Crypto Startups Analysis
What crypto projects are being built over years?
Are you curious what Crypto Startups are building?
DefiLlama provides a great way to check it with its Raises feature. You can see recent fundraises from VC of crypto startups. It gives a good glimples into what’s being funded.
I have downloaded some data and made some analysis:
The bar chart visualizes the distribution of the top categories, with the remaining ones grouped into an "Other" category. The "DeFi" and "Infrastructure" categories appear to be the most prevalent in the dataset, followed by "NFT", "L1", and "CeFi".
Here are the categories present in the "Category" column along with their respective counts as of 7th October 2023 and this counts fundraises from 2014:
DeFi: 490
Infrastructure: 469
NFT: 203
L1: 190
CeFi: 187
Gaming: 186
Centralized Exchange: 139
Web3: 117
Trading: 115
Analytics: 82
Mining: 69
Metaverse: 53
Social Platform: 33
Cybersecurity: 26
Storage, Payments: 23 (each)
L2: 22
Game: 21
DEX, Scaling Solution: 20 (each)
Digital Identity: 19
Liquid Staking Protocol: 14
Smart contract security: 12
Taxes, Healthcare: 9 (each)
Banking: 8
News, DAO infrastructure: 7 (each)
Smart contract audits, Real Estate, Custody: 6 (each)
Crypto Intelligence, IoT, Smart Contract Platform: 5 (each)
Zero Knowledge Industry: 4
Hardware, CeFi Yield, MEV, Information services digital assets, Supply Chain: 3 (each)
Blockchain-as-a-Service, CEX, Insurance, Information security, Voting, Travel: 2 (each)
Betting, EVM, Cloud Security: 1 (each)
Most of the crypto startups were created in the recent years. You can see that by looking at the total amount raised in each month.
The record month was November 2021 with $7b total money raised.
This was the peak of the bull market too.
Crypto startups per year
We can look also at individual years and see top 5 year by year:
2019 crypto startups
CeFi: 27
Web3: 24
Infrastructure: 22
L1: 19
Centralized Exchange: 14
2020 crypto startups
Infrastructure: 62
CeFi, DeFi: 50 (each)
Web3, Centralized Exchange: 22 (each)
L1: 21
Trading: 13
2021 crypto startups
DeFi: 176
Infrastructure: 108
NFT: 89
CeFi: 62
Gaming: 57
2022 crypto startups
DeFi: 129
Infrastructure: 57
NFT: 45
Gaming: 34
L1: 9
2023 crypto startups
Infrastructure, DeFi: 86 (each)
Gaming: 51
NFT: 40
Web3: 32
DEX: 19
This shows general narrative over each years.
2019 was about building centralized solutions and basic protocols.
2020 was about laying foundations of DeFi
2021 was mostly about NFTs and DeFi
2022 DeFi is still reigning, with Gaming coming up
2023 gaming is getting more popular.
Here's the total number of projects for each year from 2019 to 2023:
2019: 214 projects
2020: 419 projects
2021: 1306 projects
2022: 731 projects
2023: 556 projects
As you can see the bull market of 2021 have resulted in many more crypto startups being founded.
Predictions for 2024
General economy doesn’t look well but it seems that crypto builders still build and they especially build in
Gaming: we are still waiting for AA or AAA game with strong crypto component
DeFi: RWA seems to be a trend and depending on regulations might grew big in 2024
NFTs: financialization of NFTs already took place and we’re going to see more of NFT perps, NFT launchpads, NFT art projects.
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For example check my Narrative Calls so far summarized!
Narrative Calls for 2023
Would you be profitable if you would jump into every single narrative this year featured on my channel? The short answer is yes, but the actual results depends. Let’s have a look at Narratives I covered on PC Crypto channel, with respective coins in each category and potential loss/gain. Let’s see how profitable were projects I covered and how much you c…