Developed over 90% of the market value of cryptocurrency projects, sorting out the top 10 strongest Web3 technology teams globally

Original Title: 《The Top 10 Web3 Technology Teams in the World, Developing and Guarding Over 90% of the Market Value of Crypto Projects?》

Author: Huo Huo, Baihua Blockchain

According to statistics from Caixin Venture, 1 In January, the total number of financing deals in the global Web3.0 sector was 71, with a total financing amount of $1.034 billion, a 21.65% increase from $850 million in October.

Now, Web3 is a hot topic in the internet industry, discussed by everyone from top VCs to internet entrepreneurs. Renowned international venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital and Goldman Sachs have started investing heavily. Many individuals who left major internet companies are going all in on Web3, and companies like Tencent are also entering the Web3 gaming space.

In fact, over 90% of the market value in the nearly trillion-dollar crypto space is generated by leading projects. Today, Baihua Blockchain will help you sort out the 10 strongest and most contributing teams in Web3…

01 Bitcoin Core Team

In 2011, after disappearing, Satoshi Nakamoto handed over the development rights to Gavin Andresen, and subsequently, the Bitcoin project migrated to GitHub, officially naming the Bitcoin project "Bitcoin Core" in 2014, with the development team behind it also referred to as the Bitcoin Core team.

On GitHub, since anyone can contribute to Bitcoin Core, the Core team is not a traditional company; it can be described as a decentralized technical development organization composed of the custodians appointed by Satoshi Nakamoto, continuously absorbing new developers from the Bitcoin community. These individuals engaged in Bitcoin development come from various fields such as economics, politics, cryptography, and computer science.

As the developer team that has received the most support from the Bitcoin community for a long time, Bitcoin Core has been referred to as the most talented Bitcoin development team in the world. Currently, the Core team is still focused on maintaining the Bitcoin system and subsequent technical development, laying a solid foundation for future technological upgrades and development of Bitcoin.

To prevent centralization in technical development, the code merge submission rights of the Bitcoin Core team have been distributed among five individuals: Wladimir J. van der Laan, Pieter Wuille, Jonas Schnelli, Marco Falke, and Samuel Dobson. All merge submissions must be verified and deployed with their trusted PGP key signatures.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of people have contributed to the Bitcoin Core project. When the existing Core maintainers believe that a certain developer contributor excels in a particular area, is reliable, and shows initiative, they will grant that contributor's GitHub account commit permissions. Over the years, the chief maintainers have been:

Satoshi Nakamoto: 2009/01/03-2011/02/23

Gavin Andresen: 2011/02/23-2014/04/07

Wladimir van der Laan: 2014/04/07-present

The reason the Bitcoin network has been able to develop stably to this day, becoming the world's most successful peer-to-peer payment system, is due to the contributions of these individuals who have quietly supported the Bitcoin project technically.

02 Ethereum Core Team

Similar to the Bitcoin Core team, the Ethereum technical development team is also decentralized. Previously, Baihua Blockchain's article 《What Happened to the 8 Founders of Ethereum?》 introduced the early founders of Ethereum. The earliest Ethereum core team was composed of these individuals, and as the Ethereum community continued to grow, it gradually attracted members from around the world with "professional skills" to participate in the construction of the Ethereum infrastructure and its ecosystem.

Many people have long believed that Ethereum is a small technical development workshop led by Vitalik Buterin and a few friends. In reality, for a long time, the Ethereum community has maintained multiple interoperable open-source execution clients, developed by various independent teams using different programming languages, and much of the development work of the Ethereum core team can be said to involve these multiple teams.

Currently, there are eight teams dedicated to Ethereum 2.0 client development: ChainSafe Systems, PegaSys, Harmony, Parity Technologies, Prysmatic Labs, Sigma Prime, Status, and Trinity.

It is this diversity of clients and various technical teams that makes the network stronger, more diverse, and decentralized. In the major upgrades of the Ethereum network (including the POS merge), different client teams have repeatedly tested and adjusted on multiple testnets, and they have done a significant amount of work behind the scenes to ultimately submit a satisfactory "report."

With so many strong technical development teams as a backing, Ethereum has become the most powerful Web3 infrastructure (likely without a rival).

03 ConsenSys

Initially, ConsenSys was just a venture studio, its founder Joseph Lubin is one of the co-founders of Ethereum, who later helped establish the non-profit Ethereum Foundation, while focusing on building the Ethereum network and establishing numerous business relationships and soft power, becoming a bridge for value exchange between blockchain and government.

Currently, ConsenSys has successfully incubated over 50 projects that support the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem, covering development tools, infrastructure, core components, platform applications, DeFi, DAO, NFT, storage, decentralized digital identity, venture capital, etc., including well-known infrastructure projects like MetaMask and Infura.

MetaMask quickly gained popularity shortly after its release. For more than six years, the MetaMask team has been dedicated to creating a product that, while not perfect, is effective enough, and it is also a trusted original program for developers. Through this, MetaMask has helped tens of millions of users and thousands of developers access the Web3 world.

Another product under its umbrella, Infura, provides tools and infrastructure that allow developers to easily deploy their blockchain applications from testing to scaling. Infura can solve many pain points for blockchain developers.

Some say ConsenSys is another Ethereum; while this analogy may be a bit exaggerated, the importance of ConsenSys to Ethereum is undeniable, as it serves as a lobbying group, incubator, and technical driving force. Moreover, because ConsenSys is not only related to Ethereum but also establishes connections through government, regulation, and industry, it has made significant contributions to the entire crypto industry.

04 Polygon

Polygon Technology, widely known as Polygon, started in 2018 as a blockchain internet company.

In the beginning, several founders were focused on another scalable blockchain, Matic Network. In February 2021, the team announced that Matic Network would be renamed to its current name, Polygon, and declared it as the cross-chain center for Ethereum, establishing a new goal to become a company providing a wide range of multi-chain services.

Polygon's product, Polygon SDK, reduces transaction costs, increases speed, and supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing existing Ethereum applications to migrate relatively easily. Thus, in addition to gaining an experience comparable to Ethereum, users can also enjoy high throughput and low fees.

Currently, Polygon has deployed several popular decentralized finance DApps, such as Aave, 1INCH, Curve, and Sushi. Of course, there are also some native applications unique to Polygon, including QuickSwap and Slingshot, and it focuses on providing scalability to Ethereum through zero-knowledge technology.

Today, the Polygon ecosystem is strong, making it a leader in Layer 2, and since the project team is primarily Indian, it is also jokingly referred to as the Indian Ethereum.

05 StarkWare

In Ethereum's scaling roadmap, zero-knowledge proofs (ZK Rollup) have always been highly anticipated. Early zero-knowledge proof projects like Zcash and Monero excelled in privacy protection but could only serve as a means of value storage, making it difficult to support other applications.

Later star projects include StarkWare, ZKSync, and Aztec, among which StarkWare completed a $100 million Series D funding round in May this year at an $8 billion valuation, making StarkWare one of the highest-valued projects in the primary market, far exceeding the currently popular Layer 1 public chains Aptos and Sui.

However, StarkWare was established not long ago, in 2018 in Israel, but its team is strong and well-rounded, composed of world-class cryptographers and scientists: Core member Eli is the former chief scientist of Zcash and a leading figure in zero-knowledge innovation for many years, having invented zk-STARK and previously a professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, one of the world's leading cryptography experts; CEO Uri is a serial entrepreneur with keen business acumen and fundraising negotiation skills.

Currently, StarkWare's product system is divided into two parts:

One is StarkEx, serving as a ToB service. StarkEx established a business model of scaling as a service, officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet in 2020, and has achieved profitability. It has served top clients in the industry such as dYdX, Sorare, ImmutableX, and DeversiFi.

The other is StarkNet, a general-purpose L2, which can deploy any smart contract, unlike StarkEx, which requires custom development for specific applications. It is currently under development and testing, with the potential to decentralize node operations to the community, becoming a fully decentralized version.

Overall, the StarkWare team is the inventor of mainstream zero-knowledge proof technologies zk-SNARK and zk-STARK, and it adopts zk rollups based on STARK technology, which, compared to optimistic rollups, offers better user experience with faster withdrawal times.

As one of the best companies in the zk rollups space, StarkWare provides solutions based on STARK technology for the blockchain industry, and its leading-edge scaling technology is highly anticipated.

06 Cosmos

Cosmos was founded in 2014 by Ethan Buchman and Jae Kwon, aiming to create interoperable blockchains.

In the early stages, Cosmos established the non-profit organization Interchain Foundation (ICF) to promote ecosystem development, modeled after Ethereum.

In early 2020, founder Jae Kwon announced his departure, followed by core member Zaki Manian, which caused a significant drop in the price of its Coin ATOM.

However, Cosmos is a star in cross-chain technology, known as "the Internet of Blockchains," with interoperability and scalability being the project's biggest features. Additionally, there are two major innovations:

One is the technical innovation Tendermint, which is a solution that packages the blockchain's network and consensus layer into a general-purpose engine, allowing developers to focus on application development rather than complex underlying protocols, making it easy to get started;

The other is the security innovation Cosmos SDK, which allows developers to port any existing blockchain codebase in Golang, making it convenient and straightforward.

Therefore, although the Cosmos team has experienced ups and downs since its establishment, it has always remained true to its original intention, continuously working to solve issues such as scalability, message passing between different chains, sovereignty & shared security, and improving speed, making significant contributions and efforts to Web3.0.

But can Cosmos capture value by lowering the developer threshold, optimizing user experience, and enhancing ATOM's value capture? The upgrade of Cosmos 2.0 will assist in occupying a leading position in the future public chain market, but whether it can break through the public chain competition still needs time to test.

07 Polkadot

In 2016, Ethereum experienced a forking crisis. The Parity team considered independently creating a sharded version of Ethereum, while Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood realized that it would take at least 5 years, or even 5 to 10 years, for Ethereum 2.0 to become a reality, so he decided to leave Ethereum and start Polkadot from scratch.

In October 2016, the first draft of the Polkadot white paper was released.

Once the Polkadot project was proposed, it sparked a frenzy in the industry. In 2017, Polkadot's first private sale raised 485,331 ETH in just 7 days, worth about $144 million at the time. At that time, Polkadot was still just a white paper.

Although Ethereum claims to be a world computer, enabling the flourishing development of DeFi through smart contracts, its performance is limited and can easily lead to network congestion due to too many contracts; another issue is that Ethereum has gradually formed a closed ecosystem. When Bitcoin users cannot use the DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum, it is not beneficial for the entire blockchain industry.

Thus, Gavin Wood proposed the idea that the world cannot have only one Ethereum. He believes that in the future decentralized world, there will be multiple public chains, and these public chains need to be interconnected; otherwise, isolated public chains will become "information islands," and the bridge connecting these public chains is cross-chain technology.

Therefore, Polkadot introduced an important function: cross-chain. By the way, when mentioning Polkadot, it is often referred to alongside Cosmos as the "cross-chain dual heroes."

Cross-chain design breaks away from the traditional single blockchain thinking, expanding from a point of one ecosystem to a network that can connect many ecosystems. Additionally, Polkadot is a scalable heterogeneous multi-chain system that does not provide any inherent functional applications; its main role is to connect various chain protocols, maintain effective and secure protocol communication, and store this communication information. This significantly enhances scalability and interactivity while ensuring shared security.

Based on the outlook for Web3.0, Polkadot has made significant contributions to Web3.0, both in terms of physical architecture and protocol level.

08 Dapper Labs

Speaking of "CryptoKitties," this name is well-known in the industry. When it launched at the end of 2017, it clogged Ethereum, and over the past two years, news about Cheese Wizard, Dapper Wallet, collaborations with the NBA and UFC, massive funding, and the Flow blockchain has been continuous. All of this is thanks to the team behind it—Dapper Labs.

Looking back at Dapper Labs' development journey, each new project has set new records. Thus, the saying "Dapper Labs produces only quality products" has become popular in the circle. In fact, very few teams in the crypto industry can simultaneously develop blockchains, wallets, and launch popular applications, and the Dapper Labs team has excelled in completing these tasks. So what is the magic of this team?

Founded in February 2018, Dapper Labs' original intention was to advance towards the goal of "how to make blockchain better adopted by the mainstream." Around this goal, Dapper Labs has achieved innovative development in terms of users, developers, and innovative business models.

The Dapper Labs team is co-led by Roham Gharegozlou, Dieter Shirley, and Mikhael Naayem.

Roham Gharegozlou was born in Iran and started engaging with the internet and making websites in high school. After graduating from Stanford University, he founded an internet-related studio in 2012, three years later. Subsequently, due to various coincidences, Roham Gharegozlou, who mined Bitcoin at home, and Mikhael Naayem, who developed his own mobile game platform (later sold to Animoca Brands), joined Roham Gharegozlou's studio. At this point, they began to realize that blockchain technology could change society and grant new freedoms, so the studio shifted towards the development of crypto technology.

Thus, in 2017, the world's first blockchain game, CryptoKitties, was born in this studio. Due to the game's immense popularity, the team transformed the studio into Dapper Labs, leading to a series of exciting stories.

As stated in Dapper Labs' mission: Blockchain is for you. If the blockchain industry has opened the era of NFTs, then Dapper Labs has propelled the NFT industry.

09 Yuga Labs

The story behind the establishment of Yuga Labs is quite simple. In their early twenties, Gordon Goner and Gargamel were friends who became wealthy through cryptocurrency in 2017, but then "lost everything" due to leveraged trading, prompting them to consider starting a business in this space. Just before the NFT summer in early 2021, inspired by the works of predecessors in the circle, they contacted two other engineer friends, and the four of them created an NFT project themed around apes, which unexpectedly became a huge success. Thus, on April 23, 2021, with the launch of the BAYC club, Yuga Labs was born.

"Yuga" comes from a wizard in the game "The Legend of Zelda" who can transform himself and others into 2D artworks, which the founders of BAYC adopted as the studio's name, symbolizing the team's extraordinary creativity.

After the BAYC NFT series achieved tremendous success, Yuga Labs became a household name in the crypto industry. Later, the derivative project Bored Ape Kennel Club also gained popularity, followed by the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, which continued to thrive.

As the most influential NFT project in the industry today, BAYC holds a significant transitional role in the history of NFT development, leading many players to view BAYC as the Ethereum of the NFT field.

Earlier this year, Yuga Labs acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits series IPs, meaning that two major blue-chip IPs merged into one. The reason given by CryptoPunks developer Larva Labs for the sale was that they felt Yuga Labs was better at operating and developing image-based projects and their community ecosystem than themselves.

Acquiring star NFT IPs like CryptoPunks and Meebits is just a glimpse of Yuga Labs' business operation capabilities. Yuga Labs is also extending its operational capabilities beyond brand-related activities. On March 12 of this year, Yuga Labs announced that it is building an ape universe, with BAYC as the center of this universe. The project, named "MetaRPG," is centered around gaming and aims to expand the BAYC world, welcoming non-BAYC holders to join.

In fact, BAYC has evolved from a simple JPEG NFT into a broader ecosystem due to the special rights granted to NFT holders by the project team: including participation in various events hosted by the project team and the right to share various services and products provided by the project team.

For the team, Yuga Labs is continuously pushing the boundaries of the NFT ecosystem. Besides the BAYC series, Yuga Labs is also building a highly loyal product system, preparing to promote products through influencers in various fields, and the future of the ape metaverse is worth looking forward to.

10 Axies Developer Sky Mavis

Sky Mavis was established in early 2018 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, as a game studio focused on technology, building the virtual worlds of the future and the infrastructure that makes it possible, so Sky Mavis can also be seen as an infrastructure builder.

In 2017, after playing CryptoKitties for several months, CEO Nguyen became fascinated. He then realized he could create his own blockchain-based game. With the help of a group of friends, Nguyen created Axie Infinity in just a few months.

After the game Axie Infinity exploded in popularity, according to Token Terminal data, it achieved revenue of up to $334 million in just 30 days, surpassing the $231 million revenue of Honor of Kings on July 2, 2021. At that time, Axie Infinity became the darling of the digital asset gaming sector.

In traditional games, the equipment, items, pets, and coins we obtain in the game seem to belong to us. However, in reality, these virtual assets belong to the game development company, and the data represented by these virtual assets is also controlled by the company.

Sky Mavis attempts to introduce blockchain technology into games, making in-game coins cryptocurrencies and in-game equipment, items, and pets NFTs. The data of these digital assets is stored on a decentralized blockchain, thus giving players ownership of these virtual assets. It may seem like a simple integration of blockchain technology into gaming, but this approach fundamentally changes the nature of the game itself.

It can be said that Sky Mavis's success with Axie Infinity has brought a new concept to the gaming industry, validating a new direction for development. Sky Mavis has not only launched a successful game, Axie Infinity, but more importantly, its explorations have brought disruptive innovations to the entire gaming industry, leading to significant changes in the gaming sector.

Summary

In the 13-year history of the crypto industry, 2022 was one of the most challenging years ever, with external financial panic and a series of internal events leading to a chain reaction of failures, but the exit of the losers can pave the way for a more robust future for the industry.

However, with the groundwork laid by these predecessors, we can still be certain that those who continue to build will always be there, and we believe that the crypto industry, after experiencing a tumultuous year, will only become stronger and will not perish.