Andreessen Horowitz Launches $300 Million Crypto Fund 🚨 This article is 6 years old...
Andreessen Horowitz Launches $300 Million Crypto Fund
2 min read
Updated: Jun. 29, 2018 at 10:06 am UTC
Photo by Steven Coffey on Unsplash
Despite a market downturn, cryptocurrency is drawing more institutional investor attention now than ever before. Announced on June 25, 2018, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is launching a $300 million fund dedicated to cryptocurrency-related ventures.
a16z crypto – Leading Silicon Valley Crypto Interest
A Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) was one of the first to invest in major companies leading the technology sector today, including Facebook, Airbnb, Github, and Coinbase.
Expanding their field of vision toward the future of digital assets and their underlying blockchain technology, a16z announced plans to launch a $300 million venture fund for investing in crypto-related companies and blockchain startups.
The blog post announcement states that a16z has been investing in cryptocurrencies for over five years and has yet to sell any of those early investments – expressing plans to HODL over the long-term.
Describing their cryptocurrency investment strategy, seed investor at Andreessen Horowitz Chris Dixon states:
“We have an “all weather” fund. We plan to invest consistently over time, regardless of market conditions. If there is another “crypto winter,” we’ll keep investing aggressively.”
Through the a16z crypto fund, the Silicon Valley investment vanguard plans to offer its extensive support services for projects at all stages of development – providing access to various operating teams with expert management and legal advisory.
An industry-forward fund, Andreessen Horowitz seeks to look beyond the short-term returns of ICOs and invest only in projects that have long-term, applicable use-cases.
“Crypto is a global phenomenon, with great projects all around the world, and we’ll invest accordingly. We are focused on non-speculative use case. We want services powered by crypto protocols to be used by hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people. Crypto tokens are the native asset class of digital networks, but their value is driven by the underlying, practical uses cases.”
Kathryn Haun, a former federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice and head of the government’s first cryptocurrency task force, is taking the lead of the a16z crypto fund along with other general partners of the firm.
Haun has decades of experience working on cases of corporate fraud and cyber crimes and currently serves on the board of Coinbase digital currency exchange.
Andreessen Horowitz is among the first and one of few major investment firms to join the cryptocurrency sector and lead institutional interest in the digital asset’s future potential.
Expressing their excitement for the future of cryptocurrency, Dixon notes:
“We find ourselves consistently surprised and excited by the wide variety of creative crypto ideas we encounter. For those of us who have been involved in software for a long time, it feels like the early days of the internet, web 2.0, or smartphones all over again.”
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