/ Writing
Over the past two years, the scaling debate has narrowed and fixated on the central question of modularity vs integration. (Note that discourse in crypto often conflates “monolithic” and “integrated” systems. There is a rich history of debate in technology over the last 40 years about integrated vs. modular systems at every layer of the stack. The crypto incarnation of this dialogue should be framed through the same lens; this is far from a new debate).
The worlds of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI) have been evolving in parallel, with each domain pushing the boundaries of technology and innovation. As we continue to make strides in both fields, it is becoming increasingly clear that their futures are inextricably linked. In this post, we will explore four important intersections at the crossroads of crypto and AI.
Many have argued how co-creation will ultimately lead to the democratization of the creator class, re-imagine fandom, and turn fans into creators; however, this discussion stops short of the implications of co-creation on brands, which could be larger than the impact on co-creators themselves. In the past, brands created products and, more generally, culture, and proliferated this top-down via centralized, top-down media (Toby Shorin).
In the first wave of crypto innovation after Bitcoin, many developers forked the Bitcoin codebase to try to build other decentralized infrastructure and applications beyond digital gold. Some of the earliest forks included attempts at building decentralized databases that could be used for general purpose application development. In the wave of crypto innovation that followed Ethereum’s launch, teams began building BFT database engines.
Today, we are proud to announce our investment in Lore, the first co-ownership platform for web3 collectives. We led a $4M round alongside North Island Ventures, Seed Club Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Zeneca, Mischief Ventures, Sfermion, CMT Digital, Patricio Worthalter, Spice Capital, Sublime Ventures, and others.
Today, we are proud to announce our investment in Seed Club Ventures (SCV), a $25M venture DAO that invests in internet-native organizations, alongside Delphi Digital, Dragonfly Capital, Collab+Currency, SV Angel, Distributed Global, and others. SCV will be exclusively focused on early stage teams building communities, infrastructure and applications that leverage Web3 primitives to accelerate financial and human capital coordination to achieve their missions.
/New Investment Partners at Multicoin
Today I’d like to announce that two of our longest standing members of our investment team, Spencer Applebaum (LinkedIn, Twitter) and Shayon Sengupta (LinkedIn, Twitter), have been promoted to Investment Partner. Both of them have done great work in finding lucrative trades in public markets, and in sourcing and winning competitive deals in private markets. But most importantly, both have also worked closely with many of our founders over the past several years to help them succeed.
/Onboarding The Next Billion Users To Crypto Rails
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Today, we’re announcing we co-led TipLink’s $6M seed round with Sequoia. Our colleagues from Circle Ventures, Solana Ventures, Paxos, Asymmetric, Big Brain Ventures, Karatage and Monke Ventures also participated in the round. Nick Grossman wrote a thesis we’re fond of called The Butter Thesis which he defines as interactions and experiences that are super smooth—rich, easy, delicious.
The design space of cyber security is vast. There are an infinite number of attack vectors across chips and instruction sets, operating systems, runtimes, and applications. And naturally, there are many large cybersecurity companies. When I first got into Ethereum in 2016, the only real cybersecurity companies were smart contract auditors. Human audits have been and always will be paramount. However, human audits are not enough.
We’ve become increasingly interested in a category of innovation that we’re internally calling the Web3 Growth Stack—i.e., the tools that product managers and marketers use to acquire, engage and retain customers using Web3 technologies. In Web2, the growth stack consists of a plethora of tools, platforms, and analytics systems designed to help product and marketing leaders augment growth.