Fred Ehrsam Coinbase Co-Founder Partners With Sequoia For New Crypto Fund
The departure of partners and investors from venture capital firm into cryptocurrency investing is taking a different dimension, as Sequoia Capital partner Matt Huang has become the recent finance industry champion to make his departure. According to sources from Wall Street Journal, Huang plans to team up with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam to begin a new cryptocurrency investment fund.
This comes after a well-known trend of industry movements as the cryptocurrency investment environment continues to be quite pleasing to traditional investment. Over the past year, significant exists include Nick Tomaino of Runa Capital who departed to begin 1Confirmation, a cryptocurrency-focused fund which has been sponsored by Mark Cuban. Joel Monegro, an analyst with Union Square Ventures also left to begin his own fund called Placeholder.
The trend of personal movements from VC firms to crypto funds happens at a time when several VC firms are going through a choice of either making an extensive investment in crypto or continue to overlook the crypto market as they have previously done. Several partners at venture firms believe that now is the moment to make crypto a key point of their investment strategy, so it would look as if these patterns are an indicator of their opinion in the future of crypto investment.
During the same period, a couple of VC firms have made the decision to maintain partners who are keen in crypto by developing special crypto funds that permit them to try other alternatives without exiting the firm. For instance is the Andreessen Horowitz crypto fund which is headed by general partners Chris Dixon and Alex Rampell.
After the waited departure of Mr. Huang in June, Sequoia Capital will continue to have interest in the crypto space, including investments in Polychain Capital, Metastable, Filecoin and Orchid Labs. Partner Alfred Lin, confirming Mr. Huang’s exist noted that Huang “will remain a good friend of Sequoia, and we wish him great success.”
