Genius X Summary of 2023 and Growth Plan for 2024

As we are approaching the end of 2023, the Genius X team would like to share with you all a review of 2023 from our own perspective, as well as our plan and the roadmap for 2024. We always appreciate your companionship and support since the birth of Genius X, and would love to involve you more in our thinking and planning.

TL;DR

1. Despite the challenging 2023, Genius X has achieved several milestones:

• < 25% portfolio failure rate, compared to 90% for general startups
• Completion of the Multi-Token ISPO on our end
• Launch and monetization of Genius X Launchpad
• Launch of $GENSX token
• Blockchain-agnostic expansion with exposure to new EVM business
• Strategic expansion to other crypto hubs such as Dubai

2. With a positive vision on the market for 2024, Genius X is eyeing the following growth opportunities and plans:

• Continue to improve the success rate of the accelerator portfolio
• Plan for $GENSX staking reward distribution in Q1 2024
• New Cardano devs community growth in under-tapped markets like Asia
• Launch new product lines such as Genius X Advisory Services
• Explore strategic partnerships to scale up Genius X Accelerator
• Explore potential synergies between Genius X Launchpad and Genius Yield’s DEX
• Build new connections and businesses in new crypto markets such as the Middle East and Asia

First, we want to clarify again the nature of Genius X — it is created as a venture-accelerating powerhouse for Web3-based startups. Our goal is to support early-stage startup projects throughout their development journey. Similar to VC (Venture Capital) investment, venture acceleration is a probability game — meaning a large number of projects you support will fail, while you aim to generate a substantial level of return from very few successful ones.

Statistically, startups have as high a failure rate as 90% (source), due to the nature of this business. When it comes to the VC industry, at least half of the portfolio of an average VC fund loses them money, while the enormous return (like > 3x of investment cost) comes from only 5% of their portfolio (source). Venture acceleration tends to be a bit more extreme as it usually deals with more even earlier-stage projects.

2023 was a tough year for the whole Web3 industry, where we see the project failure number peaks, while the new project number bottoms. Additionally, many Web3 investment funds have run out of capital as their existing portfolios are not delivering returns during the venture bear market. Almost everyone is at loss on their books. This has created a significant level of challenge to new entrepreneurs and venture builders.

Despite that, we at Genius X have never stopped building through the tough days. As a result, we are very happy to see quite a number of achievements in our current accelerator program, where we have seen:

1. Less than 25% projects have had to cease operation before launching product and token;
2. Approximately 25% projects have already shipped products and been generating initial revenue, such as Maestro, FluidTokens, Dropspot, and Ledgity, despite a challenging market that has restricted their development;
3. The rest of more than 50% projects have still been building and moving towards the product launch stage, despite all the difficulties they have to manage during the bear cycle; and
4. 2 out of the 3 winners during the 2023 Cardano Summit “Battle of the Builders” competition are our accelerator projects, namely Maestro and zkFold.

In addition, we have also delivered and continue to deliver on the following initiatives during 2023:

1. Completing our part of the work regarding the Multi-Token ISPO
2. Hosting 2 token sales on the Genius X launchpad (after which we decided to slow down the launchpad business expansion due to negative market conditions)
3. Tokenizing Genius X through the $GENSX token launch
4. Building initial traction in other ecosystems than Cardano (i.e. Arbitrum, Polygon) for capturing additional growth and value opportunities for our project
5. Expanding Genius X team’s physical presence to Dubai which is a vibrant crypto hub in the world

As we see the marketing has recently started turning, and a number of macro parameters (macro economy, Bitcoin halving, Bitcoin spot ETF applications, institutional adoption, etc.), moving towards the positive direction, we expect that our accelerator startup projects will all benefit in 2024–25, potentially with substantially improved business performance and value.

During 2024, we are looking at the following focus areas and strategic priorities for Genius X:

1. Improving success rate and impact of the Genius X accelerator projects — the challenging bear market has caused a lot of delay and slow-down for all startup projects that are in lack of resources. But for those who continue to build and take their project forward, we will continue our support for them to reach the product and launch stage.
2. Plan for the $GENSX staking reward in the form of accelerator project tokens and launchpad revenue share in Q1 2024 — although we do not see the current reward pool in this form has been mature enough (as many projects have not seen the best market condition to launch their tokens, or deliver concrete value component to their tokens yet), we will still plan to start the reward distribution at an initial, level scale, because we understand that this is well expected by our community.
3. Contributing to onboarding new developers to Cardano — a fundamental problem with Cardano today, that we have observed, is the lack of new developers / project builders over the last 1–2 years. Recently, we have seen a huge lack of new projects on Cardano, except for those launched by the same Founders of existing projects. This is not healthy for the organic growth of the ecosystem. Moreover, we have also noticed that Cardano is extremely under-represented today in some crypto startup-rich regions, such as Asia (particularly Greater China and India), while many other blockchain foundations / official stakeholders are active in growing their developer community there. If we can bring new developers and entrepreneurs to Cardano through such organic growth, they would be directly fed to the Genius X accelerator pipeline. Genius X will start a series of initiatives to contribute to Cardano developer community growth, with a few examples in our plan:

• Cardano developer community growth out of Hong Kong — recently, we have jointly submitted a Catalyst proposal together with Gimba Labs, a reputable Cardano education group) and Waffle Capital, a dedicated Cardano DeFi investment fund based in Hong Kong, for a plan of systematically growing the Cardano developer community there. Hong Kong attracted $1.7 billion crypto startup funding in 2021, ranked only after the US and UK (source), due to its crypto-friendly regulation and access to the large population of Asian crypto developers and entrepreneurs. Cardano currently has very low penetration there, left way behind other blockchains such as Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, BNB, Avalanche. We hope to receive community support for this proposal.
• Cardano ecosystem partnerships for developer support — we will aim to strike partnerships with other Cardano-native organizations, stakeholders, and contributors for organizing systematic programs to take more developers through the venture building funnel — such as developer workshops and hackathons, which will bring more ideation-stage projects to acceleration-ready stage.

4. Launching diversified product lines to adapt to the market — typically, venture accelerators only deal with early-stage projects. However, in running the accelerator program, our team came across from time to time the demand from more advanced projects, for limited support in certain area(s) instead of a full acceleration process. In response to that demand, we will consider launching more diversified product lines such as a flexible Advisory business, tailored to the needs of specific projects. Examples are light service packages just for Marketing Campaign & Business Development support, or just for Fundraising support, to projects at the right stage. This is also expected to allow for Genius X to capture additional revenue opportunities on the market.

5. Strategic partnerships to scale up the Accelerator program — as a general matter, venture accelerator is mostly a corporate- or investor-sponsored business model. Dedicated external funding support can effectively scale the accelerator business and grow its value potential, particularly when the bull cycle comes. Our team will be exploring different possibilities with external investors, and other types of partners that have intention and financial budget to participate in Web3 venture building businesses.

6. Developing new value propositions of Genius X launchpad by potential synergies with Genius Yield’s DEX and other partners — Genius X launchpad is positioned as a platform for retail investors to purchase tokens of crypto projects in which they see a value growth potential. As the crypto funding market continues to evolve, we have realized the need for more diversified ways of public funding for crypto projects, besides a simple priced (by project) token sale on a launchpad. Given the upcoming launch of our sister project Genius Yield, we will be exploring new ways of public token sale / token funding manners by potentially creating unique synergies between Genius X launchpad and Genius Yield’s DEX, as well as other potential partner projects having certain form of token staking infrastructure.

7. Building new connections and networks for potential new growth opportunities beyond our previous reach of geography and communities — Genius X has been based in the West with our main networks and communities located in Europe and the Americas. However, with the increasing popularity, crypto-friendly regulations, as well as the crypto user and developer population base in certain locations in the Middle and Far East, we foresee new opportunities of growing the Genius X business, and its value by creating a solid footprint in those locations. Dubai is the first step of our global expansion journey with one of founding partners officially relocated there recently, while more vibrant markets are on our roadmap, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and potential South & Southeast Asia. We aim to bring both developers and capital into Cardano, as well as grow our own footprint strategically beyond Cardano to create extra value for the project.

To summarize all of the above: we at Genius X have been consistently building and taking this project forward despite the challenging bear cycle, with a number of milestones achieved compared to the industry norm and the nature of the industry we are in. For 2024, we anticipate a relatively positive movement of the general market conditions, and are therefore prepared for further business growth and value achievements, through a series of growth and expansion strategies. Once again we highly appreciate the continuous support of our community, and their understanding of what we have seen, experienced, and are planning forward.

Finally, we wish you all a Merry Christmas!

The Genius X Team