San Francisco-based cryptocurrency investment firm 1confirmation has announced that it has initiated a second round of its blockchain-focused investment fund.
The new round – called ‘Fund II’ – is valued at $45 million which, along with a prior round (valued at $26 million), is made up of contributions from the likes of Brendan Eich, Peter Thiel, Mark Cuban, and Marc Andreessen.
In total, the amount of money pledged through grants operated by 1confirmation are valued at $75 million+, and have been allocated towards investments in seed round & early stage cryptocurrency projects.
“Since fund 1 launched two years ago, we’ve been lucky to work with great founders and partners (80+ LPs from 9 different countries) who have put trust in us to be good stewards for the industry as the adoption of open blockchains grows. That is a privilege that we don’t take lightly.”
Nick Tomaino, Founder and General Partner (1confirmation)
1confirmation is a cryptocurrency investment firm based in San Francisco and led by Nick Tomaino, a former Business Development Manager at UK cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
Whilst details on distribution plans for this funding have not yet been confirmed, the Tomaino has made it clear in his blog post that the company is focusing its support towards organisations managed by dedicated teams and backed by communities that are just as strong.
Fund I took place back in late December 2017 and among those who received investment from 1confirmation are decentralised organisations such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and MakerDAO; as well as a cohort of what Tomaino describes as “traditional companies” (including Coinbase).
“Since August 2017, we’ve slowly built out a portfolio of cryptocurrency-powered decentralized organizations that have strong communities… We’ve also backed great founders building traditional companies…”
Nick Tomaino, Founder and General Partner (1confirmation)
Beyond the aforementioned examples are lesser known, yet still relevant, projects in which 1confirmation has invested from the funds raised in its prior round.
Examples which could help give us insight into what kind of candidates the current set of funds may be allocated towards.
Cosmos
An open source, decentralized network of independent (and interoperable) parallel chains which uses BFT consensus algorithms such as ‘Tendermint’, using its own cryptographic token called ‘ATOM’.
Founded: 2016 (whitepaper published)
Twitter followers: 28.7k
Telegram group members: 11,719 members, 856 online (at the time of writing)
Polkadot
From the people behind the Switzerland based ‘Web3 Foundation’, and created to progress the concept and development of a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web”. The foundation has its own grant program for projects which support the ecosystem.
Web3 Foundation was founded by a trio of qualified individuals: Robert Habermeier (a ‘Thiel fellow’), Peter Czaban (Technology Director of the Web3 Foundation), and Dr Gavin Wood (former co-founder and CTO of Ethereum).
Founded: 2017 (Web3 Foundation)
Twitter followers: 31.6k
Telegram group members: 4,080 members, 353 online (at the time of writing)
Nervos
Nervos Network comprises an open source project, a collection of protocols, and a public blockchain ecosystem. The team claims to be “solving the biggest challenges facing blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum today” via its decentralized application network.
Founded: January 2018
Twitter followers: 4,612
Telegram group members: 5,996 members, 304 online (at the time of writing)
Brave
Brave offers a browser which aims to provide a “safer” and “faster” internet browsing experience compared to peers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
It includes an integrated ecosystem aimed at enabling more direct and unobtrusive options for support between content consumers and content creators, based on the Basic Attention Token (BAT).
The company was founded by CEO Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla) and Brian Bondy (CTO, former Senior Software Engineer at Mozilla).
Founded: 2015
Twitter followers: 85.5k
Telegram group members: NO TELEGRAM
bloXroute Labs
A blockchain scalability solution that aims to allow all cryptocurrencies and blockchains to scale “to thousands of transactions per second (TPS) on-chain, without any protocol changes”.
The team claims that it can solve the scalability “bottleneck” by “addressing the substantial time required for all nodes to synchronize when handling large volumes of TPS. Most importantly, bloXroute does this in a provably neutral way”.
Past investors (beyond 1confirmation) include: Pantera Capital, MetaStable, Fenbushi Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners.
Founded: 2017
Twitter followers: 5,657
Telegram group members: 3,906 members, 224 online (at the time of writing)
