Original Title: "CoinList Chronicle: How to Regain Past Glory as Wealth Effect Fades?"

Original Author: 1912212.eth, Foresight News

The once flourishing CoinList is no longer what it used to be, and its wealth effect and brand reputation are not as good as before. From the highly anticipated public offering platform to its current decline, what has happened to CoinList?

One, Overview of CoinList

CoinList was originally founded by renowned angel investor Naval Ravikan, who is also the founder of the US equity crowdfunding platform AngelList. Several years ago, the global sensation Uber completed its crowdfunding financing on the platform.

When Ravikan discovered that the blockchain was in its infancy, an AngelList-like platform for the blockchain emerged. During the ICO frenzy, the Filecoin team also prepared for a large-scale financing, and Filecoin founder Juan Benet and Ravikan jointly founded this crowdfunding platform, which later became famous in the cryptocurrency circle. Although the two founders jointly established CoinList, the product, operation, and personnel configuration all came from AngelList, but the CEO was someone else, Andy Bromberg.

Andy graduated from Stanford University with a major in Mathematics and Computer Science, and was involved in the founding of the Stanford Bitcoin Group to promote Bitcoin. In addition, he is also the co-founder and CEO of Sidewire.

After a brief stint at CoinList, although still a co-founder, the focus has shifted to the newly established non-custodial payment wallet beam. The CEO was replaced by Graham Jenkin, but he did not hold the position for too long before being replaced again by Raghav Gulati.

Raghav Gulati previously served as a partner at SHA Ventures for nearly 6 years, and later worked as a product engineer at Shyp, Backplane, and KEEP. In 2019, he became the co-founder and CEO of Apex. In June 2022, the Apex team partnered with CoinList to improve the user experience of the latter. After joining CoinList, he became the Vice President of Product Management and eventually rose to the position of CEO.

The CoinList product business has now been divided into two major categories, one for user-facing platforms including trading, OTC, and staking, and the other for developer-facing functions such as launch, testnet, seed, and registration.

Despite the negative impact of the bull-to-bear market and a series of thunderbolt events, CoinList has achieved good results, stating in its 2022 review that it has added a total of 1 million KYC users. In 2023, after the market rebounded, an additional 600,000 users were added, with the strongest growth coming from Europe and Asia, with over 1.5 million users registered to participate and a cumulative token sales of over $20 million.

However, throughout the growth process of CoinList, it has always been criticized for its very strict KYC authentication.

When KYC was not strictly enforced in the past, many users would often purchase identities through intermediaries for batch authentication in order to obtain higher returns. This method was later discovered by CoinList and subjected to severe punishment.

In May 2023, CoinList issued a warning stating that "purchasing a CoinList account from a third party poses serious risks and consequences, violates CoinList's terms of service, and will result in immediate termination of the related account." Additionally, since the seller who created the account is the owner of the KYC, they can retrieve CoinList at any time and regain access to their account. The account seller can then withdraw funds, resulting in irreversible losses for the account buyer. Malicious sellers may even attempt to hold the account for ransom by trying to regain access to a "sold" CoinList account. In this situation, CoinList will be unable to assist users in recovering their assets.

Not long after, a considerable number of Chinese buyers discovered that their batch accounts had been banned, withdrawals suspended, and even remaining funds confiscated by the platform.

In fact, CoinList, which focuses on compliance, has strict KYC requirements. Users from many countries under jurisdiction are prohibited from participating in new project public offerings, such as the commonly seen United States and China, which are often strictly prohibited from participating in any project. Before each new project is publicly sold, users need to choose the corresponding country and region and submit authentication materials. If they do not meet the requirements, they will not be able to enter the public sale.

In December 2023, CoinList violated OFAC-related sanctions and paid a settlement of $1.2 million. CoinList Markets LLC opened accounts for 89 users, almost all of whom specified "Russia" as their country of residence, but provided addresses in Crimea when opening the accounts.

Behind CoinList's strict KYC policy lies a certain degree of protection for its brand compliance, but at the same time, it has left many players lamenting the missed opportunities for wealth.

二、回报率较高时期部分项目（2020-2021）

Translation:

II. Partial Projects with High Return Rates (2020-2021)

The last bull market cycle was the most glorious era for CoinList. Many well-known projects that earned huge returns participated in public offerings, and it is no exaggeration to say that as long as you grabbed them, you made a profit. Star projects such as NEAR, SOL, and FLOW have made CoinList famous in the industry.

Solana Blockchain

In March 2018, Solana's seed round raised $3.2 million (0.04 USD/token), and in June 2018, the genesis round raised $12.6 million (approximately 0.20 USD/SOL). In July 2019, the validator round raised $5.7 million, with a unit price of approximately 0.225 USD/SOL. In February 2020, the launch round raised $2.4 million, with a unit price of approximately 0.25 USD/SOL.

In March 2020, 8 million SOL tokens were auctioned on CoinList, raising a total of $1.76 million, or $0.22 per token. If calculated based on the historical high of $260, the return would be as high as 1180 times.

NEAR Blockchain

In August 2020, sharding NEAR conducted a public offering on CoinList and provided three options.

Option 1: $0.4 unit price, lock-up period of 40 days, a total of 25 million coins, minimum purchase of 500 coins per person, maximum purchase of 100,000 coins;

Option 2: $0.34 unit price, linear lock-up for 1 year, maximum purchase of 5 million coins per person;

Option 3: $0.29 per unit price, linear lock-up for 2 years, maximum purchase of 5 million units per person.

The final fundraising amount was nearly $30 million. It is worth mentioning that due to the traffic congestion and the overwhelming enthusiasm of the community, CoinList had to postpone the public sale before finally completing it.

During the last cycle, NEAR reached a near-historical high of $20.6. If calculated based on a cost price of $0.34, the return is as high as 60.5 times.

FLOW Public Chain

Ondo Finance creates and manages institutional-grade financial products, such as US Treasury bonds and money market funds, and builds DeFi protocols around these products. Ondo is committed to developing decentralized, composable protocols and providing tailored services to meet the needs of organizations, DAOs, and high net worth individuals.

Ondo Finance was founded by Allman and Pinku Surana, two former Goldman Sachs employees, in 2021. In April 2022, the company completed a $20 million funding round led by Founders Fund, a venture capital fund co-founded by Silicon Valley heavyweight investor Peter Thiel, and Pantera Capital. Other investors included Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, GoldenTree Asset Management, and Wintermute.

In May 2022, Ondo Finance sold a supply of 400 million tokens on CoinList at a unit price of $0.055. The minimum participation was $100 and the maximum was $2,000. Over 16,500 people participated in the public offering and purchased its native token ONDO. The number of tokens sold accounted for approximately 2% of its total circulation (10 billion tokens).

ONDO will be launched for trading in January 2024, with the highest price breaking through $0.3. As of now, the return is less than 6 times.

NYM Privacy Chain

Nym is a privacy platform that provides strong network-level privacy against complex end-to-end attackers, and uses blinded, re-randomizable, decentralized credentials for anonymous access control.

Nym Technologies completed a $2.5 million seed round financing in 2019, which was token financing with participation from institutions such as NGC, Lemniscap, and Edenblock. In July 2021, they completed a $6 million Series A financing round, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Eden Block, Greenfield One, Maven 11, Tioga, and 1kx.

Later in November, the company completed a $13 million funding round led by a16z, with participation from DCG, Tayssir Capital, Huobi Ventures, HashKey, Fenbushi Capital, and others.

Galxe is a Web3 credential infrastructure dedicated to helping Web3 brands better establish communities and products.

In February 2022, the project plans to sell a total of 10 million GAL Tokens (with a total supply of 200 million) at a unit price of $1.5. All shares (10 million GAL) of the project's public sale on the CoinList platform were sold out 50 minutes after the start of the sale, with over 1.07 million registered users participating.

CyberConnect Social Protocol

CyberConnect is a multi-chain decentralized social graph protocol that enables developers to create social applications, allowing users to have their own digital identity DID, content, connections, and tokenized channels platform.

In November 2021, CyberConnect completed a $10 million seed round of financing, led by Multicoin Capital and Sky 9 Capital, with participation from Animoca Brands, DraperDragon, Hashed, Mask Network, and others. In May 2022, they completed a $15 million Series A financing round, led by Animoca Brands and Sky 9 Capital.

NEON Solana EVM Compatible Solution

NEON is a fully compatible Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing developers to use all familiar Ethereum tools and seamlessly build on Solana.

In May 2023, NEON sold 50,000,000 NEON tokens on CoinList, accounting for 5% of the total circulating supply, at a price of $0.1. After a long period of dormancy, it reached its peak of $3.8 at the end of 2023, with a return of nearly 38 times, and the current price has fallen to $1.4.

Chainflip Cross-Chain Trading Protocol

In August 2021, it was announced that $6 million in funding had been completed, with Framework Ventures leading the investment. In May 2022, it was announced that $10 million in funding had been completed, with participation from Framework Ventures, Blockchain Capital, and Pantera Capital.

In September 2023, 4,500,000 FLIP tokens (ERC-20) were sold on CoinList at a price of $1.83 per token. The token price surged to over $7 after being listed for trading, but has since fallen back to above $5.

Archway Blockchain

Archway is a fast and low-cost transaction solution built on the Cosmos ecosystem public chain, with built-in developer incentives.

After the online trading, it began to decline and fell to around $0.05. It rose to $0.28 at the end of this year, but then fell all the way back to around $0.18, which is still below the public offering price.

Subsquid Zero-Knowledge Cross-Chain Data Query

Subsquid is a project that originated from Hackusama, a Kusama hackathon, to provide support for DApps built on Substrate, reducing data retrieval time and improving API reliability for developers.

In November 2021, completed a $3.8 million seed round of financing, led by Hypersphere Ventures, with participation from Zeeprime Capital, Lattice Capital, Illusionist Group, Digital Finance Group (DFG), and others.

In January 2024, CoinList will release 53,480,000 SQD tokens (4% of the total supply) for sale at a price of $0.094 per token.

zkLink Cross-Chain DEX Based on Zero-Knowledge Proof

zkLink is a multi-chain integrated trading platform based on ZK-Rollup technology, aiming to link multiple chains and aggregate liquidity from different ecosystems, making it possible to trade and combine native DeFi assets on different chains.

In October 2021, completed a $8.5 million seed round of financing, led by Republic Crypto, with participation from Arrington Capital, DeFi Alliance, Huobi Ventures, GSR, and others.

In May 2023, completed a $10 million financing round with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Ascensive Assets, SIG DTI, BigBrain Holdings, and Efficient Frontier.

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