Reflections on Token2049: V3V Ventures’ Take

A couple of weeks have passed since Token2049, and now that the dust has settled, we can reflect on it more objectively. 😄

Our core team at V3V Ventures engaged with numerous startups—some through scheduled meetings, others in spontaneous hallway chats.

We also attended a mix of pre-parties and after-parties, some open, some private. While it was fun meeting people in person (many of whom we had only known online), the quality of projects we came across was… well, questionable at best. Great conversations, weak pitches—pure cognitive dissonance! 😆

One of the highlights was The Secret Room, where experienced degens mixed with clubgoers & go-go dancers, simultaneously discussing forks & staking. 🚀

We also met Telegram team and community members, including channel owners & gaming projects. The Telegram ecosystem is growing fast, but a key question remains—can it break out beyond the ex-Soviet bubble?

50+ Projects Later: Our Key Takeaways

After analyzing 50+ crypto projects and meeting founders face-to-face, we identified three main categories:

1️⃣ 80% - 🚮 Low-Effort Projects

💩 Built on the cheap, but pitched as the next big thing.
😂 Especially amusing when a 4-year-old project claims to be open-source, yet has no GitHub, no users, and no traction—just promises.
💰 And, of course, they expect multi-million-dollar investments.

2️⃣ 15% - 💡 Solid Ideas, Bad Valuations

🧐 Some had promising concepts but serious execution risks.
📜 For example, a team with zero startup or crypto experience pitched a cool ETH restaking idea…
💰 …but valued their whitepaper-stage project at $40M, asking for $2M funding.
😬 VC risk: Astronomical. We passed.

3️⃣ 5% - 🏆 Real Winners

⭐️ The truly exceptional projects had strong founders & traction.
💸 Funny thing? They didn’t even need funding—the smartest VCs had already backed them.
🤝 That said, we believe we offer more than just money—our expertise in crypto marketing & scaling is a game-changer for projects that want to go big.

Next Steps

Despite the overwhelming amount of noise, we found a few gems worth exploring. 🔍

We’ll probably share more details soon on why we think these projects will succeed. Stay tuned!

Despite being summer, it’s still a pretty busy time for venture deals!

Recent Investments

💰 BitLayer - A Layer 2 blockchain built on Bitcoin, integrating BitVM to support smart contracts.
🔹 Building an L2 staking solution for Bitcoin—let’s see how it plays out!
🔹 Founders: Former technical lead at Huobi, and former head of business development at Tezos & Polygon.
🔹 Public round valuation goal (July): $1B 🤷‍♀️

🎮 OneWayBlock & Class of Coins - Two NFT farming games.
🔹 Backed by strong, experienced founders.
🔹 Higher risk than BitLayer, but also higher potential upside!

Final Stage Deals

🃏 U2U Network - Building an L1 blockchain featuring its own blackjack & crypto farming ecosystem.

🔄 CrossCurve - A Curve Finance aggregator integrating multiple blockchains into a single, global market.
🔹 Co-founded by Michael Egorov (Curve Finance) in partnership with Eywa.fi.
🔹 Leveraging Curve infrastructure & liquidity.
🔹 Cross-chain listings + increased yield generation + low slippage trades.

Market Insights

🚀 Many founders overvalue their projects in this market, but we believe the bear cycle will correct expectations.

📉 Over the past two years, many strong projects have launched—yet their tokens are at rock-bottom prices. We see this as an excellent buying opportunity (but, of course, not financial advice 😏).

📊 We’ve conducted a detailed analysis of various undervalued projects based on multiple criteria and are gonna post the full table exclusively here soon!

Just a few days ago, we successfully invested in crosscurve.fi, and now we are working on deals with U2U Network and Bracket, which is building a platform for Staked Liquid DeFi.

Now, let’s try to do something similar—but with older crypto projects!

By considering the market as a system of interconnected forces, we can identify patterns and make data-driven assumptions about the future—even without insider information.

Over the past two years, many promising projects have emerged in crypto. Most have already raised VC funding and launched their own tokens, which are now actively trading on exchanges. Since many founders tend to overestimate their new projects, and given that many older, fundamentally strong projects have tokens trading at all-time lows, we started wondering:

🧐 Can we identify promising “old” projects, buy their tokens on exchanges, and generate 5-10x returns within a few months?

To test this, we compiled a Google Sheet, filtering for projects launched in the past 2-3 years and tracking the following:

✅ VC price (the price at which VCs invested)
✅ Start price (the token’s price at launch)
✅ Current price (the token’s price now)
✅ Retail vs. VC ROI
✅ Project industry/category
✅ Venture funds involved (and their tier ranking)
✅ Exchanges where the token is listed
✅ Social media engagement & project development activity (e.g., GitHub updates)
✅ VC fund holdings (via Arkham, Messari, or manual research)

This isn’t a ready-made investment list—it’s a data-driven research tool to help make informed investment decisions based on personal strategies.

Finding Hidden Market Logic

Beyond just numbers, this method allows us to uncover the logic behind market movements.

For example:

🔍 Which VC funds have historically worked with “money makers” to pump tokens?
-If their vesting period is ending, they might attempt a final pump before exiting.

📈 Which projects are approaching a major exchange listing (e.g., Binance)?
-Some funds specialize in securing high-value exchange listings for their projects.
-If a fund has helped several projects get listed, we can analyze other projects they backed that haven’t been listed yet but could be next.

📊 What’s happening on social media & GitHub?
-If a project suddenly shows renewed activity, it might indicate an upcoming catalyst.

💡 The Key Idea:
To make this table valuable, we need to identify data points that the market hasn’t yet priced in.
By modeling future catalysts, we can buy strong tokens at rock-bottom prices before they pump.

Why Now?

With the entire market cooling down, many tokens are at their lowest valuations. Historically, these are the best entry points for high-upside plays.

By systematically analyzing older projects alongside new investments, we can maximize returns while minimizing speculative risks.

Here is the table https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14k-H6lK8y2XhXfURI640kCB0SzSjRZ39JYiISPwH5Rs/

We have a few exciting updates to share!

• Deal with U2U Network - Done.
• Bracket - in the final stage.
• Ghostdrive - currently working on an investment.

Recently, various games have been booming on Telegram, and one of the biggest hits is Hamster Combat, which has gained over 250 million users in just a few months. Naturally, we were curious—how did they grow so fast? And, as always, the answer is right on the surface: Freebies, Sir.

Users click, tap, play, and collect in-game currency, hoping that one day it will become the next Ethereum. Just a few days ago, a taxi driver in Singapore was playing Hamster while driving—seriously explaining how he plans to buy a country house with the tokens he has earned. And he’s not alone. Millions of people want to believe in miracles, that somewhere out there is a magic money button that will make them rich overnight.

But let’s do some elementary school math:
If they were to give away an average of $50 per user, that would total $12.5 billion. But $50 is barely enough to motivate anyone.
If we increase the average to $500 per user, the total giveaway skyrockets to $125 billion, which exceeds the GDP of many countries.

Another key issue is that unlike other cryptocurrencies, where users contribute value to the network, Hamster’s users are purely profit-driven. The token giveaway will inevitably lead to massive sell-offs, resulting in a deep price drop.

There are also rumors that Hamster’s owners plan to sell users by listing the token on some low-tier exchange, where people will have to trade or complete tasks to claim their tokens. Sounds familiar? Yep, it’s just a classic online casino model—nothing new under the sun 🙂.

Hola Amigos!

The last few weeks, part of our team has been spending time in the Caribbean region. First, we landed in the great Bitcoin nation of El Salvador. Initially, it was supposed to be a short business trip to set up smooth communication between our LPs and local financial institutions. On top of that, we wanted to check out a few promising investment opportunities.

But, as things often go, plans changed. Instead of two days, we’re now on our third week here, all thanks to various bureaucratic procedures and whatnot.

While waiting for everything to get sorted out, we figured—why not make the most of it? One of our GPs decided to dive into biohacking. He remembered the gene therapy Bryan Johnson did recently, so he flew to Roatán, Honduras, and got minicircle.io’s Follistatin gene therapy. Sounds kind of wild, right? But after COVID vaccines, nothing really fazes us anymore lol. Also, the island is incredible—a perfect place to work remotely, admire the beautiful coral reef, eat fresh food, and, well, the sunsets are pretty amazing. 🙂

So now, we guess he’s officially a biohacker! Let’s see how this all plays out—will keep you updated haha.

Tomorrow, we’re heading back to El Salvador to (hopefully) wrap things up, and the day after, we’re hopping on a plane to Singapore for Token2049.

For us, Singapore isn’t just some high-tech Disneyland. Our GPs actually spent years there, building v3v’s network and gaining valuable experience. This time, we’ll be there for a week with tons of meetings lined up with founders, and we’re excited to catch up with some old friends too. Seems like everyone’s going to be there!

We recently closed a deal with Bracket.fi (a platform for Staked Liquid DeFi), along with a few other projects:

• Shieldeum.net – a Web3 cybersecurity solution for 440 million crypto users, powered by an AI-driven decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN).

• Brkt.gg – leading a new wave in prediction markets, focusing on innovation, transparency, and strengthening BRKT’s role in DeFi.

We’ve also made a few deals that will remain private for now, but we’ll probably post about them later.

Finally, we’ve partnered with Movement Labs to help Bitlayer become the most popular L2 on Bitcoin.

See you later, guys!

In three weeks, Trump probably will be elected President of the U.S—the real question is, will the BTC reserve fund be signed right after that, or will it drag on for years?

We’d say it’s a 50/50 shot :)

Probably should write a brief note on EigenLayer. This won't be a deep dive or an economic analysis, but rather our personal take on the project, especially since our LPs have acquired a significant amount of EIGEN tokens. We've also analyzed one of the AVSs (currently raising a round) that is responsible for transaction validation.

All AVSs on EigenLayer operate using a Shared ETH model.
Essentially, users deposit ETH with an operator, and the operator distributes it among the AVSs. Most operators are working with more than five AVSs. This introduces a significant slashing risk.
In our opinion, sooner or later, one of these AVSs will make a mistake, get hacked, or face some other issue, as the risk level is orders of magnitude higher than with native staking. And considering many users are also using liquid ETH the situation gets even messier.

There's a lack of incentive to hold EIGEN tokens. From what we see, a lot of tokens are being dumped on exchanges. Who's buying them back? Perhaps EL itself.
Apart from the airdropped EIGEN tokens, the AVSs themselves generate minimal profit (practically none), because there aren't any projects that are eager to "host" on EigenLayer. Why? Mainly because there’s no need for it, and every project prefers having its own token issued on an L1 like Ethereum or Solana.
Will this change in the future? We think that's a big "if."

Since there aren't any projects paying AVSs for “hosting” on EigenLayer, AVSs are now planning to issue their own tokens to raise funds (at insane valuations).
But who needs these useless AVS tokens? That's unclear.

We're not here to predict the price of EIGEN or the fate of the entire ecosystem. But from what we’ve seen internally, there just aren’t any economic incentives to participate in the network (aside from the airdropped EIGEN). And there are no projects that really need EigenLayer at this point, for all the reasons mentioned above.
That said, crypto is unpredictable, and the famous VCs backing this project might just help it grow into something significant.

It’s been almost a month since Token2049 in Singapore, and what a wild few days those were! We've met an incredible number of new, interesting people at all kinds of events, including a couple of amusing closed-door ones. With this amount of crypto people in town, it felt like every other person was in the space, leading to some pretty weird situations, and some people we barely know are still messaging us on Telegram with various offers and sharing photos we took together :)

We also met quite a lot of VCs, and agreed to share deal flow going forward. When it comes to the value of in-person meetings, while Zoom is undoubtedly an indispensable tool these days, nothing beats the personal connection of face-to-face interaction. We managed to connect with a couple of tier-1 startup founders who had previously told us their rounds were closed and that they didn’t need more capital. But after meeting in person, we were able to change their minds. Will writing soon about the startups we invested in — a few of them are absolutely on fire!

As for startups, the founder of Directly.xyz was also in Singapore. It's a project that lets people buy real estate directly from developers with crypto and get a kickback (4-8%) in USDT — a commission usually pocketed by agents. They also have plans to tokenize real estate and launch a P2P crypto rental market in Dubai. During the few hours we spent together, we randomly met two amazing ladies, which led to some exciting follow-up. Soon, Cointelegraph will be covering his startup, and the founder will be pitching Directly on stage in just a few days at Blockchain Life in Dubai. Considering the launch was initially scheduled for January 2025, our brief stroll definitely accelerated things into hustle mode.
There’s so much more we could share, but we have to mention the epic parties every night — they were just awesome!

Continuing from our previous post about Singapore, we'd want to share something not directly related to investments or crypto, but more rooted in ideology.
Our core team entered the crypto space at its inception and still consider ourself largely a Bitcoin maximalists. It’s fascinating to watch how the community has evolved, starting as an underground movement and now going mainstream on Wall Street. Looking at the people we've met at Token2049, they’re clearly very different from those early meetups back in 2013, where people wore t-shirts with slogans like “Fuck the government.”
It got us thinking — have we abandoned the ideals of our founding fathers? :)

After all, this community was born from the cypherpunk movement, whose mailing list was where Satoshi first announced Bitcoin. They were the early adopters, and without them, crypto likely wouldn’t exist as it does today.
Timothy May’s manifesto predicted the creation of dark markets protected by cryptographic technologies, and we all know how that played out. Governments, with their strict AML/KYC regulations, now oversee and control the flow of cryptocurrency transactions. It’s like the famous saying: “If you can’t beat them, control them.”

If crypto was originally designed to free people from government control, now we’re seeing the rise of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies), which, in many ways, feel like the illegitimate offspring of crypto and the state, taking the worst aspects of both. With CBDCs, governments can decide when, how, and how much people can spend, effectively tracking every individual’s behavior with alarming precision. This level of surveillance could lead to deep intrusions into personal privacy, almost like a dystopian system—reminiscent of China’s social credit system. Step out of line, and you might not be allowed on a plane, or even into Disneyland.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Shortly after Token2049, the Network State conference was held in Singapore. The idea is compelling: in essence, people can unite based on shared values and beliefs, rather than geographic location, and start building a new kind of “networked state.” Gradually and peacefully, these communities aim to replace outdated governmental institutions. Of course, they’ll need a physical hub to organize—and they’ve already found one: a beautifully ghost city in Malaysia, where these guys are starting to gather and get things moving. So, the whole Network State idea reminds us of “Nomad Capitalist” concept—go where you’re treated best. But the Network State idea goes even further. Their plan is to create a meritocracy based on libertarian principles.
It’s definitely something to keep an eye on.

Haven’t written in a while – it’s been a busy time. During a bull market, everything looks shiny, but it takes time to evaluate opportunities!

Our recent deals include:

- Levr.bet – A sports betting platform leveraging DeFi on Monad.
- DeSyn – A decentralized restaking platform offering curated low/medium-risk options alongside potential airdrops.
- Primex – A leveraged trading and yield farming app enabling users to amplify positions using lender liquidity on DeFi protocols.
- Nomad Fulcrum – A convenient platform for selecting crypto and related investments.
- OrdeeZ – A Bitcoin liquidity protocol that unlocks BTC’s potential by enabling users to borrow, leverage, and earn passive yields, or buy premium Ordinals with just 20% upfront securely built on Bitcoin L1.
- Sunrise – A DA layer designed to meet the high data demands of L2 apps, particularly in blockchain gaming and AI projects.

Couldn’t fit everything into this post, will share more updates soon!

Great experience, we were glad to participate—there are some fantastic teams building on Aptos!

V3V team is wrapping up an intense and inspiring week in Dubai — big thanks to the @token2049official crew for the world-class organization and support throughout the event! 🙌
It was a pleasure to be one of the main sponsors this year, and we truly enjoyed being part of both the main event and some amazing side events across the city.
So many strong founders, great investors, and new connections — we’ll be sharing more takeaways and highlights from TOKEN2049 Dubai very soon.
See you in Singapore next! 🇸🇬