The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax

or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed

at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com

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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast.

I'm Sonal.

I'm here today with Chris Dixon and Olaf Carson Wee, the founder of A6&Z investment

polychain, which is a cryptocurrency hedge fund.

And we're talking today about what that means, both as an asset class and in terms of

protocol development, and more broadly, what happens when you bring capitalism

to open source development and services? Okay, that's the intro. Welcome, guys.

Oh, if you don't mind, people don't know what cryptocurrency hedge fund is. Maybe you could

explain what it is. Yeah, break it down, actually for us. Yeah, absolutely. So polychain capital

manages a hedge fund that invests exclusively in cryptocurrencies. And by the way, are

a lot of cryptocurrencies? Because the only ones I know about like Bitcoin. So you've probably

only heard of Bitcoin. Maybe you've heard of Ethereum. There are hundreds of others.

Like, oh, I remember hearing about Dogecoin and things like that. Does that count as like a cryptocurrency?

Exactly right. And new ones are launched all the time, much more than you might think. So in March alone, there have been about 15 launches of new cryptocurrencies of new cryptocurrencies.

Of new cryptocurrencies. Holy shit. So instead of investing in companies that are building on top of these protocols, we invest directly into the protocols. So we take equity ownership of protocols instead of taking equity ownership of companies.

Let's pause on that for a minute because that's so counterintuitive, honestly, because the whole

thing we've been touting here and the whole community has been talking about for ages is how

important, yes, that Bitcoin and blockchain and everything related to the cryptocurrencies,

...