Shark Fish Talks About the Development History and Prospects of the Crypto Assets Industry

Shenyu is an early participant in the Crypto Assets industry, starting involvement in the early construction of blockchain in China in 2011, and launched the first Chinese language mining pool in 2013. After 2017, Cobo company was established, focusing on private key management and its derivative risks.

Early Industry Atmosphere

Shen Yu introduced his experience of entering the Bitcoin circle. From 2011 to 2013, the Chinese Crypto Assets ecosystem was mainly composed of two types of people: idealistic crypto punks and miners who mined using graphics cards. At that time, the community mainly communicated through QQ groups, with a group of 40,000 to 50,000 people. Everyone was discussing various ideas every day, and many innovations that seemed incredible at the time, such as stablecoins and decentralized exchanges, have now been realized.

The Significance of the 2017 ICO Wave

The ICO boom in 2017, although filled with bubbles, had significant meaning for the development of the industry. It brought a large number of on-chain Crypto Assets to the Ethereum ecosystem, laying the foundation for the later explosion of DeFi. Although there were fraudulent projects, good projects and protocols still remained and continued to iterate. The application explosion brought about by the bubble also forced the improvement of the underlying infrastructure.

The Rise of DeFi

The divine fish started to engage with DeFi in 2018-2019, but it had not yet been widely applied at that time. In 2020-2021, DeFi reached a turning point, with Compound representing a new wave of liquidity incentives. The divine fish invested a lot of energy and assets to participate in DeFi, transforming from a physical miner to a "DeFi miner." He believes that DeFi allows practitioners to better leverage their advantages in private key management and underlying security.

The Value of NFTs

Shen Yu believes that the NFT market is very interesting, relatively decentralized, with a large number of fragmented communities, each with its own cultural characteristics. NFTs have brought a lot of fresh blood, making the encryption world more diverse. Although the NFT cycle is relatively short, it is very important for the future development of the industry. NFTs can also carry many non-standardized assets from the real world, and the future application prospects are broad.

Lessons from 2022

In 2022, the Crypto Assets industry faced continuous crises, but looking back at history, the underlying logic of various security incidents is a human nature problem. Industry participants became inflated, decision-making was no longer rational, and deviated from the original intention of blockchain. Users handed their private keys to centralized institutions, which find it difficult to resist inner greed.

The divine fish believes that 2022 was a year of demystification, gaining important lessons: one should not trust human nature, but rather trust mathematics and the underlying technical principles. In the future, everyone needs to easily master their own private keys to increase transparency in the industry. Keyless solutions based on MPC are rapidly developing, and trading volume on decentralized exchanges is also growing.

Outlook for the Future

Shen Yu believes that the Bitcoin halving next year is worth looking forward to. From a macro perspective, the situation may improve; from an industry-driven perspective, halving is a good narrative logic. He expects another round of halving market from Q4 this year to next year.

Development Direction of Cobo

Cobo provides three different private key management solutions based on different stages of application scenarios:

1. Purely centralized custody solution Cobo Custody
2. Multi-signature solution for on-chain smart contracts Cobo Argus
3. MPC Solutions for Decentralized Collaborative Management

Cobo hopes to enable more users to safely and easily enter the blockchain world through these products.