P2P Pipes
The first large scale P2P application on the Internet was Napster (email/SMTP was designed to be P2P and self-hosted, but in practice ended up federated). The spiritual successor to Napster was the BitTorrent protocol, which at peak, represented ~25-35% of all internet traffic in the mid-2000s. Both were permissionless: anyone could host any file.
The Great Energy Coordination Problem
Today, we are proud to announce a $12M round in Fuse. Fuse is a core contributor to Project Zero, a renewable energy DePIN designed to solve the great energy coordination problem. Fuse is a full-stack renewable energy company built by Alan Chang and Charles Orr, who were both early employees at Revolut. Alan and Charles were pivotal to the early growth of Revolut, and set their sights on solving the energy crisis in 2022.
Drift ($DRIFT) Analysis and Valuation
Multicoin has accumulated a large position across our funds—both liquid and venture—in DRIFT, the native token of Drift, a derivatives decentralized exchange (derivatives DEX) on Solana. We built the position over the last few years via private and public markets. An executive summary of our 25 page report is presented below.
All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 7 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Blockchain-Enabled Collectibles Marketplaces (BECMs)
Collecting is big business. Today, over one-third of Americans self-identify as collectors, and, as of 2024, the market size for collectibles is now nearly $500 billion dollars. Collectibles are a booming industry—and blockchains are coming for them. A growing subset of the world’s collectors are actually traders whose sole intent is to buy and sell billions of dollars worth of collectibles—from rare whiskeys to luxury watches to handbags—with the goal of flipping them and making a profit.
The Endgame for Stablecoins
Today, we’re proud to announce our investment in Mountain Protocol, the issuer of USDM, a permissionless, yield-bearing stablecoin backed entirely by US Treasuries. We led the Series A round, which also included Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and others. Stablecoins are among the largest addressable markets in crypto.
The Dawn of Bitcoin Programmability
Today, we are proud to announce our investment in Arch, a Bitcoin-native application platform that unlocks bridgeless decentralized finance (DeFi) on the world's most valuable blockchain. We led the investment with participation from OKX Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Portal Ventures, CMS Holdings, Tangent and others.
Unbundling Sotheby’s
DeFi’s arch of innovation, historically speaking, has been focused on introducing new financial primitives, like AMMs and perpetuals, that give users new ways to trade cryptoassets. As of today, the land grab for obvious primitives has mostly ended, leaving only smaller exotic primitives to explore. The next wave of innovation will focus on using DeFi rails to fix broken markets.
Enter The Wormhole
Crypto is going multichain and needs a secure but flexible interoperability platform to connect the industry. Wormhole is one of the leading solutions in the market with a full-stack interoperability platform. Today I’m excited to announce that we co-led a $225M round in Wormhole. This round closed late last year; we are formally announcing our investment today to coincide with the launch of W token, which goes live today.
Publisher-Exchanges: Consumer Applications and the Attention Theory of Value
“The price is the news” is an often used adage in crypto circles any time there is heightened engagement and awareness around a network following fast price action. It has become clear to me that the inverse of this statement is perhaps more profoundly true: “The news is the price.” In my contribution to What Multicoin is Excited About For 2024, I described a marked shift in how markets price assets that I labeled the “Attention Theory of Value.”
The Holy Grail of Cryptography
In some sense, every server-side security vulnerability or exploit over the last 30 years shares the same root cause: some sensitive piece of data was left unencrypted (or an attacker gained access to a decryption key). When presented in this frame, the solution is fairly obvious: don’t ever decrypt data, and ensure no decryption key is ever stored on any server.
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