This is an exciting time for cryptocurrencies. As we recently wrote in Cryptocurrency’s Second Act, the rise of Ethereum revealed that cryptocurrency is not a winner-takes-all market. It has evolved from a sole player with a limited use case into an ecosystem with at least two cryptocurrencies at scale, and many others trying to get to scale. We’re seeing interesting new use cases built on top of cryptocurrencies and the new ability to monetize software and open source.

We’ve never been more bullish about the potential of cryptocurrencies than we are now and have been looking for an investment in the Blockchain space for quite awhile. That’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in Blockstack, an organization formed to push the Blockstack open-source protocol forward and make the new decentralized internet a reality.

Blockstack offers a full platform for decentralized applications, providing important services like identity, DNS/naming, storage and authentication. All of the Blockstack software is open source, maintained by the 4,000+ members in the Blockstack community. To date, more than 70,000 domain names have been registered on Blockstack.

The Blockstack community is currently working on a new browser and app development platform that will allow anyone to use the new decentralized internet and the apps that are built on it. This is a large effort and we’re thrilled that the funding will help contribute more development resources to the project.

This is a passionate group with a clear vision for the future of a decentralized internet. We believe that 2017 could be the year that cryptocurrencies start delivering on their huge potential, and Blockstack could be a big part of that story.