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/The Future of Finance is Real-Time Reporting
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Today, we’re excited to announce that Multicoin Capital invested in Dune Analytics’ $8M Series A led by our friends at Union Square Ventures. Redpoint Ventures and Dragonfly Capital also participated. As avid users of Dune, we revel in the opportunity to double down in this fundraise after participating in Dune’s seed round last year. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to invest in something that we use everyday.
A blockchain is a database with unique trust-minimization properties. Like all databases, there are two kinds of operations: reads and writes. Most of the discourse to date around scaling blockchains is about writes. This is often measured as transactions per second (TPS). For example, Ethereum supports 15-30 TPS, Binance Smart Chain supports up to 160 TPS, and Solana supports up to 50,000 TPS. Investors have invested billions of dollars to scale blockchain writes.
DeFi is the most useful application of blockchains. We spend a meaningful percentage of our time thinking about DeFi, and learning from the best DeFi entrepreneurs who are building the future of finance. But when most people think about blockchains, they think about value transfer. Why? Because it’s just easier to understand. Superfluid, a new protocol we just invested in, represents the biggest step forwards in value transfer since the advent of Bitcoin.
This essay assumes familiarity with Nick Szabo’s essay on Social Scalability, Vitalik Buterin’s essay on Weak Subjectivity, and Haseeb Qureshi’s essay on Why Decentralization Isn’t As Important As You Think. This essay is not a rebuttal of Szabo’s essay.
Building on the success of our first venture fund, we’re proud to announce that Multicoin Capital has raised a new $100M venture fund to back entrepreneurs building companies (equity), and protocols (tokens) in and around the crypto space. We have been investing out of this vehicle for several months already.
Today, I’m excited to announce our investment in REALY, a platform that trades the legitimacy of streetwear and other real world collectibles. Our friends at Alameda Research and SNZ Capital also participated in the round.
Helium is a new crypto economic protocol that underpins a new business model deploying and managing wireless networks at about 100x lower cost than traditional top-down telecom business models. The first wireless technology supported by Helium is LoRaWAN, a popular technology for IoT devices. Multicoin Capital co-led the Series C round in Helium Inc in 2019 along with USV.
Multicoin Capital has accumulated a large position in RUNE, the native token of THORChain, a decentralized cross-chain automated market maker (AMM). RUNE represents one of our largest public positions.
There’s a long running joke that all financial innovation can be boiled down to two things: figuring out ways to take on more leverage, and (un)bundling risk to more efficiently price assets for investors. The first major financial innovation was the separation of debt and equity back in the 1400s. This innovation unbundled risk, creating two classes of risk holders: debt (lower risk, lower returns), and equity (higher risk, higher returns).
Today I’m excited to announce that Multicoin Capital has led a $1.15 million seed round in Swivel Finance, a new decentralized protocol that enables fixed-rate lending and interest-rate derivatives. Electric Capital, CMS Holdings, Divergence Ventures, and DeFiance Capital also participated, as did several angels including Ash Egan, Stani Kulechov of Aave, Alex Pack, Imran Khan, Qiao Wang, and Thomas Klocanas.