/ Writing
/March 12: The Day Crypto Market Structure Broke (Part 1)
There were two large downward moves in the crypto markets on March 12th, about 13 hours apart. The first was early in the morning, and the second in the evening (in the US). The first move down—a ~25% move—was fast and relatively orderly given the size of the move; however, during the second leg down, the market structure broke.
Today, the vast majority of economic activity is conducted via corporations. Corporations were invented in the 1400s, with the first versions manifesting as joint-stock companies. Capital structures, limited liability, and other parameters have evolved since then, but the fundamental premise of the corporation as the conduit to facilitate economic activity remains largely unchanged.
/Welcoming Mable Jiang To Multicoin Capital
Since launching Multicoin Capital more than two years ago, we’ve sought to build a crypto-native, global-scale asset management firm. Over the last 12 months, we’ve been thinking hard about how exactly we should grow the firm in order to build towards that vision. We determined that the most important initiative we could undertake was to develop a meaningful presence in Asia.
Today I’m excited to announce our investment in Arweave, a new protocol and blockchain pioneering an entirely new idea: permanent data storage. Arweave is the foundation of the Permaweb, a critical piece of infrastructure in the Web3 stack. We invested alongside our friends at a16z crypto and Union Square Ventures.
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.
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.