The video gaming industry has experienced tremendous growth, evolving from its modest origins in 1972 with Pong to an industry serving billions of people around the world. According to recent estimates, games generated at least $280 billion of revenue in 2023, surpassing the combined revenues of the movie and music industries. In order to get […]
Here at Arrington Capital, we have been longtime supporters of the Polkadot technology, approach, and broader ecosystem as it continues to make web3 development more accessible (in both time to market and costs) for founders and developers. Today we are taking a look at recent momentum and the state of the ecosystem. Polkadot currently has […]
Arrington Capital, US Bitcoin Corp., Proof Group, Steve Kokinos and Ravi Kaza comprised group that won the bid for Celsius Assets earlier this year November 9, 2023 – MIAMI – Arrington Capital, a thesis-driven firm investing in digital assets and Web3 since 2017, today announced that the Chapter 11 plan for the Celsius bankruptcy proceedings […]
Note: Arrington Capital is an investor in C3, a self-custodial crypto exchange, discussed further in this post. Even those not in crypto learned several valuable lessons last year as a few large crypto companies unravelled over the misuse of crypto funds — all while exposing the significant risk of centralized firms that had ownership of […]
October 25, 2023 – MIAMI – Arrington Capital, a thesis-driven firm investing in digital assets and Web3 since 2017, announced today that Colton Conley has joined the investment team as a Principal, bringing experience in quantitative trading as well as that of a Web3 founder. Colton joins Arrington Capital after founding Prime Protocol, the first […]
We take safety and security very seriously at Arrington Capital and want to take this opportunity to remind the Arrington community to alway be alert for fraudulent activity. Recently, we have seen phishing scams that have involved spoof accounts, looking for funds from founders in exchange for investment, and even falsified video calls. Please know […]
Arrington Capital continues to grow. This summer we welcome Taryn Naidu (follow on twitter here) as a partner and COO to the fund. I know Taryn very well – 20 years ago I was CEO of a tech startup, Taryn was my COO, and he took over for me when I left after living through […]
We recently held a Twitter Spaces with Barney Mannerings, one of the co-founders of Vega which is one of the most advanced decentralized exchanges due mostly to its focus on being uncompromisingly decentralized and purpose built for trading derivatives. Below are some highlights from the session, the replay of which can be listened to here. […]
Below is the press release posted on May 25, 2023 by C Street Advisory Group. For additional inquiries, please reach out to contact@fahrenheitholdings.com. Celsius Announces Fahrenheit, LLC as Winning Bidder to Manage New Entity to Be Owned by Celsius Creditors Winning bid positions Celsius’ assets to be transferred to “NewCo” under new executive leadership. Auction […]
Tanssi, a new investment from Arrington Capital and our Arrington Moonbeam Growth Fund, announced their first funding round yesterday. A $3m seed round led by us, with participation from Borderless Capital, HashKey Capital, Fenbushi, D1 Ventures, Hypersphere, C² Ventures, and Jsquare. Tanssi is building an appchain infrastructure protocol to make building new Polkadot parachains as […]
Prime Protocol launches today. Founder Colton Conley explains Prime’s raison d’être here (the video is great). You can also read about Prime in the press: Coindesk – “DeFi Broker Prime Protocol Introduces Bridgeless Cross-Chain Token Transfers” and Blockworks – Farewell Token Bridges and Wrapped Assets, Prime Protocol Says – have written this morning, among others. […]
DAM’s launch enables decentralized cross chain liquidity infrastructure When we invested in the team behind DAM, we were excited to back founders with experience building blockchain applications for the world’s largest corporations, financial institutions and central banks. We support their vision that the digital assets space needs a fault-tolerant, cross-chain defi infrastructure for scaling native […]
Today, Arrington Capital announced that Bhavik Patel has joined the firm, bringing decades of derivatives, trading and risk management experience to complement the expanding team at Arrington Capital. Mr. Patel was previously Chief Product Officer and Head of Derivatives Business at BitMEX, an early crypto exchange and derivative trading platform, where he assisted the founding team at an early stage […]
2022 was quite a year! We spent the final month of 2023 highlighting one of the Arrington Capital startups innovating in web3 each day. Our founders inspire us and we believe the long term visions demonstrated by these companies (as a sample!) mean that 2023 will be a year of continued innovation. In case you […]
Below is a write up from the team at zkLing, a secure, unified multi-chain trading layer for DeFi & NFTs, and one of the defi startups invested in by Arrington Capital. We really appreciate their approach and technical expertise. For more information, please visit their website and follow them on Twitter. ___________________________________________________________________ Decentralized Finance, or […]
I remember the first time I met Ninos Mansor back in 2018. He was at a Seattle crypto event and ran into Geoffrey Arone, one of our founding partners. Geoffrey immediately liked him and put me on the phone with him. The first thing I noticed was Ninos’ funny Australian accent. The second was how […]
Today, Arrington Capital announces that Chad Gunther has joined the firm, bringing a wealth of traditional finance experience to the organization and its rapidly growing portfolio companies. In his new advisory role, he will bring his perspective on macroeconomic conditions to the team, address competitive dynamics across the marketplace, and work with a select group […]
Today we are welcoming our newest partner to Arrington Capital: Keli Callaghan. Keli was most recently the chief marketing officer at Algorand. Keli is a seasoned entrepreneur and blockchain operator. She joined Algorand in 2018 and was responsible for all aspects of their marketing and communication since inception to what it is today – a […]
Today marks the launch of Moonwell, the native capital markets protocol on Moonbeam. See their launch post here. We recently launched the Arrington Moonbeam Growth Fund, and Moonwell was our first investment as part of this vehicle. As we outlined in our previous blog, the Moonwell team is best in class and we are excited […]
Moonbeam is a Polkadot Parachain which combines the functionality of the EVM with Polkadot’s multi-chain infrastructure. We believe it could evolve into the central hub for Polkadot assets and become a conduit to EVM-based projects. Ethereum’s scalability challenges have fuelled the rise of new blockchains which try to cater to different use cases. There is […]
We first invested in Moonbeam, a Layer-1 EVM smart contract platform on Polkadot, in 2020. We followed that investment in 2021, and have been close partners with the team during the entire journey. Today we are continuing that relationship by launching the Arrington Moonbeam Growth Fund. This is a new $100 million fund, in partnership […]
Recently, we have been made aware of sophisticated instances of scammers impersonating members of Arrington Capital. Thus far, we’ve directly heard of at least three examples. The impersonation attempts follow a common thread. The target is contacted with a cold email outlining an investment proposal. On first glance, the email address appears legitimate when viewed […]
Just this year alone, we have spoken to 10+ teams building on Moonbeam and there is one consistently recurring theme: Moonbeam attracts some serious talent. Perhaps this is an offshoot of the broader protocol team, who we talk about in a previous post, but something is definitely in the water. This preamble leads us to […]
Today, the DeFi experiment has matured into something that most of us could not imagine only a few years ago. The Ethereum ecosystem paved the way, instantiating the very first instances of crypto-native financial protocols like capital markets, algorithmic stablecoins & AMMs. With DeFi’s product-market fit in mind, the scalability challenges of Ethereum L1 naturally […]
We first met Robbie and James in late 2020. At the time, NFTs were in the early innings of retail involvement. NBA Top Shots had just launched, Ethereum gas fees were slowly creeping up and the CryptoPunk floor was still below 5Ξ. The brothers had an inkling that something big was coming, and that Ethereum […]
Contributions from Ninos Mansor, Sam Kim & Michael Arrington We had the chance to review the recent proposal from our friends at Arca and Polychain and wanted to share our notes with the community. The Proposal (1) Yields to depositors will be paid out in 85% UST and 15% ANC. (2) Yield is determined by […]
Last week we hosted seventy builders at the Denver Clock Tower. It was the first time in a while we could bring entrepreneurs in our portfolio together in person. We had cupcakes. Beanies. And a tower of galaxy brains. Thank you all who came. We are lucky to work with the brightest and most driven […]
Acala is a layer one blockchain customized for DeFi, deployed as a Parachain on the Polkadot network. It is the first blockchain to reimagine the entire DeFi stack with a natively multi-chain environment. The project secured the first Parachain slot in December 2021, with the community contributing over 32 million DOT tokens, then equivalent to […]
Moonbeam is the first Parachain on Polkadot to offer a fully EVM compatible platform for smart contracts. It is going live today and it is not going live in stealth. The launch is unique and worth studying — it doesn’t resemble anything we have seen from a “new L1”, despite being born in the L1 …
Last month, we announced our investment into AlgoFi alongside USV and Pillar. The team has been moving at lightning speed. They launched AlgoFi — a capital markets suite including Algorand’s first money market and algorithmic stablecoin — on December 17th. Today they announced a $3M liquidity mining program alongside the Algorand Foundation. In just a …
We are excited to announce our investment into C3 Protocol, what we believe to be one of the most exciting projects emerging out of the Algorand ecosystem. We led the round alongside Jump Capital, with other excellent investors participating across ParaFi, Mechanism, GoldenTree, Cumberland, DCG, Blockchain.com, Node and Borderless Capital. The team behind C3 have …
We have decided to vote for Option A in Governance Period 1, Algorand’s first and ongoing governance vote. Voting will conclude on November 14. We thought it might be useful to publish why we are voting this way and hope to contribute to what is already an extremely vibrant community discussion. Governance Period 1: What …
We have been strong supporters of Terra/Luna since 2018. We’ve watched the product grow and multiply, and today the ecosystem includes a synthetic asset platform called Mirror, the borrow lend protocol Anchor, and a flourishing ecosystem of nascent products and primitives. The Anchor Protocol is designed to offer savers a fixed income yield initially targeted …
We are proud to announce our investment into SIPHΞR, a play-to-earn (P2E) game establishing the lore of SIPHΞRIA, a new crypto-native metaverse. Partnering with Hashed & Konvoy Ventures, we’re excited to co-lead the $6.8M seed round. The rapid growth of the SIPHΞR community is a sight to behold, which will only expand as the launch …
Taproot is the first change to Bitcoin since 2017. It will introduce Schnorr signatures, Merkelized Alternative Script Trees (MAST) and a reformed scripting language known as Tapscript. Collectively, these upgrades will make the Bitcoin codebase simpler and unlock a number of new capabilities. Taproot enables key aggregation: complex multi-sig transactions will now look like uni-sig …
Yesterday the core Web3 Foundation and Polkadot teams visited Miami – including founder Gavin Wood. We were honored to host an event for them and the Miami crypto community. Approximately 50 people attended the event. The event happened to coincide with the release of our most recent research report on the Polkadot ecosystem. You can …
Polkadot has a novel answer to the multi-chain problem analogous to coexistence between nation states within the international community. Each nation pursues its own destiny and vision for the future, yet these disparate cultures come together to form alliances, engage in trade and live in a world of diplomacy rather than warfare. This is the …
We are thrilled to announce our investment into SubQuery, which we think will be the prime data aggregation and indexing layer of the entire Polkadot ecosystem. We’re excited to partner with Digital Currency Group (DCG) and Stratos Technologies to co-lead the $9M strategic round. The SubQuery ecosystem is only growing, and we look forward to …
In this paper, we argue that blockchains are trapped in a dark age of technology centralization. The wars of multi-chain DeFi push the market to abandon decentralization, its oldest and most foundational principle. Crypto’s citizens search for “fast” technologies that optimize for DeFi yield generation, even if this hands power to a new class of …
A couple of weeks ago I was asking people to Buy My House. I first bought the property, located in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2017. That was exciting. I paid ETH for the property (about $60k at the time) and title transferred via Propy on a blockchain, all approved by the Ukrainian government. Never before had …
We are big fans of Algorand. We first invested in their private rounds years ago and have accumulated additional ALGO since. And over the years we have stayed close to founder (and Turing Award recipient) Silivo Micali, CEO Steve Kokinos, COO Sean Ford and VP Marketing Keli Callaghan. This is one of the best all around …
Are modern markets open markets? Markets are part of our lives in unimaginable ways yet have never been more mysterious. Today, trading is a game of warring algos and enigmatic finance, addicted to obfuscating collateral and hiding system risk. Crypto promised to get us a step closer to open markets, gifting us perfect and incorruptible …
In 2017 I bought a condo apartment in Kiev, Ukraine. This wasn’t a normal purchase – I used the then-nascent Propy protocol to make the purchase and have the property title recorded, for the first time ever, to a blockchain. I also paid for the condo in Ether. These days, property title transfers on Propy …
News today on our portfolio company MobileCoin: Read Signal’s blog post here and the Wired article here. In the last ten years, two parallel trends have emerged: Mobile P2P and group messaging, and crypto. While many have tried to introduce crypto-based P2P and e-commerce payments to popular messaging apps, nobody has cracked the code. The …
Like a prison tattoo, March 12 2020 is branded into every crypto trader’s mind. Nobody can forget the terror of that fated candle. No trader will ever escape the disbelief of watching a derivatives market that developed over years break within minutes. Crypto desperately needs credibly neutral derivatives. A year from this PTSD-inducing moment of …
The DeFi Standard For Crypto-Native Fixed Income The macro storm of quantitative easing and record low interest rates has depressed yields in traditional finance beyond measure. Anchor is the first protocol in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) designed to capture the growth of the cryptocurrency ecosystem to offer savers fixed income yield. The Anchor Protocol is a …
We are proud to announce Arrington XRP Capital has joined the DeFi Alliance. The DeFi Alliance is an incubator launched by a notable group of Chicago-based trading firms in early 2020, including CMT Digital, Volt Capital, Jump Capital, and DRW. Today, the Alliance has evolved into the primary hub for DeFi startup incubation and mentoring. …
The emerging world of synthetic assets is one of DeFi’s most powerful bridges into traditional financial markets. With the backdrop of macro change accelerated by COVID-19, we argue that synthetic assets can create a gravitational pull on capital, as investor appetite moves deeper into the risk spectrum. Notably, we examine the growing international demand for …
Contributions From: Michael Arrington, Ninos Mansor, Ron Palmeri, Heather Harde The contents of this report are the opinion of Arrington XRP Capital and do not constitute financial advice. We cannot guarantee the accuracy and completeness of the information contained herein. DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE. Risk management frameworks are rare in the world of Bitcoin. For …
We’ve long been fans of crypto lending; we’ve made investments in two companies over the last two years, and are active in both borrowing and lending cryptocurrencies. We’ve now also invested in Blockfi, and this is our first equity investment in what is essentially a nascent, and regulated, crypto bank. Blockfi has been added to …
News broke this morning that our portfolio company Skale will partner with ConsynSys’ Activate platform to sell tokens via a dutch auction. Importantly, purchasers will be required to stake purchased tokens, which should discourage participation from pure speculators hoping to flip tokens for an immediate profit. Read more about the news on Decrypt, Coindesk, CoinTelegraph, …
Nakamoto.com, a new initiative founded by crypto investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, launched quietly last Friday evening. There was no initial press coverage, just a series of tweets to announce the purpose of the new website and link to some of the initial posts. .A battle quickly erupted on Crypto Twitter about the use of …
Arrington XRP Capital participated in the just announced Skale funding round – some $17.1 million in total. You can read the details, soundbites and thoughtful quotes on the news sites. Here’s CoinDesk and TheBlock. Yes, I’m a little salty today. I flew home last night on a redeye flight from New York. In coach. I …
Many of you in the industry know Alex Shin well. He was a cofounder and partner at Seoul-headquartered #Hashed, one of the largest crypto venture capital and accelerator funds in the world. Today we welcome Alex to Arrington XRP Capital as a Venture Partner. Alex will help us find new growth opportunities in Asia, the …
Next week, Algorand is launching its first official Australian tour, where Founder Silvio Micali and Steve Kokinos will host a packed week of events in Sydney and Melbourne. As Australian partners at the fund, Ninor and I are thrilled to welcome two of crypto’s brightest minds to our very own backyard. Silvio and Steve are …
We are very pleased to join forces with Algo Capital, a new $200 million venture fund founded by David Garcia and Arul Murugan. We have invested in the fund, which will focus on the Algorand ecosystem. See Coindesk: Arrington XRP Backs Fund’s $200 Million Raise for Algorand Blockchain We join our friends at the Algorand …
Taipei blockchain week is in full swing, and as usual Arrington XRP Capital partners are on the ground and on stage at the events. Our partner Ninos Mansor was on stage yesterday at the always excellent Asia Blockchain Summit to speak on a panel about new investment opportunities. Thank you to CEO Andrew Fai and …
Ron Palmeri is a seasoned silicon valley entrepreneur and investor. Today we welcome him to the Arrington XRP Capital team. I first met Ron shortly after launching TechCrunch nearly 15 years ago. At the time he was a partner and cofounder at Minor Ventures, an early incubator and fund that launched a slew of amazing …
We explore the monetary experiment of Algorand, a new cryptocurrency invented by Turing Award winner Silvio Micali. Arrington XRP Capital will be participating in the Algorand economy by running a relay node and bidding in the Algorand Foundation’s dutch auctions. Algorand brings together bleeding edge cryptography with a clever economic model that bootstraps Algo currency …
We’ve all watched KIN and others fight the SEC over how the U.S. government classifies their tokens. And while we often (always) bicker amongst ourselves about every detail of every coin and protocol out there, nothing can bring us together as well as a common enemy. The SEC is out of control, and hurting our …
Our investment thesis at Arrington XRP Capital is to invest in great people and great projects. It really is that simple, and sometimes that means we invest in our “competitors” – other funds making investments into crypto-focused companies and projects. We’ve made three investments in other funds to date – Ausum Ventures last year, one …
On the dawn of the Terra Genesis Block, the Arrington XRP Capital team is in the final stages of preparing a Genesis Validator for MainNet launch. After many months of technical and business development, the countdown finally comes to a close. Terra will launch tonight–April 23rd–at 23:00 PST. From the moment Michael met the team …
We are on our way back to Asia to attend the Deconomy conference in Seoul next week. I’ll be on stage in the afternoon of the first day for a panel called Silicon Valley VC’s Crypto Investment Strategies. Joining me are Alex Pack (Founding Partner at Dragonfly Capital), Bryan Chang (Principle at Collaborative Fund) and …
See CoinDesk: TechCrunch Founder’s Crypto Fund Tops $100 Million, Completes First Acquisition and CoinTelegraph: TechCrunch Founder’s Digital Asset Firm Acquires Crypto-Focused Private Fund Arrington XRP Capital is very pleased to announce a merger with ByteSize Capital, another crypto fund. ByteSize Capital partners Ninor Mansor and Ninos Mansor have joined Arrington XRP Capital as partners, alongside …
Terra is a Korean startup that is preparing to launch its first price-stable cryptocurrency, or stablecoin. It is one of our largest investments at Arrington XRP Capital, and I am excited to see this move from theory to product and, hopefully, mass adoption. You can read a recent interview with Terra at Global Coin Research …
2018 was a hell of a year. Yes, getting crushed in the market sucks. And yes, many were left shell shocked. But as someone who’s lived through a few big market downturns, I can tell you this. If you’re still standing, you are stronger for it. You are a veteran of the 2018 crypto disaster. …
Our busy travel schedule continues. Mike is in Singapore this week and next. On Saturday, September 15, I’ll be at Neo Global Capital’s (NGC) Frontiers of Blockchain Investment at The W in Boston. I’ve been invited to participate as a speaker and am really looking forward to sharing my experiences, as well as hearing about how …
Arrington XRP Capital Partners are traveling this week and will be spread around the world. Mike will be at TechCrunch Disrupt tomorrow (Wednesday) speaking at 3:10 PM California time with Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse. Heather is traveling to Israel for a special debut of new startup SpaceMesh. We’ll have more details on both of those …
It’s no secret to anyone following the crypto space that most of the innovation is happening outside of the United States. There are many reasons for this, but one of the main ones is the complete lack of regulatory guidance by the SEC. Companies here are largely in limbo as their lawyers freeze most token …
I visited Korea in July and while I was there I had the very fortunate opportunity to meet Terra founders Daniel Shin and Do Kwon. This was one of those rare meetings where it might have appeared that the company was pitching me, but I already knew I wanted to invest and in reality I …
Earlier this month I visited the tiny European country of Lichtenstein (population: ~40,000). I was there to celebrate the announcement of a new crypto exchange called LCX. LCX is entering into a joint venture with Binance to create a new fiat to crypto exchange, to be called Binance LCX. Binance, of course, is the worlds …
Two weeks ago Geoffrey and I went to Korea to speak at two crypto events: Beyond Blocks and the Binance- organized Blockchain Partners Summit. This was an incredible trip. The Korean crypto community was vastly welcoming and accommodating. We had a chance to see Seoul in all of its beauty, ate so many memorable meals …
We are ready to talk a little more about another one of our portfolio companies – CertiK. This is a fantastic company that has created a formal verification platform for smart contracts, and is backed by some of the most active and interesting crypto funds around the world. They are now included on our portfolio …
Earlier this week one of our portfolio companies – Oasis Labs, with Berkeley professor Dawn Song as CEO, was introduced to the world. This is a company that you will be hearing a lot about over the coming months and years. The announcement this week was mostly about funding – the company raised $45 million from …
Next week we (Michael and Geoffrey) are heading to Korea to speak at the Beyond Blocks Summit in Seoul. This is going to be a fantastic event, and will highlight the increasingly important Korea crypto market to investors and entrepreneurs from around the world. I’ll be participating in a discussion on July 18 about investing …
I’ll be joining Tim Draper and others at a salon event on June 28 at Draper University in San Mateo called Meet the Masters of the Crypto Investor Universe. This is the first salon put on by long time technology entrepreneur Tony Perkins. Like me, Tony has become a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and investor, and his events …
If you’re attending the BlockChainNW event in Seattle today make sure to say hi to our partner Geoffrey Arone . He’s speaking in the afternoon on The Future of Funding panel and is looking forward to speaking with fellow investors and token entrepreneurs.
We are still a very young hedge fund, but we have been extremely active over the last few months in making new token purchases – you can see most of our non-confidential token purchases here on our portfolio page. This list doesn’t include other tokens we have purchased on the open market (or otherwise), of …
When we announced our fund in late 2017 I knew that we’d be doing a lot of business in Asia, but I’m still surprised that so many of the new cryptocurrency startups that we’ve invested in are from that region (many of our portfolio companies are listed here). That’s why I was so excited to …
I spoke to CNBC Africa’s Ran Neu-Ner after we announced the fund last week at the Coindesk event in New York. His tweet about it is here, and you can watch the short interview over at YouTube.
We announced the creation of Arrington XRP Capital a few days ago, on November 28 2017. We were lucky to have the opportunity to do it at Coindesk’s Consensus Invest event in New York in an on stage interview with Pete Rizzo. I’m very thankful that Pete and the rest of the team at Coindesk …
On July 1, 2013 I purchased my first Bitcoin for $102.41. There was a fee of $1.17 added by the exchange for doing the sale. From that point on, I was hooked. Or, I was at least a crypto enthusiast. I learned as much as I could about blockchain and related technologies emerging during those …
