The blockchain industry has continued to develop in the past year. Decentralized finance (DeFi), the metaverse and nonfungible tokens (NFT) have attracted traditional venture-capital (VC) giants to invest in the space. Facebook not only changed its name to Meta, but tech giants such as Tencent and Nvidia have also entered the metaverse.

During the Spring Festival of 2022, Cointelegraph Chinese brought together some big names in the crypto industry. From Feb. 2-4, 2022, it held a Chinese New Year special event for the Year of the Tiger, focusing on the hottest topics in the industry and delivering the most cutting-edge information.

“Can the metaverse be a reality?”

Jackey Jiang, co-founder of MetaEstate, asked, “Can the metaverse be a reality?” 

Metaverse real estate has investment value, which is the foundation of the metaverse’s assets overall. 

Jiang said, “We can all see that real estate is the first step into the metaverse, and everyone chooses to buy and own their own piece of land. Once you have enough value on your land, you can actually increase the value of your land and your buildings.”

According to Jiang, real estate is a basic carrier, which is still in its early stages and has high investment value. In the long run, the focus should not only be on the investment value of real estate but its use-value as well. 

For Lan Tao, the product director of Tristan, the metaverse is an advanced and multidimensional internet, integrating virtuality, augmented reality and blockchain technologies to improve users’ internet experiences. 

Ray Suo, founder of 7 O’Clock Capital, backed the statement that metaverse is in an early stage of development. According to him, some say the metaverse is the next generation of value internet, and others say it will allow information to flow cheaply at high speeds. 

The future development of public chains and DeFi

Vincent Yang, co-founder of zkLink, said that DeFi is a long-term thing and he feels bullish about its future. Additionally, he believes there is also strong potential for on-chain derivatives, which can be expected to grow in 2022 as performance and trading experiences improve while transaction costs reduce.

 Xiaohan Zhu, co-founder of Sumer Money, said the blockchain environment is similar to the internet — both composed of many networks connected.

William Stewart, a hedge fund partner, said its 2021 growth primarily relied on incredibly high annual percentage yields (APY) to attract liquidity, whereas projects could not inherently realize the side effects of high APY. 

Mason Liu, Chinese community advisor of PawnHouse, said the DeFi market has not yet become financially complete, because it has not experienced enough testing through bull and bear markets during its developmental processes. He added that if it survives, DeFi may tout new changes due to performance improvements. While difficult to predict, gains and growth cannot be ruled out. 

How will GameFi develop in 2022?

Vanessa Cao, founder of BTX Capital, said it’s normal how GameFi’s popularity has dwindled. The game industry itself is highly competitive, and in the past 20 years, many games have had their own life cycle. 

According to Cao, blockchain-based games fell behind and led to products that weren’t accessible to users, decreasing overall daily active users. This suggests the GameFi industry is in its early days and there remains an opportunity. The industry still needs experienced teams with strong development capabilities to join and deliver better products.

Jin Tan, CEO of Monsta Infinite, said what will make GameFi take off is not this bull run, but the next. Every on-chain project has gone through a vulnerable period, which is an opportunity for a project to work on and improve itself. In his opinion, the GameFi industry will grow, as it is combining gaming and finance to create a successful protocol.

Zoie Zhang, business development head of Formless Capital, said Web3.0 has a huge advantage over Web2 products. The GameFi protocols featuring play-to-earn as the main highlight are less playable than traditional games and focus more on assets rather than gameplay. Others agreed this is not enough to attract the public. 

Cai Long, co-founder of 8848 Community, said some GameFi projects may follow the gaming model, monitoring many problems of traditional games and solving them directly on-chain, which may require more superb development teams and game companies to enter and take time. They concluded that there will still be the next wave of GameFi.

How far are we from Web3? 

Xiaolong Zhang, angel investor of xHashtag, said Web3 is the next logical iteration of the internet, and both VCs and governments are starting to pay attention to it. “The adoption of the traditional internet has taken much time, but I don’t think it will take long for Web3 adoption, because infrastructure is at a high-speed crossroads now, and we should seize the opportunity,” said Zhang.

David Jiao, co-founder and CEO of NuLink, said there were several different directions and categories to consider, such as distributed storage, domain name systems and decentralization. Regardless of a committed direction, a large difference in architecture can still be made. Traditional VCs may be more inclined to invest in capacity and application building. Institutional foray is a driving force, but also a significant challenge for traditional giants to secure property rights or user data.

Zhixiong Pan, an independent researcher, said Web3 is still in its early stages. Although many applications can be seen now, such as text-based or potential video-based applications, they are still infrastructures. After improvement, there will be additional applications in the future.