Different developers are comfortable building inside a shared execution environment. But similar to the vast open source ecosystem, blockchains enable composability and on top of that a shared trusted canvas for developers to build their applications: With blockchains you get credible neutrality out of the box. Just like any open source product can be built as a closed source product, anything that can be built with a blockchain can be built as a centralized product on top of a database.
Not too long ago, people were still scratching their heads about how open source software might ever “conquer the enterprise” and if we’d ever see open source companies as category leaders, but we all know how that played out. Platform and technology shifts tend to happen gradually, then suddenly. But after cutting through all of this noise, the core idea of crypto to enable open, trustless and permissionless interactions remains sound. With the constant stream of news of hacks, scams, unethical crypto influencers, collapsing ponzis, crypto volatility and the whole debate on the environmental havoc of crypto ( which, luckily, is being taken seriously) it is easy to dismiss the whole space as a fad. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum
Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly. But first, why crypto at all? Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Let’s unpack how we look at crypto: what we are interested in, what we did so far, where we’ll go from here, and why our deep sector expertise enables us to provide a unique value-proposition. You might also think “ Oh jeez, another TradFi VC fund announcing that they are venturing deeper into crypto”. Short-term market madness isn’t a concern. We are convinced that crypto will be an important building block for products for years to come. Unlike traders who have to be dialed into short-term movements, we follow a long-term investment strategy and track the progress of the underlying technology rather than the current market sentiment. Given the current volatility in crypto this might seem like odd timing, but from our point of view markets exaggerate in both directions. So it’s unlikely to surprise anyone that we are also deeply interested and actively investing in crypto. Even though Speedinvest might appear like a generalist fund from the outside, with our six deeply specialized vertical teams ( Deep Tech, Fintech, Health, Industrial Tech, Marketplaces & Consumer, SaaS & Infra), we invest in pretty much everything tech, software, and hardware that is out there.