethereum and other platforms with smart contracts through various cross-chain solutions. Decentralized BTC, renBTC, bBTC, oBTC and centralized BBTC and HBTC each show their magical powers. It also makes users need to choose between different versions of BTC, which only adds to the worry. On the other hand, each DeFi protocol pledge increases the value of the agreement by locking the liquidity of BTC, but it does not give these BTCs room for further expansion. Badger DAO has made some attempts among them. The SETT vault built through multiple DeFi protocol LP tokens and the flexible supply version of the BTC anchor coin, DIGG, have gained a lot of attention in the market. But we believe that the expansion of BTC and DeFi is far from that.

Why do we invest in ACoconut

Crossing BTC to the smart contract platform through a cross-chain bridge is the first step for BTC to enter the DeFi world, and giving BTC in the DeFi world an initiative and composability is the second step. AC’s two major products, acBTC and BTC+, respectively correspond to these two steps, making the expansion of BTC on DeFi more imaginative. The NUTS Finance team is a highly imaginative and executive team, and its strong iterative ability allows Acoconut to continuously explode with new vitality. At present, ACoconut has launched the BSC version, which is the first cross-chain BTC revenue aggregator in the crypto market. Whether users are on Ethereum or BSC, as long as they have BTC-related assets, they can find a suitable entrance to enter ACoconut and let themselves BTC gets the most liquidity support. We are optimistic about the future development of AC, the combination of BTC and DeFi, from 1% to 100%, there is still 100 times space.

About ArkStream Capital

Founded by @Block_Ark, ArkStream Capital is a token fund dedicated to growing Web3.0 unicorns. Our portfolio includes Efinity, Calaxy, HOPR, Xend, Litentry, etc.

Website: https://blockark.io

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ark_stream

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Block_Ark