- Andreessen Horowitz general partners Chris Dixon and Katie Haun announced that the venture capital firm has launched a new $515 million blockchain fund called Crypto Fund II
Andreessen Horowitz general partners Chris Dixon and Katie Haun announced that the venture capital firm has launched a new $515 million blockchain fund called Crypto Fund II. This fund was formed about two years after the firm raised $300 million for the first version of the fund.
“Investments made in internet technologies over the last several decades have given rise to products and services used everyday by billions of people, including messaging, video conferencing, ecommerce and everything in between. We think it’s important to keep investing in the long-term development of the internet to address the needs of the coming decades,” wrote Dixon and Haun.
There are several areas that they are excited about, including next-generation payments, modern stores of value, decentralized finance (DeFi), new ways for creators to monetize, and Web 3. In terms of next-generation payments, the firm’s partners said that payment blockchains could end up doing to banks what email did to the post office and VoIP services did to long-distance carriers. For modern stores of value, the firm points out that Bitcoin has been a digital alternative that is gaining acceptance and adoption around the world. DeFi has also been rapidly adopted by early users and developers as millions of dollars in leading DeFi protocols have been deployed while developers have also embraced DeFi’s open space. In a way that is similar to the video game industry experimenting with digital goods, the firm believes that in the near future activities like writing, music, podcasting, and design could have crypto monetization models. And while Web 3 is early in the build-out, high-performance programmable blockchains will make decentralized network development more accessible.
“These are a few areas where people are already building, but it only scratches the surface of the yet-to-be-imagined applications that entrepreneurs will dream up. In the same way that it wasn’t obvious in 2007 how applications on top of mobile phones would change so many aspects of the ways in which we move, consume, travel, communicate, and even date, it’s hard to imagine what the very best apps and use cases will be for blockchain-based computing platforms,” added Dixon and Haun.
