Venture company Andreessen Horowitz has launched a $300 million fund for investments in crypto companies and protocols. The investment fund was named "a16z crypto". According to the company's blog, it's “designed to include the best features of traditional venture capital, updated to the modern crypto world.”
Andreessen Horowitz is an American venture fund with a portfolio consisting of BuzzFeed, Coinbase, Facebook, Lyft and others. The company explained that they have been investing in the cryptocurrencies for more than five years, and do not plan to sell their assets. The a16z crypto fund is structured so that investments can be held for up to 10 years, according to Andreessen Horowitz.
The company plans to invest in projects regardless of their geography, development stage and type of assets. The fund has an ‘all weather’ unit for consistent investments, regardless of the situation on the market. Another division will be ‘crypto winter’, set up to guide active investments during a market downturn.
The company considers cryptocurrency a global phenomenon that has spread all over the world:
«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.»
Andreessen Horowitz also announced the appearance of a new general partner, former federal prosecutor Katie Haun. She is known for investigations of major cryptocurrency scandals. Haun also founded the first U.S. task force, which helped the government to understand the cryptocurrency world.
"In that process I ended up working alongside and getting to know the entrepreneurs in that space. I started realizing how transformative all this technology was," she says.
In 2017, Haun left the government and became a member of the board of Coinbase. She claims that in Andreessen Horowitz her work will focus on promising projects, not on combating fraud.
By Ekaterina Ulyanova