Silicon Valley investment powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has launched a new $300 million fund focused on cryptocurrencies.
The fund, as explained in a blog post published Monday, will be named “a16z” and will notably feature former federal prosecutor and Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Haun as one of its co-leads. Haun has also been named as the firm’s latest general partner.
That the investment firm would move to vastly expand the scope of its activities in the industry is unsurprising, given the millions it has poured into projects and protocols built around a range of use cases. Andreessen Horowitz has also invested in a number of notable startups, including crypto exchange Coinbase.
General partner Chris Dixon indicated in the post that the crypto-fund would take a decidedly long-term tack in its investments.
“We’ve been investing in crypto assets for 5+ years,” he wrote. “We’ve never sold any of those investments, and don’t plan to any time soon. We structured the a16z crypto fund to be able to hold investments for 10+ years.”
Dixon went on to add:
“We plan to invest consistently over time, regardless of market conditions. If there is another ‘crypto winter,’ we’ll keep investing aggressively.”
In another hint at the fund’s overall thesis, Dixon said that a16z would focus its efforts on projects with a “non-speculative use case.”
“We want services powered by crypto protocols to be used by hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people,” Dixon wrote. “Crypto tokens are the native asset class of digital networks, but their value is driven by the underlying, practical uses cases.”
Image via Shutterstock