The Ledger, every show

“The people I think should be worried are if you're like VC firm, 15 through 1000, right? Like I think you get disrupted because capital, as it becomes a commodity, if you're a venture firm, 25 and you're like not breaking the top decile in terms of returns, An…”

“Could Bitcoin actually be a Reserve currency that central banks are purchasing that could be bigger than the yuan or the euro in central banks. I don't think that's crazy, actually.”

“Creates this opportunity for a third system, right? An incredibly neutral third system, which might be Ethereum, which effectively starts to behave like a digital economy and a digital settlement layer for all the transactions that need to exist in a third pla…”

“Even though most of the dollars today, I think, are going towards those last two buckets of distributed computation and distributed applications, I don't think that's actually where most of the really new value will get created in the long term.”

“The real risk, in my opinion, therefore, is not that the government bans this stuff. I think the real risk, actually, is that nefarious governments fully, fully embrace it.”

“Yeah, I generally think decentralized teams won't work. I think in the very, very early days of any platform, they can work, and it's because there is not that much competition, and a lot of what you need to build out is infrastructure, and you have a small nu…”

“So what I would expect will happen is actually, over time, crypto companies will actually recentralize in large part to Silicon Valley.”

“DeFi worked. DeFi didn't fail here. Maker is still going. Frax is still going. Ethereum is producing blocks. You can send money around using stable coins. You can still take money out of Aave. All the systems that are designed to be over collateralized and res…”

“And beyond that, even decentralized infrastructure. You have things like IPFS, Interplanetary File System, which is incentivized with Filecoin, or RWE, which is a permanent data store. And these things work. You can actually store data on them. Depending on wh…”

“A lot of these protocols ultimately we think will not capture that much value despite there being very useful. It's just going to be really tough for them to actually capture significant value defensively over time.”

“Essentially, these are seed stage and series A companies that have gone public.”

“They're easily in the top five of things that will actually persist and will survive and have a real value and real ecosystems built on top of them.”

“The belief we've come to is that the NFT markets Are actually going to be more defensible than the cryptocurrency markets. And it's because the assets that you're purchasing are by definition, unique and distinct.”

“In a distributed system, in a distributed network, if you own 20% of the network, you're a liability to the resilience of the network.”

“And so you actually, like in our case, we try to not own more than five percent.”

“Crypto is also going to eat capital markets, right, which is the deployment of money and the deployment of capital. And if crypto is going to eat capital markets, it's going to eat venture capital.”

“Now, some absolutely can, and I think some will. Like, I think Andreessen and Sequoia will likely make that transition, but it's going to be extremely challenging.”

“It like destroys these local and regional monopolies and turns them into global markets. And once you're competing at a global scale, it tends to have this sort of concentration effect. It creates a power law and it creates concentration in the head and it unl…”

“And actually, I think the lockup periods, ten-year lockups, despite the liquidity, I think is actually better for LPs because it is a venture asset class. The returns are extremely asymmetric. And you can generate many multiples on your fund if you're patient.”

“We see cases where actually, yes, today there's a company, but the real value clearly will be in the token. And actually you want the company to dissolve and not exist. So effectively you're going to invest in some equity over time. You'll get some tokens, whi…”

“But a lot of the time, what you're really doing is not building a sustainable token network. It's often going to be the case that it's sort of a customer acquisition channel, and it behaves a little bit more like loyalty points than it does a true distributed …”

“Generally, a limit test we're using is like, does the company just go away? And if you shut down the company, Would you still have a significant amount of value capture and creation that happens on the token side? And if the answer to that is yes, then really …”

“You'll have millions and millions of doubts created. Many of them will fail. Many of them will look very similar to what we would expect just reasoning through it. And some small percent, 10% of them will wildly break our expectations about what's possible.”

“Like, if a VC firm that feels like, They missed out on the last wave of crypto for the last four years comes in and is starting to buy logos. Then they're going to overpay because their motivations are not just that they want to do the investment at a fair pri…”

“I think I've recently changed my mind on the uniqueness of the period of time that we lived in from roughly 1990 to 2020. Like, I thought we were trending towards that was basically the state of the world, where we would have this sort of, like, globally stabl…”

“I think what's happening is that cryptocurrencies are this massive platform shift in the world. They represent a change in a lot of different dimensions and everything from how we build companies to business models to, you know, I think this is software eating…”

“So I think that's always the risk for the VCs or for the ecosystem in general is that investors pursue things that pattern match to things that we already know rather than identifying the places where the platform is natively able to do things that we weren't …”

“And right now, what you have at the late stage is a lot of money and a lot of risk. And so you haven't really de-risked it, but there's a lot of money going in. And so as an investor, you look at that and you say, wow, that's a pretty tough place to put money.…”

“I look at ICOs strictly defined as people raising large crowdfunding rounds from relatively technically unsophisticated investors as a symptom, which is that there are a lot of scammers who are taking advantage of this ecosystem. And I think those bad actors c…”

“I think you could have the inspiration for ideas come from underserved markets, but I wouldn't be surprised if the really big winners in crypto actually sort of re-centralize around Silicon Valley.”

“In some sense ICOs are kind of the gaming use case, right? It's kind of like a gambling, it's a gambling use case, right? And like, that's actually kind of what's happening is people are just gambling as real money.”

“The way to do investing in crypto would be really different. And it would look a lot more operational. It would look a lot more like a software company than it would a traditional investment firm.”

“Bizarrely, it was easier for us to raise a billion dollars than it was to raise that first ten million dollars.”

“You look at something like Magic Eden on Solana, the run rate for that business is hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The GMV is billions and billions of dollars a year of assets being purchased, and that's on another new L-one in Solana.”

“What you can visualize is sort of a U-curve, which is to say that if you're on the far left and you really own the user relationship, you can capture a ton of value. And if you're on the far right, you have some CapEx-heavy hard technology problem. You can lik…”

“One of the things they got right, they essentially built a media company that monetizes with venture capital, and they realized that that top of funnel investment flow is really valuable.”

“We tend to think the world is going to be multi-chain. It's not going to be one chain to rule them all. And there probably is going to be some sort of power law there. So the big winner will be really big. We tend to think Bitcoin and Ethereum will be really b…”

“The high level here is I've come to believe that NFTs are probably how crypto goes mainstream.”

“There are no good investments in venture. It's either investments where you said no, you should have said yes, or it's investments where you said yes, but you should have put in a lot more money. There's just no good venture investments.”

“We probably do about a fourth of our investments in USDC, because it's just faster.”

“So I think crypto protocols and businesses need an entirely different kind of services layer. And so you don't need a board member that helps you figure out how to interview a VP of sales. You need people sitting in your discord helping you do distributed gove…”

“Is I absolutely think we will recreate a lot of the known governance structures in society. We will recreate representative government, for example, where there are experts and you sort of delegate your votes to them and then they go off and make decisions tha…”

“Our instinct is to extrapolate linearly rather than extrapolate exponentially because the conclusions that you reach to seem ludicrous in the moment. But it's turned out that every moment in time on that curve, whether you were in 1980 or 1985 or 1990 or 1995 …”

“I would expect that over time, over the next, say, five years, the volatility will go down in the space, and it will start to look like a better and better store of value.”

“And if you look at the way that the U S government in particular, I think has handled crypto. I think they've been very nuanced and sophisticated in their handling of this.”

“And so I think, actually, in practice, what's going to happen is the government will clean up Our understanding of where those lines are, and once we have that regulatory certainty, we'll actually create even more investment and more innovation, because then e…”

“I think private, privacy tokens are actually a thing. Like if you talk to a lot of people, hey, if XYZ thing went away, would you care about it? They're like, yeah, it would be kind of unfortunate if that went away, or I'd lose a lot of money because I was in …”

“I think it's probably like seven to 10 years out for most of these. I think we're really, really early in most of these cases.”