Crypto Fund 5: We Raised $2.2B. Here’s Why.
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The most successful founders in this next era are gonna be the ones that are much more product focused, much more go to market focused, and also more pragmatic rather than ideological. There's a strong sense that in order for crypto to succeed, it has to work with the system as opposed to trying to overthrow it.
What we found in crypto is that finances, for a bunch of reasons, are kind of a little hanging fruit. One kind of mental model that I have is we try to get a billion people into sort of being almost daily users of blockchains through stocks and bonds and stablecoins and payments and remittances and so forth. Once you have people onboarded, they've used the infrastructure, the wallets and so forth. It's natural at that point to offer adjacent services.
There's a big difference between the theoretical or the intellectual and the practical, practical, and it's a wonderful time to be a pragmatist building on chain.
What does it take for a new technology to move from ideology to infrastructure? For years, crypto was framed as a revolution, a way to rebuild financial systems from the ground up. But today, the trajectory looks different. The most meaningful progress is happening where crypto meets the real world, payments, markets, and financial infrastructure that people will actually use. At the same time, new forces are emerging. Regulatory clarity is opening the door for builders, while AI is reshaping how software and even economic activity itself gets created and executed. The question now is not whet
Alright. So hey, everybody. I'm here with all of the GPs at a sixteen c crypto. I think this is our first all GP episode. We've got some familiar faces, founder and managing partner Chris Dixon, Ali Yaya, general partner who's been here since the start, as well as Eddie Lazarin, chief technology officer recently promoted to general partner, and Guy Wallet, also elevated to the position of general partner. So we've got all the GPs here, and we are announcing a new fundraise, Crypto Fund five. That is the premise for today's talk, and I'd love to get into it. Maybe we could start at why we are r
Yeah. I mean, so as folks may know, we've had our crypto fund now since 2018, and I've been involved since, I guess, formally since 2013 with the investment in Coinbase. We're at an interesting point now in the evolution of crypto where on the one hand on the negative side, market prices are down, some of the sentiment is negative, some categories that are sort of non financial have not have not kind of panned out the way that we've hoped and some hoped. But on the positive side, there's a lot of good things happening. So most notably, we're seeing real kind of mainstream traction. So stableco
And the word stablecoin there doing a lot of work.
Yeah. The stablecoin was in quotes in the past. Now it's a, you know, government certified term. The bill was passed last year and we immediately saw an increase in entrepreneurial energy and, you know, new founders coming in with new ideas around it. Because if you're a founder, you know, do you wanna risk entering an uncertain regulatory market and all of the kind of risks involved with that? You don't. You you know, you go to do AI or you do something else. So stablecoins provides this this, you know, well understood, well regulated kind of area with real use cases. And, you know, what are
So you're making the case that both the environment is right for it. We have, regulatory certainty and clarity like we've never had before. On the one hand, you also have interests from major institutions and Wall Street
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