Andreessen Horowitz Announces New $4.5 Billion Crypto Fund

Discussion in 'Crypto Assets' started by johnarb, May 26, 2022.

  1. johnarb

    johnarb

    This guy always raising capital from investors... Prolly nothing


    https://decrypt.co/101321/andreessen-horowitz-announces-new-4-5-billion-crypto-fund


    Andreessen Horowitz Announces New $4.5 Billion Crypto Fund
    Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has raised $4.5 billion for its fourth cryptocurrency fund, bringing its total raised for crypto and blockchain investments to over $7.6 billion.

    By Andrew Asmakov
    May 25, 2022
    3 min read
    VC fund Andreessen Horowitz. Image: Shutterstock
    Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, today announced it raised a whopping $4.5 billion for a new crypto fund, the firm's fourth and the biggest so far.

    Crypto Fund 4 doubles the size of a16z’s previous crypto fund raised in June last year, showcasing that despite the turmoil in the crypto market, the firm’s partners are increasingly looking to get more exposure to promising Web3 startups.

    “We think we are now entering the golden era of web3. Programmable blockchains are sufficiently advanced, and a diverse range of apps have reached tens of millions of users,” a16z partner Chris Dixon wrote in a post accompanying the raise.

    “More importantly, a massive wave of world-class talent has entered web3 over the last year. They are brilliant and passionate and want to build a better internet,” he added.

    Of the $4.5 billion raised, $1.5 billion will be going towards seed investments, with the rest set aside for venture investments, said a16z.

    According to Dixon, the firm is specifically “excited” about the latest advancement in sectors including Web3 games, decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized social media, self-sovereign identity, layer-1, and layer-2 infrastructure, DAOs and governance, NFT communities, privacy, creator monetization, regenerative finance (ReFi), new applications of ZK proofs, decentralized content and story creation, and many other areas.

    Focus on the ‘top echelon of founders’
    The news of a16z's latest crypto fund comes at a time when the broader crypto market has entered a major downturn following the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin and its sister coin LUNA.

    Despite the slump, Andreessen Horowitz partner Ariana Simpson assured investors that the firm is confident about its bets.

    “Bear markets are often when the best opportunities come about, when people are actually able to focus on building technology rather than getting distracted by short-term price activity,” Simpson said in an interview with CNBC.

    In 2018, venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz made a big bet on crypto with a first-of-its-kind $300 million investment fund. Two years later, it doubled down by creating another $510 mil...

    She went on to say that “the technical diligence and the other kinds of diligence that we do are a key part of making sure that projects meet our bar.”

    “While our pace of investment has been high, we continue to invest really in only the top echelon of founders,” said Simpson.

    The firm’s current crypto portfolio includes the likes of Alchemy, Avalanche, Celo, Dapper Labs, Phantom Wallet, OpenSea, Solana, and Yuga Labs.

    Earlier this week, the firm invested in Flowcarbon, a blockchain-based carbon-credit trading platform which also backed by controversial WeWork founder Adam Neumann.

    In a separate move earlier this month, Andreessen Horowitz announced the launch of GAMES FUND ONE, which will invest $600 million across the gaming industry.
     
    Trader Curt likes this.
  2. Do they have a shorting strategy? Maybe short Tether?
     
  3. johnarb

    johnarb

    I think it's a long-only fund

    Tether is not going to crash, imho
     
    Trader Curt likes this.
  4. ZBZB

    ZBZB

    Why doesn’t someone do a stable coin that publishes its treasury bill holdings every day? Open source stable coin.
     
    johnarb and formikatrading like this.
  5. That is SO anti-crypto! :D

     
  6. I'd love to get secret recordings where these hedge fund vultures talks honestly about their suckers
     
  7. johnarb

    johnarb

    I don't think this would be a good money-management strategy for the company behind the issuance of the stablecoin

    Let's imagine Tether wanted to switch everything to US Treasuries

    Wouldn't putting everything in US Treasuries pose geo-political and jurisdictional risks since Tether is not a US company?

    Maybe not, I don't know, it just seems with what happened with Russia and the Oligarch, what if one or more of Tether's investors was Russian billionaire?

    The company also needs liquidity in case of redemption like what happened recently $10 Billion worth of redemption in a short time

    Anyway, Tether is fine, it's not going anywhere, I imagine that there are billions of USDT that the private keys are lost forever (i.e. death, crashed hard drives, etc.) so that's instant profits for the company

    Plus the many years of yields it received from putting the $ billions into commercial papers and other interest-bearing investments

    We just hold USDT to a much higher standard than traditional finance, being that it's a crypto asset with full transparency on the public ledger (blockchain)

    Tether is a 1 to 1, how can they go bankrupt, they don't need to do any fancy stuff, their cost of operations is very low (not many employees)

    Compare that to a bank with thousands of employees and executives and buildings and other costs that they need to leverage deposits 30 to 1 and still fuck it up, BofA shares went below $1 during financial crisis, Citigroup same and none of them went to jail and they all kept their riches

    How about them Eurodollars, eh? Do they have attestation on their asset backing?

    https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eurodollar.asp
     
  8. savoir

    savoir

    Tether will undergo at least one stress test before the bear market is over. It’s going to need more than the current smoke and mirrors to pass.

    What asset backing are you talking about?

    Eurodollars are US dollars deposited outside the US. IOW, Eurodollars are fiat money. By definition fiat money is not backed by any commodity.

    Most of the world’s trade is conducted in Eurodollars. People waiting for the collapse of the US dollar are going to have to wait a long time.
     
  9. MrMuppet

    MrMuppet

    yeah...especially about the guys who are still not in the game and nag from the sidelines
     
    johnarb likes this.
  10. Pekelo

    Pekelo

    Just because tech stocks were a good investments in 1997, that doesn't make them the same in early 2000. The same with crypto, we are far away from 2018.

    But anyhow, these are mostly venture capital and they are bli... I mean expertly spreading it among crypto start ups. 1-2 may pay off, the rest will not.

    I would like to see their previous 3 funds' returns and what they invested in. Oh wait!:

    "This has led some other venture capitalists to view the firm as arrogant, and for competitors to snark when a16z's returns have suffered a downturn, as they did in 2019, or trailed other VC firms."
     
    #10     May 27, 2022