Why you should keep an eye on Asian markets for web3 scaling & adoption w/Sora Ventures — SlateCast #36

In the lat­est episode of the Cryp­toSlate Slate­Cast, we caught up with Jason Fang from Sora Ven­tures to get insight into the Asian cryp­to mar­ket, learn why he decid­ed to invest in Cryp­toSlate, and his over­all view on the future of the blockchain industry.

Sora Ven­tures is an Asia-based ven­ture cap­i­tal fund found­ed in ear­ly 2018. Its port­fo­lio includes Immutable, Forkast News, Casper­Labs, Guild of Guardians, CitaDao, and many oth­ers. As of a deal signed ear­li­er this year, Cryp­toSlate also now joins the Sora Ven­tures family.

This marks our 5th media invest­ment in the space, after BTC Inc, The Block(Exited), Forkast News, and Sun­rise Dragon(China). Excit­ed to grow the busi­ness with the amaz­ing team at @CryptoSlate https://t.co/unP9gTsISb

— Sora Ven­tures (@sora_ventures) August 22, 2022

The Man­ag­ing Part­ner and Co-Founder of Sora Ven­tures, Jason Fang, spoke to CryptoSlate’s Aki­ba on the Slate­Cast to talk about the future of cryp­to, the dif­fer­ences between web2 and web3 invest­ments, its recent invest­ment into Cryp­toSlate, and how Sora Ven­tures looks to add val­ue to each part of its portfolio.

Fang stat­ed that web2 invest­ments are equi­ty-based and focus on where LPs can add val­ue where­as in web 3 things are slight­ly different.

“The invest­ment cycles are short­er… there are a lot few­er rounds when com­pared to the equi­ty, … few­er rounds com­pared to the equi­ty, and the lifes­pans in gen­er­al terms of fundrais­ing are also a lot shorter.”

Sora Venture’s approach is to focus on “com­mu­ni­ty devel­op­ment and mar­ket­ing” where “we’re adding imme­di­ate val­ue that you can see with­in weeks, if not days.”

Con­tin­u­ing, Fang also spoke about his view on the Chi­nese cryp­to mar­ket which is cur­rent­ly closed. He believes that it will “even­tu­al­ly open up… when that hap­pens we want to be pre­pared for that.” The growth of the cryp­to indus­try in Chi­na is some­thing Fang believes has “oppor­tu­ni­ty in the future” despite the cur­rent ban on cryp­to in the country.

Talk­ing on the dif­fer­ence between West­ern and Asian invest­ments in web2 com­pa­nies, Fang argued that “a lot of U.S. com­pa­nies will focus on inno­va­tion… and things that are fair­ly new.” How­ev­er, in Chi­nese mar­kets, it is more “hor­i­zon­tal” where you see more scal­ing in terms of these prod­ucts rather than brand-new technology.

Fang com­ment­ed that there are equiv­a­lents to Ama­zon, Net­flix, and oth­er lead­ing U.S. com­pa­nies in Chi­na, and “for some rea­son, they tend to scale a lot faster than the U.S. com­pa­nies.” Fang attrib­uted the abil­i­ty of Chi­nese com­pa­nies to scale, in part, to the increased num­ber of poten­tial cus­tomers, low­er labor costs, and low­er turnover.

As a result, Sora Ven­tures looks to focus on cryp­to invest­ments which can be used as “future play­books” for invest­ments in Asia.

To hear more about Jason’s view on the cryp­to mar­kets, what he’s look­ing out for in the bear mar­ket, and his out­look on Ethereum post-merge watch the full pod­cast linked above.

Dis­claimer: This inter­view was filmed pri­or to the col­lapse of FTX when Bit­coin was trad­ing at around $20,000.