CoinFund Launches $300 Million Web3 Fund To Invest In Early Stage Crypto – TechCrunch

As capital continues to deploy the crypto economy, another large fund is entering the space.

Seven-year-old CoinFund is launching a $300 million early-stage web3 venture fund, CoinFund Ventures I, backed by institutional investors, family offices and crypto-native founders.

“We started in 2015 and have invested in more than 100 portfolio companies since then,” David Pakman, managing partner and head of venture investments at CoinFund, told TechCrunch.

The firm is one of the longest running web3 venture capitalists and has invested an estimated $1 billion in seed stage startups, the firm said in a release.

The new fund will invest in crypto projects and companies that focus on layer-1 blockchains, web3 infrastructure, DeFi, NFTs and gaming, payments, asset management, exchanges, marketplaces and decentralized applications, Pakman said. The capital will be distributed over a period of two to three years, he added.

Although the market may not be as bullish as it was last year, Pakman is not worried.

“We are long-term investors and believe that crypto and web3 offer the largest areas of value creation for companies in the entire technology industry today,” commented Pakman. “This view is independent of current market conditions. We try not to time markets, and instead invest over long periods.”

Pakman believes the recent decline in crypto asset prices generally provides more favorable entry prices for venture capital funds like CoinFund, but the transition from Web 2.0 to web3 is in an early phase. “We believe cryptonative investment teams like ours have a distinct advantage in the market today in understanding the direction and long-term opportunities set in web3.”

Even in this bearish crypto market, there is more evidence of consumer and institutional adoption than previous cycles, Pakman commented.

“NFTs, for example, generated more than $30B in sales in the first two years of their existence, making them, we believe, the most successful new consumer product introduced since the smartphone,” Pakman said. “These products could only have been built on top of blockchains and show strong consumer interest in crypto-based products.”

Through the new fund, CoinFund will aim to continue investing and building crypto companies that align with “the giant landscape that web3 entails,” Pakman said.

“This focus creates a ‘clean slate’ investment discipline that is not distracted by legacy business models and unbiased by legacy approaches to building technology, many of which we feel are outdated strategies ill-suited to creating the networks of the future.”