"In recent months, the popularity of tokens with high valuations and low initial circulating supply has been a topic of discussion in the crypto community. This stems from the concern that this market structure leaves little sustainable upside for traders after the token generation event ("TGE"). "-This is the opening sentence of Binance Research's article "Binance Research: Low circulation and high FDV tokens are prevalent, why has the market developed to this point? " published this week. It seems that all of a sudden, the reasons and discussions for the prevalence of "high FDV, low circulation" tokens have become the headlines of the cryptocurrency media and are frequently mentioned in the hot topics of community members. On May 20, Binance announced that it will take the lead in supporting small and medium-sized cryptocurrency projects. It hopes to promote the development of the blockchain ecosystem by strengthening support for small and medium-sized cryptocurrency projects with good fundamentals, community foundation, sustainable business models and industry responsibility.

However, this article does not elaborate on the discussions and problems caused by high-valuation, low-circulation projects. Interested readers can check out the relevant articles: "When low-circulation, high-FDV tokens are rampant, the rising profits may have already been privately divided", "Dragonfly Partner: Is VC Coin really the culprit of this round of "bull market without mutual takeover"? ", "Why do VCs raise the FDV of projects? Investment from the perspective of meme》

This article aims to list some small and medium-sized cryptocurrency projects through financing data, investment institutions, project progress, user data, etc., to find "potential stocks" in the current market environment. Some of them have also received investment from Binance Labs. Although Binance has previously stated that Binance Labs' investment and listing review departments operate independently and do not interfere with each other, obtaining relevant investment projects may also indicate that they are more in line with Binance standards to a certain extent, so they are temporarily used as one of the reference marks in this article. This article does not contain any investment advice and is only for readers' learning reference.

GoPlus security

Raised approximately $15 million

Project introduction:

GoPlus is a powerful Web3 user security data platform that has developed a real-time, dynamic, and automated security detection platform, including token detection, NFT detection, malicious addresses, approval security APIs, and dApp contract security.

Team background:

The GoPlus team is experienced in the field of data security, and its members are mainly from China, Turkey, the United States, Greece and other countries, and most of them have worked in Web2 security-related work.

Project Progress &User Data:

On April 30, GoPlus launched the user security-centric RPC service GoPlus SecNet and the on-chain personal security center GoPlus SecHub. According to official introduction, the number of monthly active independent IP users of the full-scenario security service platform SecWareX has reached 1.8 million, the number of users who pay to subscribe to advanced security services has exceeded 50,000, and the total number of chain addresses has exceeded 9 million. In addition, GoPlus has a clear plan for the Q2-Q3 stage in 2024:

1. Launch of GoPlus SecNet: The first version has covered Ethereum and BNB chains, allowing SecWareX users to access and experience real-time on-chain risk control on a large scale.

2. Launch of SecHub: Launch of the personal security center module to provide users with various security risk preference settings, allowing personalized configuration of their security strategies.

3. SecWare protocol openness: aims to build the GoPlus network developer ecosystem, so that more services can serve users through SecWareX

4. Security gas service model: introduce project tokens $GPS and energy blocks as gas for security services, thereby realizing the circulation of the economic system.

LayerZero

Raised approximately $260 million

Project introduction:

LayerZero is a trustless cross-chain communication protocol. Its essence is to use the technical principles of light nodes, design the mechanism of ultra-light nodes, and divide the intermediate trust link into two through relayers and oracles, thereby exchanging lower fees for better security.

Financing situation:

LayerZero has completed 3 rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of more than $250 million, and a luxurious investment lineup, including Andreessen Horowitz, Binance Labs, Sequoia Capital, Samsung Next, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, etc.

On September 16, 2021, LayerZero completed a $6 million Series A financing with a valuation of $50 million, led by Multicoin Capital and Binance Labs.

On March 30, 2022, LayerZero completed an additional $135 million Series A financing with a valuation of $1 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

On April 4, 2023, LayerZero completed a $120 million Series B financing with a valuation of $3 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Team Background:

Caleb Banister is the co-founder of LayerZero Labs. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2010 and was the co-founder of 80Trill (a crypto company that specializes in writing and auditing smart contracts for blockchain-related projects) and Minimal AI (an ML/AI company);

Bryan Pellegrino is the co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. Before founding LayerZero, Pellegrino was a professional poker player who successfully sold a set of machine learning tools he wrote to an MLB (Major League Baseball) team and published journal reports in the field of artificial intelligence;

Ryan Zarick is the co-founder and CTO of LayerZero Labs. He was the co-founder of 80Trill and Minimal AI and joined the Layerzero team in 2021.

Project Progress:

The LayerZero announcement indicates that the token may be issued in June. The token distribution information was announced on May 11, with 50% allocated to users of cross-chain OFT, 20% to LP, 15% to token holders, and 15% to community members. At the same time, the LayerZero Foundation will screen according to the final witch report, and the witch address will be automatically disqualified from the allocation.

User data:

In May, LayerZero co-founder said the actual number of users exceeded 6 million, and said in the community that it is expected that 6.67%-13.33% of the 6 million addresses will be eligible for airdrops.

Puffer Finance

Raised approximately US$24.15 million

Project introduction:

Puffer is a permissionless native liquidity re-staking protocol built on EigenLayer, which reduces its staking validator startup threshold from 32 ETH to less than 2 ETH, and has received funding from the Ethereum Foundation. Puffer aims to serve three main groups: node operators (NoOps), re-staking operators (ReOps) and ETH stakers, among which ReOps are mainly responsible for AVSs operation and may also be NoOps. Nodes in the protocol use Puffer's anti-slashing technology to participate in node verification and run AVSs at a cost as low as 2 ETH, and can accumulate PoS rewards and obtain re-staking rewards through AVSs operation at the same time.

Financing:

In June 2022, Puffer Finance received a pre-seed round of investment of US$650,000, led by Jump Crypto, with participation from Arcanum Capital and IoTeX.

In August 2023, Puffer Finance announced the completion of a $5.5 million seed round of financing, led by Lemniscap and Lightspeed Faction.

In January 2024, Binance Labs made a strategic investment in Puffer, and the specific investment amount was not disclosed.

On April 16, 2024, the Ethereum re-staking protocol Puffer completed a $18 million Series A financing, led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital, and participated by Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Lemniscap, Franklin Templeton and other investment institutions.

Team Background:

The Puffer Finance team has five core members who are proficient in Python, C language, Java, SolidWorks, JavaScript, blockchain and other fields. Their professional backgrounds include computer science, electrical engineering, marketing, etc.

Amir Forouzani is the co-founder and CEO of Puffer. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a background in data science and NASA. He holds a master's degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the University of Southern California and has worked as a research assistant.

Jason Vranek is the co-founder and CTO of Puffer, with a master's degree in computer science and engineering and experience in market design and blockchain front-end transactions. He uses Chisel to build hardware accelerators and is interested in areas such as teaching and automatic theorem provers, deep reinforcement learning, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in verifiable computing.

Project Progress:

On April 16, 2024, according to the official website of Puffer Finance, the total TVL of the protocol reached 1.179 billion US dollars, and 20.02 billion Puffer points, 550 million Eigenlayer points and a comprehensive APY of over 3.3% have been generated.

On May 9, 2024, the Puffer Finance mainnet was launched, marking the entry of the mission into Chapter 4. Users can now deposit ETH, stETH or wstETH. Detailed Chapter 4 tasks will be launched soon, and an improved points system will soon be brought.

On May 15, 2024, Puffer Protocol revealed in an AMA event that it would launch a new Chapter 4 event. The new Puffer points mechanism will further enhance the benefits of pufETH holders, and will soon cooperate with Trust Wallet, Scroll and its ecological project Pencils Protocol to jointly carry out multiple incentive activities for Puffer users. In the future, Puffer plans to launch its own AVS to continue to provide higher sustainable rewards to its stakers and node operators through re-staking and verification services.

Puffer's mechanism includes two tokens, the liquidity staking token pufETH and the governance token PUFI. Users who stake ETH on Puffer can obtain the liquidity staking token pufETH. PUFI will be used for voting and governance in Puffer DAO. The specific token economic model has not yet been disclosed.

User data:

Puffer, as a node operator ranked in the top 10 on the EigenLayer official website, has only registered EigenDA's AVS. As of May 20, 2024, the number of pledgers is 8,690, and the entrusted assets include approximately 1.786 million EIGEN and 3,372 ETH, with ETH mainly coming from Lido and Swell.

Myshell

Raised approximately $16.6 million

Project Introduction:

MyShell is a fair and open source AI ecosystem that covers a large number of open source and closed source AI models. It is an AI agent/APP creation platform where creators can build applications and easily capture users. Its ecosystem includes robots such as OpenVoice (an instant voice cloning program); MeloTTS, a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) library; Alice is an artificial intelligence agent that can perform a variety of tasks, including topic research, coding, and literature review.

Financing:

MyShell received a seed round of financing of US$5.6 million on October 16, 2023, and a round A financing of US$11 million led by Dragonfly on March 27 of the same year, with participation from Delphi Digital, Bankless Ventures, Nascent, Foresight Ventures, OKX Ventures, GSR, Maven11, Nomad Capital, Animoca Brands and other investment institutions.

Team Background:

Myshell co-founders Rick and Ethan have been deeply involved in the field of AI for more than 10 years. Most of the research team comes from top universities such as MIT, Princeton University, and Oxford University. Rick is one of the co-founders of Myshell and has rich entrepreneurial and management experience in the fields of AI and robotics. Rick is mainly responsible for product design and team management at Myshell. Ethan Sun is another co-founder of Myshell and has rich entrepreneurial and R&D experience. He is mainly responsible for technical architecture design and core algorithm innovation at Myshell. He has invested a lot of energy in the development of TTS speech synthesis technology to achieve high-quality synthesis of personalized speech. Ethan Sun is an expert in AI and speech technology. Myshell's technical advantages are largely due to his contribution.

Project Progress & User Data:

Myshell is an AI project incubated by Binance Labs in the sixth phase. On April 19, MyShell launched the world's first AI consumer Layer2 network, which is technically supported by EigenDA and Optimism, and has reached a cooperation with AltLayer. As of mid-April, more than 50,000 creators have built innovative AI applications on MyShell, and more than 1.2 million users are using Myshell.

On April 29, MyShell launched the first phase of the test network, with AltLayer providing security deployment. The project will also release NFT MySoul at the end of May, with a total supply of 3,333, of which 65% will be allocated to test network users, 10% to the community, 15% to Myshell Treasury, and 10% to the NFT launchpad and community collaboration.

Ultiverse Electric Sheep

Raised approximately US$13.5 million

Project Introduction:

Ultiverse is a one-stop platform for Web3 game production and publishing driven by artificial intelligence. Ultiverse is based on the Bodhi protocol and connects different game worlds in a generative artificial intelligence way.

Financing:

Ultiverse has completed three rounds of financing. The investment lineup is luxurious, including BinanceLabs, Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital, Animoca Brands, etc. On March 18, 2022, it completed a $4.5 million seed round of financing with a valuation of $50 million. On March 25, 2022, Binance Labs invested an additional $5 million in Ultiverse, and the investment will be made in the form of equity acquisition. On February 14, 2024, Ultiverse completed a $4 million strategic round of financing with a valuation of $150 million, led by IDG Capital.

Team Background:

The team consists of more than one hundred full-time game developers and artists. Team members' previous work experience includes Gameloft, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Tencent, etc. The team has developed popular games such as "Prince of Persia" and "Assassin's Creed" series and "Elden Ring".

Project progress:

On January 3, 2024, Ultiverse released token economics, and 8% of the tokens will be airdropped to Electric Sheep NFT, SOUL holders and ecosystem asset holders. The specific distribution of the remaining ULTI is as follows: 30% of the tokens will be used for the Ultiverse ecosystem; 20% of the tokens will be allocated to investors; 17% of the tokens will be allocated to the team; 15% of the tokens will be allocated to the community; 7% of the tokens will be used for initial exchange liquidity.

The Ultiverse Gold Chip NFT was released on April 29. As of press time, according to Blur data, the NFT floor price is 0.33 ETH.

User data:

Currently, according to official introduction, Ultiverse supports more than 300 game integrations, with more than 7 million active community users, including more than 1 million Web3 game enthusiasts, and about 10,000 content creators on the platform.

Thruster

Raised approximately $7.5 million

Project Introduction:

Thruster is the native DEX of the Blast ecosystem. For developers, Thruster provides a fair launch mechanism and liquidity tools. For users, Thruster supports revenue tools as well as social and analytical features, making trading and liquidity provision easier. Thruster has confirmed that many Blast native projects want to use Thruster infrastructure and community to guide their tokens.

Team Introduction:

The team is anonymous and no relevant information is available at present.

Financing:

On April 18, Thruster completed a $7.5 million seed round at a valuation of $70 million, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Manifold Ventures, and Arche Fund (formerly Coin98 Ventures).

Project Progress & User Data:

On May 1, the Thruster Credit Dashboard was launched, which tracks loyalty data such as liquidity, swaps, and social contributions. On May 10, Thruster decided to give 2.7 million Blast gold points to loyal users of the platform for phased distribution, mainly to platform liquidity providers. As of May 16, more than 2 million points have been distributed.

Official data shows that Thruster has been used by more than 100,000 independent wallets, with funds deposited close to $300 million. On May 22, Thruster posted on the X platform that Thruster's TVL exceeded $500 million for the first time.

Analog

Raised approximately $16 million

Project Introduction:

Analog is a blockchain interoperability project that is building cross-chain communication tools for interoperability across multiple blockchain networks. Its core products include Timechain, a blockchain network based on the Rust language; Analog Watch, a product for developers; and the Timegraph SDK and API suite, which allows application builders to combine applications on multiple chains. Analog has also launched a novel and fast PoT protocol that creates verifiable event data on the time chain, allowing DApp developers to build the next generation of event-based applications.

Financing:

In March 2024, Analog announced the completion of a $16 million seed and strategic round of financing to improve its cross-network communication tools for developers. Tribe Capital led the investment, and NGC Ventures, Wintermute, GSR, NEAR, Orange DAO, Mike Novogratz's alternative asset management company Samara Asset Group, Balaji Srinivasan and others participated in the investment. The financing was achieved through a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT), and this round of financing increased Analog's fully diluted valuation to $120 million.

Team introduction:

Victor Young is the founder of Analog and a partner of X Fund, with many years of experience in blockchain development. Eric Wang is the team's business leader and has worked at Injective Labs and Polkadot Ecosystem Development Organization. Avneet Singh is the team's product manager and has worked as a product manager at Chainlink; another product manager, Sanchal Ranjan, was once an entrepreneur supported by the well-known venture capital firm Y Combinator. Some members of Analog's team have worked at Parity Technologies, the Polkadot ecosystem development organization.

Project progress:

At present, the official has confirmed that airdrops can be received by participating in the test network. According to the token economy it announced, 26% of the total token supply will be used for airdrops. In 2024, amid the craze of many full-chain interoperability protocols issuing coins, Analog, which has received investment from a star lineup, is also worthy of attention. On May 9, Analog announced that it would open the second phase of the test network to community members. The Analog Discord community has more than 110,000 members, and the community is very popular.

NGRAVE

Raised approximately US$21 million

Project Introduction:

NGRAVE is a hardware wallet manufacturer that provides a complete self-custody solution, including the connectionless and highest security certification (EAL7) hardware wallet ZERO, the mobile application LIQUID that connects users to the blockchain in real time, and the encrypted and recoverable key backup GRAPHENE. In 2022, NGRAVE raised a total of US$21 million, with participating investors including Binance Labs, Woodstock Fund, Morningstar Ventures, DFG, Spark Digital Capital, Moonrock Capital, Mapleblock Capital, etc.

Team Background:

NGRAVE was founded in Belgium in 2018. The founding team consists of Ruben Merre, Xavier Hendrickx and Edouard Vanham. Ruben Merre is the CEO and is a serial entrepreneur. Xavier Hendrickx is the CTO and is a self-taught computer science graduate. Edouard Vanham is the COO and was a banker and entrepreneur.

User Data:

As of December 2022, Ngrave's flagship product Zero has been sold in 90 countries and regions, with cumulative sales of US$2.2 million. Recent data has not been disclosed.

Since NGRAVE is a hardware wallet product, it is highly likely that it will not issue tokens, so only an introduction is given for the convenience of readers.

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