#60: The redefined role of investment funds in the Blockchain space
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The redefined role of investment funds in the Blockchain space
Jake of Coinfund tweeted an extremely interesting insight the other day.
I find this insight fascinating and worth of deeper analysis.
The crypto space is a completely new world, where the recipients of investors’ monies aren’t companies anymore — and can be networks, ecosystems, open source projects, non-profit foundations, cooperatives and DAOs.
At the same time, the product is not a simple consumer- or business-targeted software or real product, but a protocol.
This means that investors have to re-think a number of different parts of their model that were targeted towards product-based companies.
The usual thinking here has been around liquidity and how to manage a now uncertain type of asset, but the more interesting thought is around what the actual structure, scope and vision of an investor will look like.
Jake envisions a version of the future where investors will be “miners, stakers, validators, bonders, curators, dispute resolvers, nodes, hubs, watchers, routers for networks”.
We’re actually already seeing a bit the lines blurring in private sales happening at the moment.
Oftentimes we’re seeing market-makers, hardware-producers and other ecosystem players invest and be welcomed by founders.
We’re seeing founders actively request mining, node-running and similar services from their investor base and oftentimes only allocating capital to such entities. This could be one argument for the ballooning number of participants in rounds, as founders look for as much service supply as they can get their hands on to bootstrap they networks. Of course the other argument is that founders raise way too much money while it’s hot, letting in anyone with a cheque.
Adding a structured portfolio of services and infrastructure like the one envisioned by Jake, might even become table-stakes in the future of crypto investing.
Other topics in #60 this week:
- an intriguing long thesis for ETH…
- what investors can learn from BitTorrent survival strategy
- more skepticism from Nobel-prizes
- evolving Bitcoin narratives
- unpacking the big ICE / Bakkt news
- new products: Quickline, Nimbus, Sparkswap, Cred…
- big raises: Handshake, Hashgraph, Radar Relay
- July ’18 ICO dire update
- and a lot more!
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📖 Bonus: Most read from #59
- Methodologies for measuring project health by Nadia Eghbal of Protocol Labs
- State of Stablecoins, 2018 by Nathan Sexer of Variabl
- Fat Protocols vs Fat Dapps vs Fat Wallets by Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Partners
- The race to build the best blockchain by Stan Schroeder of Mashable
- Cryptoeconomics for the Long-Term: Founder Lockups and Second ICOs by Adam Kaplan, recent Stanford grad
