Paradigm's Blockchain investment landscape: Focus on DeFi, Layer2, infrastructure, and tools

2021-07-23 16:30

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Many of the young head trading platform/fund founders in the industry are doing the same thing: bringing more traditional capital to the crypto world.

Original title: young People at Paradigm, a Top Institution

Source: Odaily Planet

On Wednesday (July 21), FTX completed a 900m Series B financing at a valuation of $18 billion, with more than 60 investors participating, the largest fundraising in startup history. From the investment list, we can see the figure of traditional capital such as sequoia, SoftBank and Coinbase. Ventures, Paradigm and other crypto funds with traditional capital genes. On July 15, SBF mentioned in The dialogue with The Information that "listing may be considered in The future". Combined with The huge financing of series B, FTX undoubtedly reshuffled The pattern of The top exchanges.

Many of the young head trading platform/fund founders in the industry are doing the same thing -- bringing more traditional capital to the crypto world.

Outside the exchange, withSBFWith a similar backgroundParadigmThe founders took this one2018The crypto fund established in 2003 became an industry benchmark. foundedParadigmWhen,Fred Ehrsam,Matt Huang(Huang Gongyu) are29Age, and then joined the partnerCharles NoyesSo far only21Years old. All three have been listed on Forbes30The new elite of the elite list under age.

Fred, who studied computer Science and Economics at Duke University and has two years of experience as a trader at Goldman Sachs, has been a long-term angel investor in bitcoin since he first got involved in the industry in 2011. More notably, he co-founded Coinbase, from which he resigned in 2017 (he still owns 6% of the company);

Huang, who holds a bachelor's degree in math from MIT and worked at sequoia capital, is a tech and Internet entrepreneur and investor who founded an analytics company called memy (backed by YCombinator and bought by Twitter), Participated in projects such as ByteDance, Instacart, Amplitude, Benchling and PlanGrid.

The other partner is Pantera Capital's Charles Noyes, whose work on blockchain technology as a teenager was nationally recognized by Intel and the NSA, and who studied at MIT for a year (incomplete) before devoting himself to encryption full time.

Fred and Huang founded Paradigm in June 2018 to convince top institutional investors to get involved in the crypto space. A sign of initial success is that by 2018 10. In January, three of the highest-profile college endowments -- Harvard, Stanford and Yale -- joined Sequoia in investing in the secretive start-up VC. Fred and Huang pooled all of their $400 million and put it all into ETH and BTC.

As of today,ParadigmIt has been invested so far30According to the time order of disclosure, we arrange the investment projects as follows (the amount unit in the table is US dollars) :

顶级机构Paradigm的年轻人们

As we can see from the table, Paradigm has made many star projects. From StarkWare, Mina, Uniswap, Compound, MakerDAO, Yield Optimistic, Amber, Fireblocks, Synthetix, Opyn, TaxBit, BlockFi, Chainalysis, Gitcoin, Lido, dYdX, FTX... And because Paradigm mostly appears as a lead investor, sometimes new projects are shrouded in the halo of top institutions. I don't know whether it attracts investors because of its own strength or whether Paradigm's investment attracts the attention and follow of other VCS.

Taking a closer look at Paradigm's investment landscape, in general, it focuses on DeFi, infrastructure, tools, and Layer2.

· DeFiIn the loan, derivative agreements mainly.

ParadigmEarly in theVeilIs a peer-to-peer forecasting market and derivatives trading platform, although the subsequent operation has not been smooth, but in the18yearsParadigmI realized there was room for imagination in the crypto derivatives market; The following isCompound(19years11Month) andReflexer(20years8Months),ParadigmBegan betting broadly on lending and low-volatility collateral, and by the first half of this year led in Ethereum2.0The pledge agreementLido; Again, we can see a significant trend21Year of strong support for derivatives, from the beginning of the derivatives agreementSynthetix,Opyn,dYdXWon aParadigm". In addition, it is worth mentioning thatYield- byParadigmSelf - incubated fixed - rate lending agreement this year6Month gained1000$10,000 strategic financing.

· Infrastructure

Including the lower level of the development team, centralized exchange, etc. Paradigm's earliest investment was in StarkWare, a zero-knowledge proof research and development company that addresses privacy issues. In nineteen years, Paradigm led the investment in Tagomi, Tendermint, Mina and other early blockchain service providers. The 20-year tBTC development team and Sio developers became Paradigm's investment partners. Since then, Paradigm has been crazy about investing in centralized exchanges, investing in CoinSwitch Kuber in India, Bitso in Mexico, and FTX this year, all of which are significant.

, tools & have spent

It mainly refers to automatic tax declaration platform, data analysis tool and so on.20years11Month,ParadigmLed the investment in digital asset securityFireblocks; This year,3An automated tax platformTaxBitAnd blockchain data analytics companiesChainalysisWe've done it separately1$100 million of large financing, areParadigmLead shot. In addition,Paradigmin4Month led the investment in the open source software funding platformGitcoin. Thus, the extension of the encryption tool plate isParadigmA key point of this year's layout.

Layer2,

isParadigmEarly bet on the track. In late 19th and early 20th years, the Ethereum Layer2 scaling scheme Optimistic Rollup completed its small 3.5 million seed round from Paradigm and a design firm sub-investor. Paradigm went on to raise $25 million in series A funding at the end of the decade. In addition, Paradigm's long-term investment in StarkWare is also involved in layer2-related businesses.

之所以成为加密基金头部，除了针对性的布局之外，还得益于在早期便押注许多明星项目，并长期为其「输血」：

1.Uniswap

By now, we are no longer familiar with Uniswap, the leading decentralised exchange. Paradigm's bet on Uniawap began in a 2019 seed round, with an early investment of less than $1 million, making it one of the few backers that year. Uniswap already had $11 million in funding at the time of its Series A round in August 2020, and while Paradigm did not continue to lead the investment in its Series A round, the early bet on Uniwap has become one of Paradigm's classic cases.

2.StarkWare

StakWare, Paradigm's first investment since inception (in October 2018), uses zero-knowledge proof protocols to protect the privacy of information on the blockchain, while ensuring computational integrity and reducing power consumption. Early on, Paradigm led the investment in StarkWare, and obtained traditional capital Sequoia, Intel Venture capital support; StarkWare raised $75 million in Series B funding in March, with Paradigm continuing to lead the round.

3.Optimistic

The mainstream Ethereum Layer2 scaling scheme was mentioned above.

In addition, Paradigm was not one of its earliest, but was relatively early in its strategic round of lead investments, such as Synthetix, a synthetic asset header protocol. In the recent hot NFT space, Paradigm, NFT art casting and collection protocol ZORA, and NFT social platform Showtime are NFT projects that other large crypto investors are not involved in. Does this show that Paradigm has a unique perspective on the NFT circuit?

As Fred Ehrsam, the young founder, puts it: "" although in early may seem more frightening, but I think the block chain eventually create a safer world." they are at one end, and continuously explore new block chain architecture of the world, and to give a steady stream of "engies" incentives; on the other end at the same time, the impending nuptials, "to persuade the traditional investment institutions pay close attention to encrypt the development and changes of the world.