Portal Labs

In April, in addition to the overall volatility of the crypto market, perhaps the most explosive news was that Du Jun, co-founder of ABCDE, announced the official halt of new project investments and suspended the fundraising plan for the second phase fund. He also elaborated on the upcoming pivot in investments: shifting to a new path focused on strategic incubation and secondary market allocation.
In fact, as early as the end of 2024, many articles about crypto venture capital were 'complaining' about a tragic fact: the primary market has become unprofitable. Players no longer buy into VC narratives, leading to over 80% of VCs facing losses. Du Jun also expressed in early March 2025 that the ETH holdings he increased over the past year have seen paper losses exceeding $20 million.

As the cryptocurrency asset market matures, more and more high net worth investors are entrusting their cryptocurrency assets to third-party institutions to ensure asset security and comply with global regulatory requirements. The emergence of cryptocurrency asset custody services fills the security, liquidity, and compliance gaps faced by high net worth investors in cryptocurrency asset management.
But among many custody platforms, which are trustworthy for high net worth investors? And what successful application cases can we learn from?
In this article, Portal Labs will review the 10 most influential platforms in the cryptocurrency asset custody industry, helping you make informed choices in a complex market.

Twenty days ago, Portal Labs wrote an article (CZ: 'It's easy to surpass 99% of players in Web3, but hard to beat the last 1%!'), at that time, CZ's HODLism was still highly praised.
However, in just a few days, Trump's tariff stick seems to have easily shattered everyone's faith in HODLism.
In April 2025, U.S. President Trump once again announced tariff policies aimed at the global market, reshaping the trade landscape with the U.S.
Why say 'again'?
As early as during his first term from 2017-2020, the Trump administration implemented a series of tariff policies based on the 'America First' trade protectionism approach. At that time, the Dow immediately fell by 500.

If you are participating in or about to enter the Web3 world, you are likely to be dazzled by various 'Tokens': some can be traded, some can be voted on, some represent NFT collectibles, and some claim to offer 'annual returns of 15%'... So the question arises: what exactly are these virtual assets? Are they stocks, points, data, or currencies?
In this article, Portal Labs hopes to provide you with a practical classification logic for virtual assets, helping you clarify what functions the most common types of assets serve, what risks they carry, and what types of participation paths are suitable.

In Portal Labs' previous article (Chinese investors' 'offline breakthrough': Why do you need to attend the 2025 Hong Kong Carnival?), we shared why Chinese Web3 investors need to run events.
However, knowing how to run and where to run also requires skill. In this article, Portal Labs will chat with everyone about it.
Where to run?
The first step in choosing offline events is to see which city they are held in.
The reason is simple: the policy environment and entrepreneurial atmosphere of a city determine whether it can attract truly high-quality institutions and projects to participate.
For example, in the past two years, Hong Kong has gradually opened up to Web3, actively supporting the entry of Web3 companies. At the beginning of 2025, one of the most famous Web3 events, Consensus, chose to hold an event in Hong Kong.

If asked how to obtain firsthand information and networking resources for Web3 development, most veteran Web3 players would give you a unified answer: attend more meetings.
What is 'run meetings'?
Every year, various Web3 events are held around the world, among which the most representative and influential recently is the upcoming Hong Kong Web3 Carnival (Web3 Festival) scheduled for April 6-9, 2025, attracting a large number of domestic and foreign investors, project parties, and industry experts.
Meanwhile, there will also be various surrounding activities (Side Events) around the main venue, continuously throughout the day. According to the well-known Web3 event platform Luma, there are currently nearly 40 surrounding activities.

Since 2024, after continuous good news from Hong Kong's virtual asset market, more and more traditional financial users have turned their attention to this emerging market.
From direct trading of virtual assets to indirect purchases of virtual asset-related products, and then to investments in high-quality crypto projects, the Web3 world always has countless opportunities waiting for players. But what kind of Web3 investments can you actually participate in? And can you participate legally and compliantly?
In this article, Portal Labs has organized the current mainstream Web3 investment methods and the types of suitable people.

In the past two days, Portal Labs saw a piece of news from PANews stating: According to the 2024 annual Runa Open Source Entrepreneurship Index (ROSS Index) report released by the European venture capital firm Runa Capital, more than half of the 20 hottest open-source startups globally are closely related to AI, with projects represented by MyShell and Fuel prominently featured.
In Web3, starting from the end of 2023, elements of #AI have become popular, and by 2025, #AIAgents , it can be said that any project that does not incorporate some AI elements is 'out of place'.
To say how popular the AI label is in the current Web3, let's first look at a set of data (at the time of writing):

Regardless of whether you are a new player in Web3 or an experienced veteran, if you are a Chinese investor, there is inevitably a long-standing question that troubles you: Is participating in #Web3 illegal?
First, here's an answer: it's not.
So, under the current regulatory framework, how can Chinese investors participate in Web3 in compliance? Which tracks are compliant in China? In this article, Portal Labs will outline the compliance pathways to help Chinese investors find feasible Web3 tracks.
Compliance red lines in the domestic Web3 industry
Currently, the regulation of Web3 in mainland China is mostly still in a gray area; as long as you do not cross the red line, there shouldn't be any major issues.

I wonder if investors who are newly exposed to Web3 have this feeling:
I have read investment analysis reports from major institutions like t-88, t-90, t-92, and listened to popular terms like t-94, t-96, and Restaking, but... new projects emerge every day, and each project has multiple labels attached. How can I find these subdivided projects in popular tracks?
Many people think that understanding reports is enough to understand projects, but when it comes to practice, they find: concepts exist, the direction is vague, project classifications are chaotic, and it is impossible to accurately target.
If you are troubled by this, let this article help you solve the problem.

Due to the clear regulatory red lines in our country, many core areas, especially those involving crypto financial services, such as cryptocurrency trading, lending, etc., still find it difficult to participate in compliance domestically. This has led many investors to consider overseas investment in search of a freer market environment.
But with this comes another critical issue that Web3 investors need to consider: Is participating in Web3 overseas really compliant?
Here, Portal Labs also provides an answer: compliance.
What exactly is the compliance law? In this article, Portal Labs will analyze it one by one.

In (What is social engineering attack and how to prevent it?), we mentioned that social engineering attacks are becoming one of the biggest security threats for Web3 investors. From impersonating customer service, phishing websites to disguising contract signatures, attackers use a variety of means that are hard to defend against.
Many investors tend to focus their security protection on wallet settings and private key protection, but in reality, what can immediately block risks from daily operations are some simple and practical security tools, such as anti-scam security plugins.
In this article, Portal Labs recommends several mainstream and well-reviewed anti-scam plugins to help you enhance asset security from the source and build your personal Web3 protection shield.

In the Web3 world, whether you are an ordinary player, a high-net-worth investor, or a project party, one of the unavoidable risks is scams.
According to the Chainalysis report (The Chainalysis 2025 Crypto Crime Report), the total amount of global on-chain crime reached 24 billion USD in 2024, of which:
The scale of fraud-related transactions reached 9.9 billion USD, with pig-butchering, phishing websites, and fake investment projects being particularly prevalent;
The amount of funds stolen exceeded 2.2 billion USD, with over 60% stemming from private key leaks and social engineering phishing;
Ransomware, market manipulation, and other criminal activities are also frequently seen.

On March 24, 2025, amidst the repeated tug-of-war in the global virtual asset market, BTC once again broke through 87,000, alleviating some fear in the crypto market—according to CoinMarketCap data, market sentiment is at 31, an increase of 4 points from the previous day.

At the same time, a piece of news related to mining has caused a small stir in the market:
According to Public Pool and Umbrel, at 08:30 on March 23, Beijing time, an individual miner successfully mined the first Bitcoin block (888989) using a self-hosted Umbrel node and Bitaxe miner through the Public Pool protocol, with a block reward of 3.15188086 BTC.

On March 17, 2025, a conversation between crypto bigwig Emperor and crypto top player CZ on Twitter sparked deep reflection among many Web3 players:
Emperor pointed out that the barrier to success in the crypto field is very low, as 80% of people come in just to check it out because of a hot news story, 10% are influenced by FOMO while lurking on Twitter, and 5% pretend to be rich, with only the last 5% truly needing to surpass.
CZ then added that among them, 4% have been active on major trading platforms, but their returns may not outperform the last 1% who hold BTC long-term.
To outperform this 1%, tremendous effort is needed.