Venrock, the official venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, has partnered with crypto investment group Coinfund to support cryptocurrency and Blockchain[1] business innovation, Fortune[2] reported April 6.
Coinfund has recently added token-based financial services platform Coinlist[3], a spinoff of startup connection website AngelList, to the number of projects that it backs. Coinfund is also known for backing chat messenger app Kik[4], which raised almost $100 mln[5] in the Initial Coin Offering[6] (ICO) of its Kin token last fall. Fortune notes that Venrock and Coinfund met through their mutual investment in the live video streaming app maker YouNow.
When asked about Bitcoin[7]’s (BTC) recent failure to strongly stay above $7,000, Venrock partner David Pakman told Fortune that the price of “a single currency over the next day, week, month, year” is not what they thought about when deciding to partner with a crypto investment group:
“We’re really patient long term investors [...] we’re wondering what happens over the next five to ten years. Can we have fundamental change to a number of different markets because of a disturbed ledger, a token economy that all participants can take part in?”
According to an April 6 blog post[8] by Pakman, cryptocurrency and Blockchain’s most important innovation is their creation of “the possibility of building sustainable decentralized computing platforms, services and apps”, writing:
“It may finally be possible to build widely-distributed networks without centralized trust or control, and to allow user consensus to govern their future [...] In this scenario, ‘commodity’ applications like messaging, social media and application infrastructure like file storage and compute become very much like public utilities — and they are owned and governed by their
