Original author: Frank, PANews

As a leader in the encryption industry, Vitalik Buterin has always been active in the industry. In addition to being known as the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik has also invested in several new encryption projects in his personal capacity. On June 28th, MegaETH, a layer 2 project aiming to build a highly performant real-time EVM, announced a $20 million financing round, with Vitalik appearing on the list as an investor. PANews takes stock of the encryption projects that Vitalik has invested in to see how his performance as an investor has been.

According to publicly available information, Vitalik is currently invested in 7 encryption projects. Among them, there are well-known projects like StarkNet and Polymarket, as well as poorly operated projects like Nocturne, which announced its cessation of operations in June this year.

StarkNet: 146x Maximum Return Rate

StarkNet is a permissionless Decentralization Validity-Rollup (also known as "ZK-Rollup"). It operates as an L2 network on Ethereum. Vitalik made a seed round investment in StarkNet in May 2018, with a total amount of 6 million dollars for this round of financing, and the proportion held by Vitalik was not disclosed. According to chainbroker's data, the seed round investment cost of StarkNet's tokens was 0.025 dollars, and the highest price of STRK tokens has risen to 3.66 dollars so far. Vitalik's investment has achieved a maximum return rate of 146 times, and the current STRK price has fallen to 0.675. Compared to Vitalik's cost, there is still a 27-fold return.

In addition to financial support for StarkNet, Vitalik has also expressed his support for StarkNet multiple times on social media.

As of now, StarkNet has raised a total of $260 million in funding, with the most recent round of funding in May 2022, raising $100 million at a valuation of $8 billion.

In February 2024, StarkNet completed its first airdrop and launched its token. In May, Vitalik unlocked 845,205 STRK from StarkNet, worth $1.08 million. Currently, Vitalik has not sold the STRK tokens.

Aztec Network: No Waves After Raising $100 Million

Aztec Network is the first cross-chain privacy bridge on Ethereum. In 2021, Aztec Network announced the completion of a $17 million Series A financing round, led by Paradigm with participation from Vitalik. In fact, as early as 2020, Vitalik had expressed support for Aztec Network on social media, not only showcasing his participation in Aztec's testing, but also stating in the tweet that with Aztec's official entry into ZK rollup, second-layer scalability and privacy are coming soon.

In 2022, Aztec Network once again raised $100 million in Series B financing, with a total financing amount of $119 million. In 2023, the project will launch the Aztec Sandbox Alpha program for developers, which is expected to be airdropped during the testing phase. However, as of June 2024, Aztec has not yet announced its airdrop plan, and market attention has gradually dropped. This seems to be due to a lack of marketing capabilities. The latest news shows that Aztec has appointed former Risc Zero marketing director Claire Kart as its new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

Kakarot: Innovative experiments in the Starknet ecosystem

Kakarot is an EVM implemented in Cairo language on Starknet, which is considered an important innovative experiment in the Starknet ecosystem. In June 2023, Kakarot announced the completion of the Pre-Seed round of financing, with participation from Vitalik Buterin, StarkWare, and others. The project did not publicly disclose the specific financing amount, but as early as November 2022, Vitalik had retweeted the open source code of Kakarot and commented 'so cool'. On May 22, 2024, Kakarot announced the launch of the test network.

Nocturne: Fleeting privacy protocol

Nocturne is a privacy protocol on Ethereum, whose goal is to allow users to conduct anonymous transactions within the Ethereum ecosystem. The project was founded in 2023 and announced a seed round of financing of $6 million in October of the same year, with Vitalik being one of the investors. In November 2023, Nocturne deployed V1 on the Ethereum mainnet, but announced the closure of the protocol in January 2024. On June 6th, Nocturne announced the gradual cessation of company operations, while retaining the withdrawal function of the frontend.

Overall, Nocturne may be seen as a relatively unsuccessful case of Vitalik's investment, but the project's shutdown reflects more of the challenges in the privacy field. From the final outcome, Nocturne, which is able to see it through, is not disappointing Vitalik's support.

Daimo: Wallet application with poor marketing capabilities

Daimo is a stablecoin wallet without mnemonic words. In March 2024, it announced a seed round financing of 2 million dollars. Vitalik is also one of the investors. In the same month, Vitalik mentioned Daimo in an article, comparing it to Venmo on Ethereum (a popular encryption payment software). However, so far, the promotion of Daimo seems to be unsatisfactory, with only over 3,000 followers on Twitter.

Polymarket: Rapid Rise Brought by the US Election

Polymarket is a decentralized information market platform that allows users to make predictions on the world's most controversial topics. Since its launch in 2020, the project has gradually grown into a leader in decentralized prediction markets. In March 2024, Vitalik tweeted citing Polymarket's data on the Gas fee reduction ratio after the EIP-4844 upgrade. In May 2024, Polymarket announced the completion of a Series B funding round of $45 million, with participation from Vitalik Buterin.

On July 2, Vitalik once again mentioned on social media: "In my Twitter circle, it has become very normal for people to use Polymarket, metaculus, or 01928374656574839201 as evidence of the actual impact of daily political events." In June 2024, as the US presidential election heated up, the volume of Polymarket reached $100 million, reaching a historic high. And as the heat of the US election continued to rise, the market popularity of Polymarket will remain at a high level.

MegaETH: A New Hope for Ethereum L2?

MegaETH is a project recently invested by Vitalik. On June 28th, MegaLabs announced the completion of a $20 million seed round financing. MegaETH claims that their two key technologies - heterogeneous blockchain architecture and 'super-optimized' EVM execution environment can increase TPS to 100,000. Currently, the project has not been officially launched, but based on the expected goals and the market's enthusiasm, MegaETH could become an important weapon for Ethereum to compete against Solana.

In the 7 projects invested by Vitalik, most of them are innovative projects around privacy protocols, EVM, Layer 2, Wallet, and other encrypted infrastructure. Among these projects, only StarkNet has already issued coins, which can be considered as providing returns to Vitalik financially. There are also short-lived projects like Nocturne, and hot projects like Polymarket that seize the opportunity, as well as potential future stars like MegaETH.

Overall, from a financial perspective, Vitalik's investments may not be considered successful, but it's clear that his choices are more focused on helping the Ethereum ecosystem develop better. Moreover, the amount of Vitalik's investments has never been made public, and from a practical standpoint, his participation may have greater strategic support significance than financial significance. However, judging from the development of Nocturne or Daimo, having the endorsement of Vitalik is not enough to gain complete market trust. It is more of a test of whether the product model and operational capabilities can gain the recognition of the general public.