Jesse Walden, a Silicon Valley top venture capital partner a16z, announced on Tuesday that he is setting up a new venture capital company, Variant Fund.
According to a blog post published by Walden, the fund will work to build an “ownership economy” driven by cryptocurrencies.
He wrote, “Cryptocurrencies drive ownership as a tool that can prompt users to contribute to the protocols they use in a deeper way. The opportunity now is to follow this model and build more accessible products and protocols, To guide users to adopt and participate through better economy.”
He cited the recent Hot Compound project, which distributes most of the governance tokens to users, and the social giant Reddit in the Web 2.0 era began to look for the application scenarios of tokens in its existing businesses.
Walden said in an email to CoinDesk that the fund is supported by a16z’s Chris Dixon and Marc Andreessen, Union Square Ventures and Compound’s Robert Leshner.
He also said that Variant Fund has already invested, but it has not been officially announced. Walden wrote: “To help build an ownership economy, I will work with entrepreneurs and communities at the earliest stage.”
According to a previous report from “Budget”, the second a16z fund focused on cryptocurrencies in April this year has raised 515 million US dollars, 65 million US dollars more than the original target. Andreessen Horowitz previously said he wanted to raise up to $450 million in funds for this new cryptocurrency fund.
a16z also said in a report that although the current encryption cycle looks a bit “chaotic”, there are always new ideas, projects and startups. “In the next few years, technicians and entrepreneurs will continue to promote the development of encryption technology. We are very happy to see their results.”