A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors. Named after Italian businessman Charles Ponzi, this type of scheme misleads investors by either falsely suggesting that profits are derived from legitimate business activities, or by exaggerating the extent and profitability of the legitimate business activities, leveraging new investments to fabricate or supplement these profits. A Ponzi scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as investors continue to contribute new funds, and as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment or lose faith in the non-existent assets they are purported to own.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management, with $42 billion as of May 2024.
Blockchain.com is a cryptocurrency financial services company. The company began as the first Bitcoin blockchain explorer in 2011 and later created a cryptocurrency wallet that accounted for 28% of bitcoin transactions between 2012 and 2020. It also operates a cryptocurrency exchange and provides institutional markets lending business and data, charts, and analytics.
Circle is a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
Kraken is a United States–based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. It was one of the first bitcoin exchanges to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal and was valued at US$3 billion in January 2024. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018, and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.
The DAO was a digital decentralized autonomous organization and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund. After launching in April 2016 via a token sale, it became one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in history, but it ceased activity after much of its funds were taken in a hack in June 2016.
Digital Currency Group (DCG) is a venture capital company focusing on the digital currency market. It is located in Stamford, Connecticut. The company has the subsidiaries Foundry, Genesis, Grayscale Investments, and Luno. It also formerly owned CoinDesk.
ShapeShift, founded in 2014 by Erik Voorhees was a cryptocurrency exchange headquartered in Switzerland that turned into a permissionless DAO operating on the blockchain. Its decentralized application empowers users to trade the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and 10,000+ crypto assets across 14 chains.
An initial coin offering (ICO) or initial currency offering is a type of funding using cryptocurrencies. It is often a form of crowdfunding, although a private ICO which does not seek public investment is also possible. In an ICO, a quantity of cryptocurrency is sold in the form of "tokens" ("coins") to speculators or investors, in exchange for legal tender or other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ether. The tokens are promoted as future functional units of currency if or when the ICO's funding goal is met and the project successfully launches.
EOS.IO is a blockchain protocol based on the cryptocurrency EOS. The smart contract platform claims to eliminate transaction fees and also conduct millions of transactions per second. It was developed by the private company Block.one and launched in 2017. The platform was later released as open-source software.
A cryptocurrency bubble is a phenomenon where the market increasingly considers the going price of cryptocurrency assets to be inflated against their hypothetical value. The history of cryptocurrency has been marked by several speculative bubbles.
Tezos is an open-source blockchain that can execute peer-to-peer transactions and serve as a platform for deploying smart contracts. The native cryptocurrency for the Tezos blockchain is the tez. The Tezos network achieves consensus using proof-of-stake. Tezos uses an on-chain governance model that enables the protocol to be amended when upgrade proposals receive a favorable vote from the community. Its testnet was launched in June 2018, and its mainnet went live in September 2018.
An Initial exchange offering (IEO) is the cryptocurrency exchange equivalent to a stock launch or Initial public offering (IPO). An IEO is the process of digital asset procurement through an established exchange for the purpose of raising capital for start-up companies. Exchanges act as a middleman between investors and the startup, profiting from fees generated by services rendered during the due diligence process and funding phase. IEO's and initial coin offerings (ICO) share similar characteristics with, however, an IEO can be seen as an evolution from the ICO due to legal influence and an increase in financial regulations within the cryptocurrency market.
A security token offering (STO) / tokenized IPO is a type of public offering in which tokenized digital securities, known as security tokens, are sold in security token exchanges. Tokens can be used to trade real financial assets such as equities and fixed income, and use a blockchain virtual ledger system to store and validate token transactions.
Pantera Capital is an American hedge fund and venture capital firm focused on digital assets headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The fund specializes in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. It is one of the largest digital asset funds in the world by managed assets.
SafeMoon LLC was a cryptocurrency and blockchain company created in March 2021. The company created the SafeMoon token (SFM) which traded on the BNB Chain blockchain. The token charged a 10% fee on transactions, with 5% redistributed to token holders and 5% directed to wallets in a different currency, Binance Coin (BNB), controlled by the coin's authors. The token reached its all time high market cap in April 2021 of $17b. As of December 2022, it had dropped 98.7% in value to $223m.
Securitize, Inc is a financial technology company that provides businesses a platform to raise capital from institutional, accredited or retail investors (crowdfunding) with shares issued in the form of digital tokens recorded on the blockchain, including for Oddity and digital custodian Exodus, which used the Securitize platform to raise $75 million in 2021. Securitize also operates a broker-dealer marketplace on which tokenized shares in private companies are traded. Securitize has approximately 3,000 clients with a combined 1.2 million investors and is regulated by both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA. In June 2022, Securitize became authorized by the Spanish government to enter its securities test environment.
Polychain Capital (Polychain) is an American investment firm based in San Francisco, California. The firm focuses on investments related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Tokenomics is a term that refers to the study and analysis of the economic aspects of a cryptocurrency or blockchain project, with a particular focus on the design and distribution of its native digital tokens. The term is a portmanteau of words token and economics.
Chia Network Inc. is a US-based blockchain technology company. The company built the Chia blockchain that uses proof of space and proof of time consensus protocols and issues the digital currency Chia (XCH). Chia Network was founded in 2017 by Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, and Ryan Singer. Its headquarters are in South San Francisco, California.
