/ Writing
Since the advent of Bitcoin, people have been talking about the inevitability of crypto-based payments. And yet, 13 years since the launch of Bitcoin, payments over crypto rails have not yet entered mainstream consciousness. Why have crypto payments struggled? And why is that changing now?
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This year we celebrated our fifth anniversary as a firm. Over that time, we’ve watched carefully as the industry has evolved and built step-function improvements to scaling, indexing, data modeling, wallets, and more. Core infrastructure has occupied the minds of builders for years; however, that’s now starting to change. New consumer applications—like games, social media, creator platforms, consumer loyalty, and more—are starting to appear.
Miner Extractable Value (MEV) is fundamental to permissionless distributed systems and cannot be eliminated. The market structure for MEV is dynamic and complex, but the actors that profit from them in proof-of-work (PoW) networks—such as Ethereum 1.0—have exclusively been miners and searchers.
Today I’m excited to announce that Multicoin Capital has led a $7.5M seed investment in Mercury with participation from North Island Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Brevan Howard Digital, and several others. The convergence of sports and crypto is one of the most exciting, fast-growing areas of the market with strong, early successes in companies like Sorare and NBA Top Shot. Both have onboarded countless new users into crypto.
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Today we are excited to announce our latest venture fund, Venture Fund III, a $430M fund that invests $500K-$25M in early-stage opportunities all the way up to $100M+ for later-stage projects when combined with our evergreen liquid fund.
Why is the UX of OpenSea and Magic Eden generally the same (discovery on homepage, basic set of linear filters on the left side of collection pages, same search presentation, etc.)? Or, framed another way, why doesn’t the front page of OpenSea or Magic Eden have an activity feed (like Fractal or Hawku), or a livestream (like Twitch), or the results of a recent game tournament that heavily leverages NFTs?
Today I’m excited to announce that Multicoin Capital has led a $60M Series A in Delphia alongside Ribbit Capital, FTX Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, FJ Labs, Lattice Ventures, Cumberland, Road Capital, and M13.
/The Ball Multicoin Bitwise Metaverse Index
Over the last 6 months, as the term “metaverse” has become more popular in mainstream lexicon, we have come to the realization that many of our investments across various sectors—Web3 infrastructure, DeFi, asset ledgers, data networks, etc.—are good candidates to provide foundational infrastructure to power many credibly-neutral metaverses.
One of the most powerful features of crypto-economic protocols is their ability to create incentive structures that allow anyone in the world to permissionlessly contribute to a set of shared objectives. These incentive structures can be finely tuned to facilitate large-scale coordination to achieve specific goals. This represents a step-function improvement in capital formation.
Today I’m excited to announce that Multicoin Capital has co-led a $35M investment in Fractal with Paradigm, with participation from a16z crypto, Solana Ventures, Animoca, Coinbase, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Do Kwon, and Tim Ferriss.
