Qiming Venture Partners Executive Director Discusses Web3 Investment Strategy and Industry Prospects

Qiming Venture Partners is a globally renowned venture capital firm with 17 years of experience in the VC field. The company began investing in the cryptocurrency sector in 2019 and has currently invested in 16-17 projects. Qiming Venture Partners' Web3 investment strategy primarily focuses on supporting Chinese entrepreneurs, with investment areas covering multiple sectors including infrastructure, application layer, and middleware.

The executive director of the company stated that they are optimistic about the long-term potential of the cryptocurrency and Web3 industry. From a technological and talent perspective, this market has attracted a large number of outstanding engineers and developers. The vision of Web3 is to build a value network where users can own and quickly exchange digital assets, value, and identity. Currently, the Web3 industry exhibits some characteristics similar to the early days of the internet in certain aspects and has already established some global de facto standards.

Although Qiming Venture Partners mainly focuses on Series A and Series B investments, they have adopted a more flexible strategy in the Web3 space, investing in both early-stage projects and higher-valued growth-stage projects. In addition to the Ethereum scaling project Scroll, Qiming Venture Partners has also invested in several projects such as the self-custody wallet imToken and the crypto financial company Matrixport. In terms of underlying infrastructure, they have paid attention to emerging fields such as staking service providers.

Regarding the current market situation, the executive director expressed a cautiously optimistic attitude towards market improvement before the end of next year, but is also prepared for the unpredictability of the market. He suggested that invested projects maintain sufficient capital reserves and sustainable income models to weather possible prolonged market downturns.

In terms of investment strategy, Qiming Venture Partners hopes to maintain a stable investment rhythm, but bull and bear markets do affect specific operations. The investment pace during a bear market is slower, but it is more conducive to gaining an in-depth understanding of projects and conducting thorough due diligence.

When discussing the elements required for the large-scale adoption of Web3, the executive believes that there is still a significant gap between Web3 and Web2 in terms of user scale and experience. The main challenges include user acceptance of cryptocurrency payments, the inadequacy of underlying infrastructure, and some technical details such as wallet design. He anticipates that resolving these issues will take a considerable amount of time, potentially exceeding 2-3 years.

For Web2 entrepreneurs entering the Web3 space, Qiming Venture Partners holds a welcoming attitude. They believe that these entrepreneurs possess strong technical and execution capabilities, as well as a deep understanding of products. As long as they are willing to learn the characteristics of Web3, they can often adapt quickly and achieve success.

Regarding the phenomenon of some Web3 entrepreneurs turning to the AI field, the executive expressed understanding. He pointed out that this is partly due to the current lack of new application scenarios in the Web3 industry, and on the other hand, there have indeed been some exciting breakthroughs in the AI field. However, he also reminded entrepreneurs that both AI and Web3 face significant challenges and uncertainties at the application level, suggesting that they make choices based on personal interests and abilities.