We are very pleased to announce our investment in Uniswap, the leading decentralized crypto exchange. We participated in the $11m Series A raise, alongside our friends at a16z, USV and Paradigm. Exchanges have been the most important piece of infrastructure when it comes to building out crypto networks. The first…
Since the early days, crypto has had four core promises: 1) Enabling trust at scale. Transactions are executed by code, rather than a single gatekeeper like a bank or other financial middleman. 2) Permissionless innovation. Crypto’s open source nature enables anybody to build on top of existing code. 3) A…
If you spend a lot of time in crypto (like we do here at V1), it can be easy to lose sight of how non-crypto investors and entrepreneurs think about the space. The huge ICO run-up in 2017 brought a lot of attention to the vertical. Since then, many have…
I recently shared some thoughts about DeFi in light of recent market turmoil. While I remain extremely bullish on p2p finance in the long run, I believe there are at least 3 major questions to answer in the short term: 1) what blockchain/layer is most appropriate for DeFi scalability, 2)…
The last couple of weeks have been quite a test for cryptocurrency markets in general and DeFi in particular. On Black Thursday (March 12), BTC/ETH prices declined by ~50% and DeFi’s flagship project, MakerDAO, ended up with ~$5 million USD in unbacked DAI. You can read Tom Schmidt’s excellent postmortem…
