From Seed to Scale - How Projects Achieve 10x Growth - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

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I'm very much looking forward to this discussion from seed to scale. We've got three amazing industry executives going to be talking about how to achieve 10x growth. everyone's favorite word in crypto about how to multiply growth. So, what we're going to do, we're going to kick right in. My name is Kieran.

I'm from Cointelegraph. We're going to quickly introduce ourselves and I guess also uh hear from each one of you where you have experienced the 10x growth along your journey um as well. So, we'll start with his.

So, I'm managing partner at Dragonfly. We're a global crypto investment firm. Uh we've certainly experienced 10x growth from when we started. I think we managed $100 million back in 2018 when we first started running Dragonfly. Now we're over $4 billion AUM and we're one of the big funds in the space.

Um this is Sy. I'm the CEO and founder of story. We are an intellectual property focused blockchain and especially um we're exploring how you know IP can be scalably licensed register for the age of AI and I think the biggest inflection point in terms of you know 10x growth for us is just kind of the ecosystem apps that are building on top of story we have the now about 100 plus apps with 6 to 7 million um wallets uh that are actually registered a lot of web two apps on top of web three apps being reg um interfacing with the story so yeah That's exciting. Yep.

Yeah. Um, good afternoon everyone. I'm Cecilia Shu. I'm the new CSO of uh, Maxi and welcome everyone to Maxi stage. So, Maxi is uh, I think uh, most of you know right uh, Maxi is the top leading crypto exchanges in the world.

In terms of spot trading, we are top five. In terms of perp trading, we are like top 10 uh, um, in terms of trading volume. So, yeah, welcome everyone and hope you enjoy our talk. Meanwhile, enjoy your lunch. Thank you everyone.

Now I think it's really interesting to hear from all three of you uh I guess what the difficulties and challenges that new projects face when they're trying to grow and scale in this super highly competitive environment that we have in crypto now. We'll start with you Cecilia.

Yeah I want to share some story like my personal experience about 10x uh a project because I'm in crypto space for six years. um entering the seventh year now. My first three years was in also in crypto exchange. So I co-ound a centralized exchange called Fumx. It was a very good ride or very um exciting story.

So the first three months of our project it was like zero. We check the the revenue the fee every day. I go to office I check um our spreadsheets showing our revenue. It's several hundred a day until one day we saw it um it was 17,000 for one day and then I check with our data group is it true uh did you make like the number wrong and they said it is 7,000 so starting from day that day it starts from 70,000 and then 100,000 and 200,000 so it's picking up super fast but I mean six years later when you look into the current projects on the market. I would say if you look at like in a micro way um both the supply side and the demand side has been changed a lot the supply side you have thousands of builders coming into crypto because the entry barrier is pretty low for them.

So if you have a big trend on the market, everyone just entering um everyone I guess after hyperra after aster everyone's going to build a perex right or everyone is in AI everyone is building like memecoin for for for the past several months. Um so there are so many competitors not like us six years ago it was just bitmax by bit and fmax so it's very easy to build a new project and from the demand side we actually we haven't seen for this trend for this cycle there are more new retail users in the cycle it's more by institution so all the price rise is pushed by institutions um you don't see many sexy new narratives or real applications which brought the new retail users in um which means that for the demand side there are not so much increase but meanwhile there's so many builders coming in and they're building projects with no very unique positioning so that's why um the growth start to be very very difficult for them yeah

and interesting to hear your thoughts as well s about what the the main barriers and challenges that you're seeing right now with early projects and and scaling Um I can speak to my own experience but I think what's very difficult is that I mean a lot of the cycle this cycle has been really driven by um kind of the institutional narrative right so like okay the fact that the Bitcoin ETF happened the fact that you know stats are happening those kind of things are really really driving and a lot of the early projects if you look at most of the new projects you see that's being listed this year and last year uh besides you know hyperlquid and etheum like most of the projects are facing very hard time because you're not seeing your retail coming in so that's been very very tough for at least the kind of liquid token market um and you know so in that world how do you um capture the audience capture the attention bring it a new retail interest so that's I think something someone as a someone running a token project uh that's been a very big challenge for sure I don't have a clear answer for this but you know for us we are playing an infrastructure play for we're chain but with a special purpose focus on intellectual property and I'm in the initial days we kind of follow the you know the many bottoms up uh philosophy of many of these other trades you know just giving ecosystem grats helping others but I mean in the end at the end of the day what we saw there are a lot of just copy pasta apps being built on top of story uh that are like another deck, another perfex, another liquid staking protocol and that's not what we're built out for. So I think it really changed in terms of how we uh operated once we started incubating projects. So one example is a company called Arya. So we we are very hands-on with building that protocol. So, it has now um you know more about $und00 million TVL of real IP assets from Blackpink's uh uh catalog to u BTS catalog and you actually get 7 to 10% uh IP stable coin yields and you get bonus yields from you know points on top of that.

So people are getting real IP yield from all these streaming revenue on chain. That's the then we had to incubate that and secondly we actually okay we can't just incubate why don't we make a subsidiary app subsidiary that actually focuses on real world data licensing for AI model companies. So we have a kind of a scale AI like DPIN app that actually for um if you record your audio if you actually record your egocentric video footage and actually you get points or IP tokens and all these uh data get registered with IP terms and get licensed to AI model companies and we haven't revealed them yet but we have signed very huge AI model companies to license this data already. So what what I realized as a chain is you can kind of pray and other people to come in but uh in the early days actually you have to be a little bit of app studio to start building uh your chain uh to actually have a lot of activities going. So that's kind of what we learned from bootstrapping our ecosystem uh that which was a challenge.

Thank you Sy. And I guess from Dragonflyy's perspective, Hy, what have you noticed been the the biggest challenges as well for early companies trying to scale?

So the base case when you're building a startup is that uh it's not that you're going to fail, but rather that you're going to be ignored. That basically nobody cares. Is that you you shout into the void, hey, I built a new thing. It's so great. I have this new thesis, blah blah blah, and just crickets.

And the number one job that any startup has to do is to first and foremost get people to give a And the way that comes is not by to your point sy of doing the oh I'm building X on Y. You know I'm building uh you know a memecoin launchpad on bear chain or whatever right like this kind of stuff is not going to get people excited about something new and aggressive that you're doing. You know, we're talking about the perpex meta. There's a lot of excitement around perplexes, but that excitement is not going to extend to the 12th, the 15th, the 20th, which is somebody who's starting today, unless you have a visual idea about how you're going to attack that market. Um, probably you're just going to get crickets, even though everyone's excited about Aster and Hyperliquid and so on.

And so, the number one thing, the mistake that I often see from founders is that they're trying to follow what they see in front of them. They're trying to follow the brightest lights that are in front of their windshield. But usually this is the wrong answer. That's not how you build the next Hyperlquid. Hyperlid wasn't chasing the next meta.

Story protocol wasn't chasing the next meta. They had their own thesis, their own conviction about the way in which crypto ought to change. And that's what fundamentally got people excited even before that meta had changed. So number one advice I give to founders is to be more ambitious than you think you're supposed to be. Because ultimately that often means that you're wrong.

But more often than not, it means that you actually get people excited about something new that you bring into the world rather than that you're following somebody else.

I guess we'll follow on with the the next question for you just on that is I guess from uh your perspective, how can resources like investment or incubation support be best used and leveraged for these early projects to scale? So if you're working with uh venture capitalists, right, like uh ourselves or like Mexi ventures, we're very good at all the normal stuff that startups need in order to get off the ground. So we can help you with recruiting, we can help you with PR, we can help you with BD, we can connect you to all the important people you need to be in touch with. Um but often the number one mistake that I see founders make with respect to how they work with their founders is uh or how they work with VCs is not relying on them for the core strategic decisions. Right?

Very often the the advantage that that VCs have is not that oh we have all these resources we have all these teams we have all this you know this thing that thing that thing over this grab bag of services the most important thing is that we see everything we have the thousand foot view of what's going on within the ecosystem and because of that we can help you avoid driving into potholes before you ever drive into them and so the number one mistake I see from founders that oh man why did they do that thing before even talking to us because if they did we could have told them a month ago don't do that that's a mistake like you're I know exactly what's going to happen if you go and try that thing. Um, so often times the advice I give to founders is talk to your VCs more than you think you should. Not about the things that it's like, okay, I need your help on hiring, but on the things that like, hey, I'm going to make this big strategic decision. What do you think? Because often times your VCs can help you in these big strategic decisions that can be really valuable to your underlying business.

And Cecilia, would you be able to add in your point of view as well from Mixie?

Yeah, of course. Uh so when I was checking the question I was thinking sh after I talk about Maxi what should Hazib say because it seems like we are replacing VC's uh work but after you answer the question I have a clear picture that VC is more like your brain like they see everything on the market and they give you a guide like when I was with Mo you also give us a lot of guide like how layer 2 should um drive to but in terms of um exchanges I think um we actually have um a kind of like new logo or new slogan for Maxi recently. Uh it's not public yet but I would say it is very very um it's into our core value which is uh empowering empowering users empowering um different parties. So we changed we use maxi we extend maxi meaning into maximize um so we play a little bit with uh the the the brand um so we empower everyone's growth we empower the growth but who's you so to maxi we have like three different group of target audience one is definitely our traders our users and second one is our projects uh like story is also our listed and invested projects and third one is of course our team or employees. Um I think back to your question, how can we empower the growth uh maximize the growth of the projects?

Um with Maxi, I think we have four very important pillars. One is as the video show that we have Maxi ventures which we are still very actively investing in the top the leading the very promising projects on the market uh including for example uh story and also Athena. We just announced that we uh have a second round of investment in Athena and the total investment reaches uh 66 million in total to Athena. Um and also the other uh leading projects like of Tong like Aptos from the past years. Um so this is the first thing we have the fund to um support our our projects and the second biggest pillar is mixi itself.

So Mexi as a leading crypto exchange we have over 40 million users already. Um and as I said that our trading volume the uh daily trading volume of per is around u 60 uh sorry 36 mil um billion and the spot trading is around four to five billion every day. So it's a tra huge trading volume with huge user base and also um as I mentioned that we also maximize our users. The reason why users come, 40 million users come and trade with with Maxi is that another like four very important um selling point of key features of Maxi which is we break it it down into the abbreviation of our uh brand name MEX. Uh the most important thing is that M stands for most trainy tokens.

On Mexi you will find 4,000 trading pairs in total including per and spots. Um and also we are always the fastest one to list all these tokens. Uh for example, take Trump as example. Maxi I think is the first one who listed Trump um on the top leading centralized exchanges. We listed it um two hours after they start to trading on on chain and most of the exchanges start to uh uh start the trading I guess 10 hours after they start on on chain.

Um yeah, this is what M stands for, most trendy tokens, and E stands for um everyday airrop, which means that if you go on Maxi, you will see there are airdrops, there are discounts, there are fee discounts, lucky draw every day for users, which means that for a retail user, it's very easy for you to access or to start to trade um your tokens because it's just discount price, right? Um and then third of all for X which means extremely low fee. So we have 4,000 trading pairs and we have 200 trading pairs which is zero fee. And for the all the other trading pairs we have much lower trading fees than the other top exchanges. For big traders for frequent um like daily traders fee is always very important.

Um but actually if you go to the top leading ones you pay tons of trading fees to them which many users even don't know about it but on maxi the fee is extremely low and we would rather to share you know the fee uh revenues with our traders to give them the best trading experience. And last but not least um C stands for comprehensive liquidity. Um we have so many trading pairs a lot of them are all our coins or or meme coins but if you trade with maxi you feel the liquidity is the best on the market zero slippage and um you can always buy and sell very easily. So this is um also why we have so many uh users which we can help our projects to grow and uh beside that we also have um uh like our operation team is pretty strong for take story for example we have a whole months for story. Do you know about that whole months for story um putting story putting IP token trading on our banner on our official website.

So every day I open Maxi app, it shows trade with uh IP, trade IP and get uh uh bonuses or or or lucky Joel or whatever uh fee discount. Um and the result was super good. Uh we brought I guess 200 to 220,000 users as new IP token traders and Maxi becomes I think probably the first or the second biggest trading platform uh in terms of trading volume for IP, right? So all in um with all these pillars we actually it's not just I'm saying it's just I think that's why I can also talk about like after uh collaborating with Maxi what kind of growth IP got sorry got from that. Yeah.

So I guess this is what Maxi can bring value to all these builders.

Yeah absolutely and you know Cecilia was saying to you Sy about you know their involvement and support for story. I mean more broadly from a exchange and VCs when you have worked to them what kind of support has proved to be like the most valuable to uh to you? So it depends on the stages for I think what Mexi was very useful for was Mexi came in after TG and it's was probably one of the very few investors we took on after TGE but it was um we um a lot of the investors we got before the TGE are just classic Silicon Valley style uh venture capital funds like Andre. So, you know, they they don't really kind of understand the, you know, kind of all the exchange dynamics, liquid market, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, folks like Mexi who really run their own exchange,

uh, really actively uh, invest in liquid tokens from Athena to Story to Aptos and so on and so forth to TAN. Yeah.

Uh it was very I'm it's a very good sounding board for understanding kind of the macro liquid environment and you know and the trading trading volume how do we get that up blah blah blah. So all these things were super useful um for for that side in the early days. I think um I think we we were very lucky to have just found a one very strong partner who led all our three rounds and recent Horowits. But what they were very very helpful in terms of they uh they were extremely helpful with recruiting. So I think um you know out of I think majority of our early C levels right um even I mean they invested in me when I was one person right so they uh because I had an exit experience in the last company majority of them they helped close together you know for instance like CTO um we brought in someone who led the entire technological development harmony protocol which was an early layer one they we had they did like very very lengthy technical ical interviews together kind of picking those candidates right they would say pros here are the pros here are the cons you know I think you're building a smart contract protocol but he was building a layer one you know so it's like a little bit of mismatch like everybody you know in the long end here are his strength he knows how to build a team he knows how to bootstrap things you know so he they relentlessly vetted every single person through that network and as a especially I was coming from web 2 I I I've invested in crypto I had crypto friends but I didn't have that experience of building a crypto project So and and network.

So I think especially what the for me what the VCs I think you know at the end of the project is about a team the team that you build um the vetting helping recruiting often times like Chris Dixon would get on a call uh with the candidates and close them if they're on the fence right so those things really really helped out on the recruiting side and was to be honest once you help vet and help build a team together at a very kind of stellar team to be honest I I really believe that if a if you have a group of smart people in the room very dedicated um they'll figure a strategy out right and right right if they're dedicated if they're sharp and they're competent with a long-term view especially we started during like the cryptobear market right after Luna crashed and during the fs rash pe crypto people who were left during that time were actually just believers so people who recruited then onuh were very long-term folks. So, I think it really uh benefited uh kind of you know I think the kind of the V especially getting the uh VCs to vet on the talents bring the talents together. I think that was like the biggest value for us at least. Yeah, I think it's it's no secret as well how much the the crypto investment environment more broadly has changed as well in recent times and many in the audience would uh would have noticed if they're across that space and uh for you Cecilia I mean from Mex's perspective you guys have stayed relatively active throughout the period I mean why is that why have you guys kind of continued to invest while you know you could say a lot more ventures have become more conservative.

Um yeah, we are still like very actively uh investing in the market. Um just as I mentioned, I joined Mexi recently. So I joined one months ago. It's a new company, a new organization for me. But after I joined, I feel like Mexi is pretty unique I would say.

Um it runs its business not by its OKR or its KPI. It runs a business by its philosophy. So it's it's a good thing because you don't you are not like just chasing for short-term KPIs. It's more like they have a long-term vision like what kind of business they want to build and what kind of relationship they want to keep on this market and how they want to do this business. Uh I guess the first philosophy they have um or we sorry we have um which is we want to keep things very simple.

Um I think many top exchanges are doing a lot uh sex wallet chains payment whatever everything regulation related uh entities but maxi is just keeping doing trading like very focusing on trading. If I talk about our um selling points it's just super straightforward forward. We just want to build a very professional trading uh platform for retail traders. Um this is a key. So we know that although Maxi is a very big organization but we know that all these people in Mexi are trading platform people we know what we can we know what we are capable of.

We are very good at building trading platform but we might not be good at uh building a wallet or a chain. So that's why uh we don't expand our business like crazy. But we also want to take um a chance in this market. we want to um participate in the big trendy uh projects. So that's why we focus our own team only focus on the uh trading part but we take our investment as our weapon to go into the market and to look for the best players um because we are not capable of doing that.

So we find for example story who can build a train perfectly. So we invest in SY. And the second philosophy is that um uh I I I actually think um well we uh when we when we try to be very focused where we um try to be like very simple to do our executions. Um we also try to empower people a lot like I mentioned many many times like maximize. We want to maximize our builders but we know like how we can help them.

Um Maxi as an exchange is very different from VCs from investors because investors they overview the the market they have money to invest but they don't have all these resources exchanges have. Um I'm in the space for six years. I can still say that centralized exchange or maybe one day Dexis will be the leading sector um on the market. So we still have the most users, we still have the most assets um on the platform. So we know exactly after we invest in you, it's kind of a commitment to you guys.

We invest in Athena, we invest in story, which means that we are very confident after we invest in you guys, you will grow. So we are not like some VCs which you mentioned that they are probably they have fear to invest in a bare market because they are fully depend on the market and the project themselves. So if the market is not doing well if it's a bare market uh and they can only count on the builders themselves but they cannot tell from the early stage um how can I trust you? Are you a long-term builder? Can you guys really survive from the bare market?

They cannot tell. But for Mexi, we have this confidence because if I invest in you in you, I give you all the resources we have. I give you the traders. I give you all my partnerships uh to to support you. So I'm super confident that I buy the ticket.

I'm on the same train um a same boat with you and then you will grow and of course we'll make the profits. So that's why we are still very actively u investing on the market now.

Amazing.

Yeah. I guess um you know coming to the the end of the panel um anyone that is in the early stages of developing a project uh more broadly I think be really interesting to hear from all three of you uh some advice on how they can replicate 10x growth. So we'll start with you from Dragonfly

experience 10x growth. Um believe in something and be worth believing in.

I I I think uh I mean I just think just for generally for entrepreneurs even last company that I built I it was a half a billion dollar exit but it was just one app a small mobile app. It took me eight years to to have that success but it was like for sixth year it was like this and the seventh year went up like this. So you know every start startup is going to be an overnight success but it normally happens on 2000 night. So whenever I tell meet entrepreneurs I say uh today is going to be dark tomorrow is going to be darker but day after tomorrow is going to be you know glorious. So always have that be pessimistic the short term and even more pessimistic midterm.

little bit realistic but long term be very optimistic. So you need to grind for a long time. You can't be short term because I think crypto entrepreneurs whenever I meet them they're like okay we teach you next year and then we going to we're going to rip and we're going to exit in three years just that just never happens. It just take you know at least if you want a good project it takes at least seven years to build anything. And finally, Cecilia

um I would say if you want to have 10 times growth or you want to be successful with your project either you came into the market pretty early you are uh but not the first one uh you have some pioneers which who has already tested the market and you know it's the right direction and you are the first batch of player in this market um or you have very unique selling points either your tag or your goto market strategy or your resources or if you don't have uh neither of them. Just find a great partner uh and exchange a VC or uh bunch of influencers. Find a very strong partners on the market. Yeah.

Amazing. Well, you know, I hope uh the audience got some great insights into into scaling early stage projects and you guys have been fantastic. So, about a round of applause for the three panelists and uh thank you very much for your time. Thank you.