Where does venture capital invest in Bitcoin? – Bitcoin Magazine
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast”, hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by Alyse Killeen to talk about what’s happening in the VC space in relation to Bitcoin and what hidden gems are ripe for investment right now.
Watch this episode on YouTube or Rumble
Listen to the episode here:
Alyse Killeen: I’m curious about so much going on, how you all think about the important things to be aware of in the innovation space. We talked a little bit about Swan’s acquisition, which is exciting because it’s a company that has maintained such a commitment to their community, so I’m excited to see them grow.
We talked about Taro and what it does for adoption. I wonder what you all think about it. So from Stillmark’s perspective, just to lead with an answer here, from Stillmark’s perspective, what we like to do is look at where the protocols are going and then anticipate what that means for entrepreneurs and infrastructure and apps.
I gave the example of talking about seeing Segwit being activated in 2017, and knowing what that meant for the Lightning Network or for entrepreneurship and innovation in the absent infrastructure that would be built on top of the Lightning Network. So we see that in that kind of progressive build-up, but I’m curious from your perspective, how things come to the top of your list in terms of what’s important and exciting.
P: Man, that’s a fantastic question. I’ll give my thoughts and I’d love to hear questions too. I think, as I mentioned earlier, one of the most important challenges we face in the Bitcoin space is the UX problem. How can we increase the average person’s ability to adopt bitcoin?
In the United States, we have a level of economic privilege, given that we exist in the country that is currently the world’s reserve currency, but in so many other places, that is not the case. I think technologies like Fedimint and things that make it easy for people who are not interested in bitcoin for the broad reasons that we all are to adopt it and immediately see the positives – people operating in repressive financial regimes, people who are trying to figure out how to maintain and sustain the value they’ve earned over time and space because they have real, lived experience of their governments confiscating that wealth. I think those are the most interesting technologies for me.
Second, I would say technologies that allow us to more effectively preserve our economic privacy and freedom in developed countries. We have talked a lot about CBDCs (central bank digital currencies). We spoke yesterday with Natalie Smolinski, who will testify in a congressional hearing tomorrow about how CBDC is a sales funnel for Satan.
I think technologies that allow the average person—who isn’t fixated on financial privacy by default—technologies that allow them to adopt that really easily and naturally are going to become more and more important as the challenges we face in the world continue to heat up. up.
Those are the things that are most interesting to me.
Killeen: So P, I was just going to say that we see things the same way here, and one of the things Stillmark is doing is looking at how the technology can be used to meet people where they are in terms of both adopting BTC, asset , and Bitcoin, the protocol.
So I’ll give an interesting example of this, which is a company that we invested in quite recently called Pink Frog. And so what Pink Frog really is, it’s a game studio, but what they’re going to do is they’re going to integrate the Lightning Network to provide a better community experience for their players, and they’re going to use rate as in-game rewards, and also rewards between users.
We’ve seen it before, and it may not be interestingly described in the way I just laid it out, but here are the details that I think really make it compelling and show an advance in the Bitcoin ecosystem, broadly speaking. This is a team that does not come from the Bitcoin perspective, but comes from the gaming perspective.
So a team that comes from King, which is one of the most prestigious studios and successful studios in the gaming world, and it’s the team that introduced and developed Candy Crush. And Candy Crush is a game that has seen 100 million monthly active users as an example of the adoption that this team has been able to achieve.
Now, what they did when they left King and launched Pink Frog was they thought deeply about the gaming experience and how it could be made better for their players. And what they’re doing is they’re looking at a young millennial, a Gen Z audience. So they’re looking at like the TikTok audience, and they’re trying to see how technology or other kinds of innovations can be woven into what these players are looking for.
So they’re not really trying to force bitcoin in, they’re identifying Bitcoin as a way to serve a need and a want that they’ve observed in the user base. And so it’s really exciting to see the technologies being used in this way, which is just to solve problems or provide some kind of fun response to something that people want.
And instead of trying to convince people that they want bitcoin, it uses Bitcoin technologies to meet people where they are and integrate with their lives or the way they spend their time. Pink Frog is a nice, fun example of that. So, back to the beginning of our conversation, Taro was the serious application of that, where when we introduced the Lightning Network in emerging markets, and I’ll use El Salvador again as an example, we saw that people really needed to be tapped through Bitcoin and through Lightning Network. They needed to be able to engage with their local community and online, without a debit or credit card, and that was exactly what the Lightning Network was for them. But BTC’s volatility was difficult for people of lower socio-economic status. So Taro comes in to meet people right where they are and to offer a solution for something they know they need, which is tools to engage both in their local and in the global economy.
What you’re saying really resonates with me because I’m excited about the exact same thing, which is how Bitcoin can address a number of challenges that future users have.
