Authored by Jake Brukhman with insights from Seth Ginns and Pete Gatti
Over the last week, CoinFund’s Seth Ginns, Pete Gatti, and I represented the firm in Singapore at Token2049, a truly global conference that offered glimpses of where the industry might be headed.
Notably, it was my first time at an Asian crypto conference since I attended Devcon2 in Shanghai in 2016. At the time, Devcon2 was a 1,000 person conference. Token2049 is the largest crypto show I have attended in nearly nine years since becoming a crypto investor, and I was blown away by the sheer scale and international representation converging on Singapore. Reportedly 20,000 participants from Asia and all over the world attended the event.
And maybe that’s the headline: depending where you sit, you may not be operating in a bear market at all. There’s a large and hungry industry out there comprised of founders exploring all avenues to bring their vision to market, and LPs ready to back a new generation of technologists. Sitting in the U.S. it is easy to navel gaze, to become almost obsessed with shifting day-to-day commentary or any signal, good or bad. It’s a real risk as an industry to allow our focus to be tethered to a constantly moving tide. For CoinFund, with about 45% of our founders headquartered outside of the U.S., we’re both inspired by the energy in the Asian market and responsible for interpreting these opportunities for our portfolio.
These are our collective observations after speaking on three panels, meeting with 30+ Asian institutional investors, meeting numerous founders on the ground, and attending countless events:
The Now
- As mentioned, there really was no sense of an industry in a severe bear market. On the contrary, countless booths of startups promoted projects building in full swing, and investors were writing checks.
- Overall, there was very little discussion of global macro conditions, the Fed, or interest rates. The focus was rooted in innovation and the future built on blockchain technology and its bottom-up use cases. Asian investors did want our take on the current regulatory environment in the…