/ Insights
The largest profit centers of crypto—the exchanges—are generally under analyzed from a strategic lens, especially given their systemic importance to the space as a whole. This is especially true given that the public can invest in the success of the exchanges through each exchange’s respective token (with the exceptions of the US-based exchanges, BitMEX, and Deribit).
/Welcoming Tony Sheng and The Next Steps For Multicoin Capital
Today I’m excited to announce that Tony Sheng has joined Multicoin Capital as a Principal on the investment team. With deep experience as a product leader at companies like Google, AltspaceVR (acquired by Microsoft), and Decentraland, he brings a unique, user-focused perspective to the firm and the ecosystem as a whole. He’ll be based in Los Angeles, and will be working on new deals and helping our existing portfolio companies.
/Privacy Is a Feature, Not a Product
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Privacy is a feature of valuable cryptocurrencies, not a product offering in and of itself. Users should not have to take balance sheet risk (e.g. by selling some BTC or ETH for ZEC) on less valuable and less secure cryptocurrencies in order to achieve financial privacy. This essay will argue that general platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum already offer sufficient privacy guarantees for most users to never need niche privacy-focused blockchains.
Vitalik conceived Ethereum as the world computer: a single, composable, open, permissionless state machine that could run trust-minimized code. And while Ethereum was a breakthrough on many fronts—P2P layer, deterministic state machines, composable smart contracts and more—it was lacking in many others.
A year ago I illustrated the Web3 stack as I understood it at the time. More recently, I published Multicoin’s crypto mega theses, detailing the investment thesis for Web3. As I highlighted, one of the key implications of Web3 is that data ownership and application logic will be unbundled.
Numerous smart contract platforms (e.g. Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, Dfinity, Near Protocol, Algorand, Kadena, Spacemesh, and Solana) are launching in the next year or two. Each team is pursuing a unique scaling strategy. Most of these approaches, however, do not address one of the fundamental problems with distributed computing systems in Byzantine environments: the clock problem.
Today I’m excited to announce that Multicoin Capital has led a $2M seed round in Torus with, including participation from Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, Accomplice, Sixth Horizon, and Terminal.
I’m excited to announce that Multicoin Capital has co-led a $3.5M investment in dfuse with Intel Capital, including participation from Diagram Ventures.
I’m extremely excited to announce that Multicoin Capital co-led a $15M financing in Helium with our friends at Union Square Ventures. The Helium vision is the most ambitious we have seen in the blockchain space since the advent of smart contracts on Ethereum: Helium represents a fundamentally new approach—one with a radically reduced cost structure—to deploying and managing wireless networks at scale.
Today, Ethereum is the leading smart contract platform. While the trust-minimization properties of Ethereum are compelling, many developers are realizing that Ethereum simply cannot support the applications they want to build. Because of this, developers are choosing to build on other chains at an increasing pace. What applications are being unbundled from Ethereum, what applications are increasingly bundling around Ethereum, and what are the long-term implications for ETH’s monetary premium?