On April 9, OKX Ventures partner Jeff attended the 2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival sponsored by OKX Web3 and Delivered a keynote speech on "Exploring the Future of Bitcoin Ecology" at the main venue. This forum, with the theme of Bitcoin, is co-organized by Wanxiang Blockchain Lab, HashKey Group and Nervos CKB.
Jeff first shared the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem. He said that in the past two years, the cryptocurrency market has continued to develop, and the OKX Ventures team has always been optimistic about its underlying value attributes and development resilience. Judging from the trading volume, this rising cycle began in September 2023. As of March 2024, its total monthly transactions have exceeded US$7 trillion.
Moreover, compare with the 2022 data released by the World Bank Let’s take a look: The total trading volume of U.S. stocks is $43.22 trillion, and cryptocurrency trading volume is at the same level. Secondly, from the perspective of investment and financing in the crypto market, after experiencing the madness in 2021 and 2022, the total market investment in 2023 has dropped to around US$10 billion. The investment areas mainly focus on infrastructure, games, DeFi and other fields. The total investment and financing in the first quarter of 2024 will exceed US$2.6 billion. Compared with historical data, it is currently in a moderate state.
Of course, what deserves more attention is Bitcoin-based UTXO, SegWit and other technologies as well as Taproot upgrades, and  ;Ordinals, Atomics and other protocols have built the underlying infrastructure for the issuance of BTC NFT, Token and other assets. As of April 1, 2024, according to statistics from OKLink, Dune and brc-20.io:The total number of inscriptions is 64, 066, 164 .
When talking about the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, Jeff It is believed that under the background that Bitcoin itself does not have the characteristics of Turing completeness and does not support smart contracts, which limits the development of Bitcoin’s more complex ecological business, Bitcoin Layer 2 emerged as the times require, and these protocols It was developed to provide scalability to the Bitcoin network by processing transactions outside of the Bitcoin main chain, thereby improving Bitcoin's overall performance.
Of course, in addition to ecological progress, this year's listing of BTC spot ETF is a milestone event in the industry. At the beginning of the year, the US SEC finally approved the listing of Bitcoin spot ETF . As of April 1, the average daily net inflow of Bitcoin spot ETFs was US$219 million, and the average daily trading volume was US$3.37 billion.
So this year, the BTC halving is Another industry-level event. This halving is affected by new developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem in many aspects, especially the growth of inscriptions and the listing of spot ETFs. The emergence of Bitcoin Inscription has injected new vitality into on-chain activity, and the continued growth of on-chain activity is due to renewed attention from developers and innovation in the Bitcoin blockchain. At the same time, widespread adoption of Bitcoin ETFs may absorb selling pressure, reshape the market structure, and provide a new source of stable demand for BTC prices. These factors together have a certain impact on the price of BTC.
In addition to developments related to Bitcoin itself, the combination of AI and Crypto is also the focus of recent attention in the industry. Currently , we see that there may be the following combination points from the technical development analysis:
- < p style="text-align: left;">Through the decentralization and permanent storage characteristics of the blockchain, it provides solid integrity support for AI 's data and models
The introduction of Token economy will more effectively support AI incentive and payment mechanisms in terms of data, models and computing resources
< li>With the continuous development of blockchain technology and the improvement of computing power, it is expected to deploy AI models on the chain in the future to promote blockchain and artificial intelligence The deep integration has brought unprecedented changes and innovation opportunities to various industries.
While talking OKX When investing in Ventures, Jeff said frankly that in the face of the challenging and based encryption market, OKX Ventures has always actively embraced industry construction and insisted on contributing its own modest efforts. In 2023, OKX Ventures' total external investment will exceed US$50 million, covering multiple fields including the Bitcoin ecosystem, with the core area focusing on infrastructure construction.
"OKX Ventures actively invests in and supports innovative projects within the BTC ecosystem, providing not only financial support but also additional resources to promote success. For example, we have worked with others Industry partners jointly organize the winter roadshow of Bitcoin ecological projects to actively guide and encourage more developers to join the Bitcoin ecosystem. In the future, OKX Ventures also looks forward to actively cooperating with more high-quality project parties, providing in-depth support, providing users with quality services, and The industry is adding more bricks and mortar,” Jeff concluded.
About OKX Ventures
As the investment arm of OKX, OKX Ventures focuses on exploration and investing in innovative projects in the blockchain technology and digital currency ecosystem. We are committed to promoting the healthy development of the industry through investment support and looking for emerging technologies and business models that can drive the digital economy forward.