Tony Cheng / Foresight Ventures
Foresight Ventures' Tony Cheng on investing in crypto heading into 2023
In this episode
Ashton Addison speaks with Tony Cheng, General Partner at Foresight Ventures, on their investment strategies, insights into investments in the DeFi, GameFi, and NFT space, their expansive ecosystem with exchanges, wallets, incubation and advisory, and their outlook for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies heading into 2023.
- Early-stage crypto valuations have remained elevated despite bear market conditions, creating challenges for investors seeking favorable entry points.
- Developer activity and builder conviction remain strong throughout the bear market, with founders showing longer-term commitment versus previous cycles.
- Foresight Ventures operates an expansive ecosystem including exchange BitGet, wallet BitKeep with 300k DAU, and media platforms across multiple regions.
- NFTs are expected to play a significantly larger role in the next bull cycle with real utility applications beyond fungible token focus.
- Institutional conviction in crypto has substantially increased since 2018 due to demonstrated DeFi utility and GameFi asset ownership capabilities.
Transcript
Read the full transcript
I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have Tony Chang General partner at foresight Ventures Tony welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time yeah thank you arson for having me here you're very welcome at the show thank you I'm excited to dive into your insights into the industry I know you've
been deep in it before we get to foresight let's just hear a little bit about yourself getting into blockchain and finance and what has led you up to this point cool cool yeah no so I started my career in Consulting so more traditional web 2 background I was at Sequoia capital China for about three years starting in 2018. that's kind of when I started first
getting into crypto back in 2018 like at the end of the last the previous Bull Run so yeah it was there I kind of did a lot of like fintech investing SAS investing look dabbled a bit in blockchain like early stuff but given the regulatory situation in China we didn't really spend too much time in the market was really bad in 2018 2019 so unfortunately
Kind of looked too much at web 2 but I kind of Dove right back into web 3 in 2021 I've been following this space ever since 2018 I invest I look at a lot of like early stage stuff but in 2021 I was at a hedge fund that wanted to kind of start gaining exposure in crypto it was 3G Capital it's a traditional PE fund
They do a lot of mergers and Acquisitions but like we try to get into crypto but that was also a bit tough there because they're used to kind of larger checks crypto was more kind of early stage in 2021 a lot of new innovation they couldn't really get their hands they could get their heads around like investing in early stage seed stage stuff so yeah so unfortunately that
didn't really work out I joined foresight right after that and yeah and today at foresight I cover web 3 investing a lot of early stage projects we look at anything like we look at any type of project it could be pre-revenue it could be post Revenue it could have product it can it can also not have one but yeah we were typically very early stage
investors and we try to do as much as we can to kind of help portfolio companies yeah I'll give a like much deeper background about us that sounds great Tony and thank you for that intro it's great to great to see the progression and you know there was a lot of even through the so-called bear Market of 2018-19 I felt like there was a lot of great web
three companies that started up and became really large in 2021 and that must have been pretty exciting for you joining in web 3 sort of at the beginning of the bear Market there and then seeing from the bottoms of 2018 19 up to how quickly it grew in 2021 and you know of course It reversed a little bit after that but I just feel like the next cycle as we're
working towards it you know it's probably not that far away a couple years could grow even bigger are you going to stick to more web 3 Focus throughout this next run or what are your personal interests and what kind of companies that you're most interested in investing in yeah no for sure like I think in 2018 the conviction levels for a lot of these institutional
funds right and even myself wasn't high enough because we didn't really see any types of applications of blockchain apart from my payments right apart from like money and but then we saw a device summer in 2021 and I think the next cycle you'll see tons of like new utilities functionalities with nfts as well 20 yeah so the ball run from like
2020 2021 was like fungible tokens I think the next next cycle definitely nfts will have a much more important role in the industry but this time around I think like a lot of Institutions myself included a lot of traditional web to investors the conviction is so much higher right like you're seeing a lot of utility in the defy space you're seeing a lot of
game five where people can actually own gaming assets you're going to see a lot of like nft utility like using nfts or coupons using any tickets so yeah this time around I'm sticking to crypto and we're doing a lot in the investment space today we're trying to spend a lot of money incubating companies investing in company and the
biggest thing kind of driving that is the conviction in this space right even though you have all this FTX Fiasco you have Finance essentially becoming an a monopoly on the market but definitely like you see the developer activity you see the number of people still kind of moving into the space even with this bear Market it's definitely something very very
positive in our view and it's something definitely we're going to be sticking around for great insights Tony and yes throughout 2022 not just with FTX sort of near the end of the year but you know with 3ac and Luna and Celsius and you know throughout most of this year it's been it's been chaotic I'm curious in you know your perspective from deal flow and
more importantly quality deal flow from what I understand you know Builders are not stopping building to put doesn't matter where the prices of the assets are going are you seeing a reduction in quality deal flow throughout you know the downtrend in this market or is it sort of you know just as as normal no I definitely think what we're seeing
less less Talent well not not necessarily less talent but we're seeing less number of projects right the number of projects raising funding Now versus let's say a year ago definitely dropped off a cliff but today at least the people that we're speaking with it feels like they have more conviction they're at least in it for the longer term versus maybe a year ago where
everybody was trying to make a quick Buck so today like definitely it's a lot more interesting speaking with some of these Founders but the thing is like even though public valuations like the liquid site has cratered a lot of the early stage stuff hasn't really gone down right the early stage valuations hasn't really gone down you're still seeing a lot of seed stage
companies where it's pre-product pre-revenue just have a deck and they're trying to raise that like 100 million 200 million and in this environment this is something like we're super worried about because during bear markets the only way to essentially make it back in the in the bull market is when you can get into valuation get into companies get into investment rounds at
a much lower evaluation right yeah because the hit rate is going to be significantly lower as well so yeah I think like for us what we're seeing less steel flow but at least the quality of Builders has improved significantly today we're seeing more builders in it for the longer term and we're seeing a lot more people kind of trying to build out real utility
leveraging blockchain yeah I personally like the mostly the seed stage you know and pre-revenue Investments of course there's more there's more risk on you know trying to find the product Market fit and ensuring that the valuation is not too high right and I feel like last year because of the hype there was a lot of crazy valuations and now that you
know the hype's faded but the fundamentals are still there you can't overvalue otherwise you know you have to down value or you know sort of raise at the same valuation for the next round if depending on the nature of the bear Market you know if the if their Runway only lasts a couple years and you have to raise more you want to make sure that you've added that extra value
between now and then to ensure that you know you can justify an increased valuation in the company yeah exactly and today like so for us even though what we're seeing a lot of these valuations still kind of hold right because there's still quite a bit of like money in crypto that is still kind of going around what we've been trying to do
To kind of provide the value trying to get in at a lower valuation is on the incubation side on the company building side we're trying to kind of provide more support in those areas so foresight Adventures we have like a very large ecosystem we have an exchange which is our main LP called beat get we have a decentralized wallet called bit keep it
has 300 000 Dau very Asia Centric it's a super app it embeds D5 nft trading and a lot of other kind of adapts into a mobile app a very super app kind of kind of product we also have a lot of media presences we have the number one crypto media in China it's called foresight news we are also invested in a lot of media Platforms in Southeast Asia in
Korea looking at Japan turkey Latin America so for us given our ecosystem what we kind of try to help a lot of these projects do is kind of help them build out the Asia side of the business right if you want to capture Asian users we have like all the tools we have all of the people we have all of the kind of functionalities that you can think
of that can kind of help you there and therefore like that's kind of a way that we've been trying to kind of try to cut down the valuation right like that's an argument for us where we can provide a lot of value that other VCS might not really have right we have a tokenomics design team we have a team of exchange Traders market makers we have a team that can help you
integrate into all types of wallets where investors in wallet connect right or like so we have a lot of like these tools at our disposal to try to help us get better access better valuations that's great to hear and I've heard of some of those products as well I didn't know that was a part of foresight so that's awesome to have that kind of expansiveness and
and on the incubation side as well I feel like that's it's like a must-have you know if you're already investing in these small companies you want to be a strategic investor that actually helps them and you know helps your investment as well at the beginning you mentioned about about defy about game Phi and nfts moving into new sectors I feel like nfts
in finance are I've seen a few sort of Innovations with that but you know moving beyond art into some of these other Industries I feel like that's a huge untapped potential still are those sort of the three Niche industries that foresight is focusing on or where do you see a lot of these new stage startups building in yes so we're very
Like our coverage is very quite broad we don't have like a specific Niche that we really focus on because we have a team of like 10 people each covers certain sectors right we split the team up by Chain coverage and by like Niche coverage right so what you mentioned like D5 nft gaming these can be covered by different people but on even different chains we have like
different coverage people as well so some might cover all the Innovations on Aptos and this might span all three of these categories so we have quite a lot of people that it helps to kind of coverage the entire universe of crypto but me personally I think like I've been spending a lot more time on the nft side the application side so what I mean by this is like we've
been looking at what if we can make like nft indexes right make nft indexes critical make nfts trade more like fundable tokens like FTS so therefore you unlock a lot more liquidity you build a much stronger Market these are all kind of innovative products that we've been thinking about at the exchange at the wallet and foresight which is more on the
investment side we look at projects that can help us kind of achieve these goals and then we bring them together try to build like strategic strategic Investments with them and kind of help them build out that product leverage our users get users on to using that and see if we can kind of scale it from there yeah I'm fascinated by you know the
building more liquidity for nfts and I'm curious about you know the nature of the nfts and if you think that's important you know for example we've seen the profile picture nfts and the digital art that you know the ones that have more liquidity but there have a floor price of a hundred thousand or you know in the in the bull market a
few hundred thousand are those the kind of nfts that you know if you can tokenize those and make them more fungible to allow you know millions of people to trade a single nft versus one person that needs to find a few hundred thousand dollars to buy it well I think it's that's a great question this is a it's a topic we've often discussed internally as well right because like
for these really expensive pfps what like one of the core values is it's scarcity right and if you make it and if you allow it to be kind of purchased by anybody that kind of reduces the value there it's kind of like if you're looking at a Chanel bag or something right or a piece of really exotic art so for us like when we were thinking about like making nfts more tradable
We were thinking more around like let's say gaming assets potentially or more kind of larger scale nft kind of applications or nfts for these specific like super expensive nfts we were thinking more around like what party that I was doing allow people to kind of crowds or crowdfund in nft right buy it with a few friends
But not make it like tradable for all masses because that kind of different value like a pfp right that's a great point I think yeah but yeah but for the next cycle I definitely think like pfps won't be the only kind of nft innovation it's just a matter where we see like more nft usages I agree and I obviously GameFly and just making a lot of in-game items nfts is
part of that next step I'm still interested in the finance side but on the gaming side are you at foresight investing in some of these you know larger game studios that are actually building out you know full-fledged you know Call of Duty level games where eventually we're expecting that the games that come into web 3 are going to be so great that they're going to bring
in millions of new people into web3 you know similar to AAA game studio and everything will be nfts inside of that yeah well I think that's definitely a thesis that we've kind of invested around but the thing is like for these AAA games you have to give them time right I think the over the kind of past cycle Everybody kind of didn't really have
that patience for a lot of these Triple A games like we invested in exterior that there's this team spun out from fun plus which is a really strong like team in China that kind of does like overseas gaming we invested in quite a few other gaming projects as well I'm looking at a lot of Studios but I think like you have to really have patience I don't
really think a lot of these games will really be able to deliver in the next year or so right especially AAA you have to spend quite a bit of time tweaking everything making everything work well if you look at all of these like Call of Duty type level games they've been built for like three or four years right definitely Grand Theft Auto is like an
eight or nine year a game so yeah I think like it's definitely you kind of have to have patience for a lot of these games so at the same time like why are we investing in a lot of these AAA games we're also looking quite a bit into the Casual side of gaming as well because our view is that a lot of these casual games like if you think about Angry Birds right if you think
about some of these casual games that blew up in the web 2 space they're really well they're really good at onboarding users as well right so and if you add tokenomics into that's just kind of another lever that you can really pull to acquire users so yeah so a lot of these casual games their development periods are much shorter if you can find something that is
viral that can really gather a lot of interest I definitely think that's a really good way to kind of kick start the game five user acquisition as well and that's something we're definitely super interested in I'm glad you mentioned that Tony and I've seen you know there's a huge rise in casual games especially in the last couple years with people on their phones
and having more free time at home to just play and not want to commit to their whole lives to playing one of these you know RPGs that sucks them in for days at a time but I'm just playing for 20 minutes or 10 minutes a day on their phone I feel like casual games and integrating web 3 and nfts into that will definitely be a huge play and do you think you know I first
of all I wanna I agree with you about you know the large games and that it takes a long time I've seen some of these game studios have like 50 to 100 people working on it and they're looking at delivering the game in like three years to four years and you know the narrative came up that these large games were going to be delivering nfts you know in one year everyone expected you
know all the games to be ready and you know nfts to explode and it just doesn't work like that it's such a huge project and I also feel the importance of making an the gameplay and you know the forget about the nft side makes the game actually good and not just you know a front for trading nfts you know we've seen some of the early stages like
axi infinity or something that has some ponzinomics or a great token integration into it where people are actually there for the token they're not actually there to play the game and I feel like those sort of fall apart you know after the people have made a lot of money and then they start dumping it and then if the if the price of the token or you know the profitability of playing
it goes down people weren't actually playing it for the game they were just playing it to get tokens yeah exactly I think like the next cycle is probably not going to be like Play to earn it's probably going to be like Play and earn right so you're gonna have like a lot of really good gameplay and you can couple in the fact that you can earn kind of a bit of cash on the side
Because ultimately like for crypto like if you don't have any earn aspect to it you're not gonna get any users either right because yeah like we have to be honest with ourselves like a lot of people in crypto like especially the retail crowd in Southeast Asia in a lot of these Emerging Market countries they're in it for the money and the gameplay often comes second
But the next cycle if you can get like gameplay kind of up to 90 80 of what we expect in web 2 then the earn aspect then coupled with the earn aspect like you get a much better experience right for everybody coming into playing games yeah no I completely agree and in 2023 what do you what do you think in
terms of you know projects actually releasing into the mainstream I saw a lot of great projects that I was following in 2022 that delayed their releases because of the market conditions and from what I'm looking at with the Bitcoin four-year cycle you know it's only been one year since the all-time high and I don't think it's going to be a v-shaped recovery in
2023 I don't think it's going to go completely sideways I think there will definitely be positive sentiments and movement in the market but are you expecting some projects to you know that delayed their Market launches to start launching in 2023 and do you think the deal flow will increase from this past year yeah so a lot of our portfolio all delayed
Launching tokens they were supposed to kind of launch in queue for q1 next year they're pretty much all delayed by at least six months mainly due to market conditions our internal View is that this bear Market will still kind of be there for a while I think the earliest like that the most optimistic view on our team is 2024 maybe Q2
But in the meantime right in the next year or so you're still going to have a lot of people building you're going to see a lot of like spikes in trading activities due to like certain one-off events right when the FED might start evening when China's so something happens in China something happens the finance or some some like big news event but for us
Like timing the market has never been easy our view is that as long as you see interesting teams you see Founders that are really kind of long-term oriented UC products that are really solving an interesting problem it's definitely worthwhile to invest even in a bear Market and for us I think we're going to focus quite a bit on applications things
that can really kind of build crypto adoption because we think for the next cycle if you want to still get new retail into crypto get users that actually use blockchain for True utility you need to build something interesting right that really leverages the value of having tokens versus what web 2 can already achieve yeah that's a great point and I feel
like just continuing to you know have good Products that come out and they find new ways to generate value for people in the real world I think that's very important investing them in a bear Market you're you're actually having a better deal you know and yeah as long as the you know the team and the vision checks out and you have conviction that you know this is going
to make it to the market and it's going to help people you don't have that bull market premium where you're paying twice as much because people just want to throw money at companies so I feel like this is the best time moving into 2023 to stay focused on the market and to invest into the good companies exactly you also it's so much easier to get a location as well
And during these times it's interesting because what a lot of these Founders are looking for as well in an investor is the ability to kind of help right on the strategy side on the operations side the market making side on the advice on tokenomics I think like right now what we built in the past year or so really really puts us in a good
position for the next few years we don't really have like Capital issues so we never really had pressure of raising Capital because our single LP has been super supportive but I think because our LP is also very long-term oriented he's able they're able to kind of help help us along the way take a very long-term oriented look
We don't have to kind of exit in three or four years we can take like a five to eight year Vision and that's when you kind of really see like you open up your mind to like what is really possible right you're able to kind of think deeper think longer and just without Innovation to happen I love that and I always say in my talks that the smart investors have very
long-term investment Horizons and we often see you know especially when it's a retail investor that's just starting his first Investments here's about crypto and wants to get rich by tomorrow you know their investment Horizon is so short that it's not going to happen or they're going to make mistakes or they're going to buy at the top and then you know they're they're perceived
Horizon it was a month and a month later it's down so I think staying in it long term you know through multiple Cycles even is definitely the way to win so I'm excited to look towards 2023 and see what foresight Ventures is doing and investing in I would love to follow along with your team is there a way for the viewers to either take a look at
some of the portfolios or if there's companies that are watching to see about the incubation and the advisory and how they can get involved in foresight yeah so we have a website forgesideventures.com our portfolio is all there you can also email us foresightvan gmail.com f-o-r-e-s-i-g-t-v-n gmail.com
Which is our kind of external email to kind of allow people to send in incubations send in decks all of that so yeah we also have a Discord Channel so there's a lot of ways to kind of contact us a lot of incubation projects what we're looking at and investment side we're Super Active as well
sounds great Tony and I will leave those links to the email and the Discord and the platform in the description box below thank you so much for your insights into the industry and giving me hope for the great projects to come out in the next year and two I know there will be a lot of them it's just keeping your eyes open so I appreciate the time and let's follow up in the near
future thank you thank you Austin for having me it's great speaking
More interviews
How Brave is expanding beyond ad blocking with Drew PotterSep 27, 2026
Why Kevin Carter thinks China is winning the AI raceSep 25, 2026
Brave's plan to bring self-custody payments to 120 million usersSep 18, 2026
Arie Trouw on why AI agents now need proof of actionSep 14, 2026
How XYO is building an audit trail for AI agentsAug 14, 2026
Dave Rodman on choosing the right offshore home for a crypto companyAug 4, 2026