Inside the Room at the Spring 2019 Multicoin Summit (Videos)

The Multicoin Summit is a semiannual, invite-only event that brings together some of the brightest minds in crypto to discuss the most important trends and topics shaping the industry. Though our events are primarily for our LPs and industry partners, we strive to make the ideas discussed as accessible as possible to you, our readers.

I’m happy to report that our Spring 2019 Summit did not disappoint. It was another great event in sunny Half Moon Bay, California. Our featured speakers included representatives from a university endowment, European fund-of-funds, crypto-native founders and builders, and c-suite executives from some of the most established businesses in crypto. We also featured two of Multicoin’s very own to talk about prediction markets and data science.

Below we’ve selected a few talks to highlight. For various reasons, we are not at liberty to share all of them just yet, though we promise to release more in the coming weeks and months. We will also publish these talks as podcasts if you prefer to listen instead of watch. With that, let’s dive in…

The Crypto Mega Theses

Starting off with a bang, Kyle Samani revealed our investment theses on stage for the first time. A few weeks ago, we also published the talk's accompanying blog post: The Crypto Mega Theses. We define “mega theses” as those in which the addressable market is measured in the trillions of 2019 USD. We expect these theses to play out over a decade or longer and to generate the vast majority of our returns. After spending two years with entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors in this space, we’ve developed more conviction in these theses than ever. This is a talk you don’t want to miss. Watch the full presentation below, and read the accompanying blog post here.

Portfolio Construction for Institutional Allocators

One of the most common questions we get asked is about institutional portfolio construction—i.e., how should allocators think about firms’ strategies, portfolio weighting, and overall exposure. This year we were fortunate to welcome Ray Hindi, CEO / CIO at L1 Digital, a prominent European fund of funds, and Chris Bartholomew, the Director of Investments at the University of North Carolina Management Company to speak about selecting fund managers and strategic portfolio construction. This conversation traverses a wide range of topics, everything from winning over investment committees to selecting the most important attributes in funds. If you’ve ever wondered how permanent capital thinks, this panel is a great introduction.

Disclosure: This post includes views expressed by Ray Hindi (“Investor”), who is or was at the time of this post an investor (directly or through an investing entity) in one or more funds managed by Multicoin Capital Management, LLC (“Multicoin”). Multicoin did not compensate Investor in connection with this interview. Investor’s status as an investor in Multicoin funds creates a material conflict of interest since (1) Investor may be strongly incentivized to portray Multicoin and the investments it makes in a positive light, and (2) Investor may be less incentivized to be critical about Multicoin.

A Fireside Chat with Balaji Srinivasan, Former CTO of Coinbase

Almost one year ago, Coinbase acquired Earn.com and appointed Balaji Srinivasan as its first CTO. It was later announced the week following our summit that Balaji is leaving Coinbase. This video is the last known public talk that Srinivasan gave as CTO—and what a talk it was. In the span of a single hour Balaji masterfully traverses all of the major initiatives at Coinbase, Coinbase’s role in the ecosystem, the early success of Earn.com, and all he could share about the exchange’s future plans for growth. This talk is potent and insightful. Watch the full video below.

The Promise of Prediction Markets

Our very own Matthew Shapiro gave a great talk on the promise of prediction markets, a micro-thesis in crypto that we follow closely as a firm. Part walk through, part market- and product-commentary, this 15-minute demo is a guided tour through Augur, Guesser, Veil, BlitzPredict, and Flux, five of the most prominent prediction market tools on the decentralized web.

The Maturation of Crypto Market Infrastructure

In this panel, Greg Tusar, the Co-founder of Tagomi, Tushar Jain, and Matthew Ballensweig of Genesis Capital joined the stage to explore the maturation of crypto market infrastructure over the past 18 months (as an aside, we wrote about this topic in Business Insider recently). Hear from the front lines how prime brokerages and other services are coming to crypto, how institutional trading desks are gaining volume and building out new services, and what it all means for new investment managers looking to enter the space.

Disclosure: This post includes views expressed by Matthew Ballensweig (“Investor”), who is or was at the time of this post an investor (directly or through an investing entity) in one or more funds managed by Multicoin Capital Management, LLC (“Multicoin”). Multicoin did not compensate Investor in connection with this interview. Investor’s status as an investor in Multicoin funds creates a material conflict of interest since (1) Investor may be strongly incentivized to portray Multicoin and the investments it makes in a positive light, and (2) Investor may be less incentivized to be critical about Multicoin.

Crypto-native Metrics and Data Science

Last but certainly not least, Zach Bolian, our Head of Data Science, gave a great talk on the state of the art in data science for blockchain data. Going well beyond simple sentiment and social data, Zach demos custom applications he built to illustrate how public blockchain data can be wielded to forecast future dapp adoption, behavior, usage, and more.

And that’s a wrap! If you’re interested in watching more videos from the summit, make sure to subscribe to our blog for future updates. You can also re-watch videos from previous summits on our YouTube channel here.