I summarized five types of "living VCs" and how they survived.

Since last weekend when ABCDE announced the halt of Phase II and new project investments, more and more Chinese VCs have started to review their fund returns this week.

It can be seen that even in a bull market, the overall return on primary investments by Chinese VC in this cycle is actually not good. Even VC with a seemingly decent "listing rate" do not perform well in terms of return rates.

But I also noticed that there are still some VCs who are doing quite well. Why can they survive? I summarized five types (of course, many VCs are a mix of several of the following):

01｜Transfer to Level 2

Traditional investment-type VCs have not been doing well this year, so many are directly transforming to engage in secondary markets. For example, meme coins, Hong Kong and U.S. stocks, and even traditional financial trading.

As long as the transformation is fast enough, there will still be meat to eat. The liquidity of this round of altcoins is poor, and apart from mainstream coins, Hong Kong and US stocks are very good options; money tends to gather in places where there is the most.

02｜Lightweight Strategy

There is also a type of VC that directly reduces the fund size and even acts as an individual angel investor. Participating with a small scale and low cost can actually yield good returns.

Compared to the past approach of having to secure a few million and engage in "top-tier financing," this type of lightweight operation is now more agile and offers more flexible returns.

03 | Corporate Venture Capital

The biggest characteristic of this type of VC is that they have their own main business, such as exchanges, public chains, or market makers. Investment is just a part of their ecological layout.

This type of VC is essentially more like CVC (Corporate Venture Capital), with goals and direction. They invest in projects to make the ecosystem more prosperous—such as increasing TVL, enhancing trading depth, binding specific teams, strengthening on-chain activity, and so on. The most typical examples of this type are well-known: YZi Labs, Solana Foundation, Polychain, DWF Labs, etc.

04｜Media-type VC

For example, a16z is very strong in creating concepts, investing in few projects, but they are memorable enough. You could say it resembles a VC, but it actually functions more like a media group that understands communication, emotions, and storytelling.

Their presence often does not rely on accounting profits, but rather on the ability to "define the narrative"—these types of VCs have a strong voice in the phase where the narrative drives the market.

05｜Accelerator / Incubator VC

The best incubation in this cycle should be AllianceDAO, which has incubated top meme tools like Moonpay, Pumpfun, and DAOSFUN.

The large amount of funding in the past has actually shown everyone that many project founders are truly those who have never seen big money, or they simply don’t know how to spend such a large sum. After receiving the funding, they just lay flat "soft rug". Some even go to the extent of using some methods to wash the money and buy villas. However, the teams that really want to get things done actually lack resources more than they lack money. Just like before, a16z and Sequoia hoarded a bunch of H100 GPUs in exchange for equity.

Similarly, high-quality crypto projects actually do not lack funds; what they lack are: quality marketing, helping founders build personal IP, community cold starts, TGE, ethical market makers, listing channels, and so on. At every critical juncture, we can fill the gaps and help you "get the project off the ground."

Including ABCDE, the incubation we are doing now is also like this; what remains unchanged is selecting high-quality projects, while the focus has shifted to post-investment. This is also the reason why so many agencies have emerged this year.