 | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Investment management |
| Founded | 2016 [1] [2] [3] |
| Founder | Olaf Carlson-Wee |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, U.S. [4] |
| Products | Hedge Funds Venture Capital |
| AUM | US$6.6 billion (March 2022) [4] |
Number of employees | 38 [4] |
| Website | Official website |
Polychain Capital (Polychain) is an American investment firm based in San Francisco, California. [4] The firm focuses on investments related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. [1] [2]
Polychain Capital was founded in 2016 by Olaf Carlson-Wee. [1] [2] [3] [5] [6] Prior to founding Polychain, Carlson-Wee was an employee of Coinbase where he was Head of Risk. [1] [2] [5]
Investors of Polychain include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures and Founders Fund. [3] [5] [6] [7]
In January 2018, the firm considered holding an initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange to raise $325 million but eventually decided not to proceed with it. [6]
The firm claimed $1 billion assets at the start of 2018 but dropped to $591.5 million as of the end of 2018, majorly due to the drop in the value of its holdings. [8] [9]
Companies that Polychain Capital has invested in include Coinbase, Kik Messenger [10] and Tezos. [11]
Elliptic is a British blockchain analytics firm headquartered in London, with offices in New York and Singapore. The company was co-founded by Adam Joyce, Tom Robinson and James Smith in 2013. It is the first company to develop cryptoasset anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance tools based on blockchain analytics. Its clients are primarily financial and institutions and crypto businesses, although it also provides blockchain investigation tools and data to government agencies. Customers have included Coinbase, Santander, BitGo, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration and United States Department of the Treasury.
Chris Dixon is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and previously worked at eBay. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Hunch. He was #1 on the Midas List in 2022. Dixon is known as a cryptocurrency and Web3 evangelist.
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.
Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work. It is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States by trading volume. The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. In May 2020, Coinbase announced it would shut its San Francisco, California headquarters and change operations to remote-first, part of a wave of several major tech companies closing headquarters in San Francisco in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Winklevoss Capital is a family office founded in 2012 by Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Howard Winklevoss. The firm invests across multiple asset classes including seed funding and infrastructure to early-stage startups. The company is headquartered in New York's Flatiron District.
BTCC is a crypto exchange established in June 2011. The exchange underwent a significant restructuring in 2018, closing its offices in China and expanding its business globally since then.
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 began as 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$10.8 billion in mid-2022. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018, and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.
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.
Abra is a financial services and technology company that operates a cryptocurrency wallet service including a trading service for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, a service for earning interest on cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, and a lending services for borrowing against cryptocurrency collateral.
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.
USD Coin (USDC) is a digital stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar. USD Coin is managed by a consortium called Centre, which was founded by Circle and includes members from the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Bitcoin mining company Bitmain, an investor in Circle. USDC is issued by a private entity and should not be confused with a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Balaji S. Srinivasan is an Indian-American entrepreneur and investor. He was the co-founder of Counsyl, the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Coinbase, and former general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Pantera Capital is an American hedge fund that specializes in cryptocurrencies. It is the largest crypto hedge fund in the world by AUM.
Frederick "Fred" Ernest Ehrsam III is an American business executive and investor who is the co-founder and former managing partner of cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm. He is also the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
Olaf Carlson-Wee is an American entrepreneur and the CEO of cryptocurrency fund Polychain Capital, which he founded in 2016. He was the first employee of Coinbase. Carlson-Wee was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2018.
Li Xiaolai is a Chinese billionaire and Bitcoin investor known for founding Chinese venture capital firm Bitfund. He is often described as "China's richest Bitcoin billionaire" and had an estimated net worth of ¥7 billion in 2018.
Solana is a blockchain platform which uses a proof-of-stake mechanism to provide smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is SOL.
Three Arrows Capital was a Singapore-based cryptocurrency hedge fund which was ordered to liquidate on 27 June 2022 by a court in the British Virgin Islands. It was founded in 2012 by Kyle Davies and Su Zhu. The company borrowed billions of dollars to fund its trading, and according to July 2022 bankruptcy filings, faces $3.5 billion in creditors' claims. The fund appears to have lost in excess of $3 billion over 2021 and 2022, making its collapse one of the largest hedge-fund trading losses of all time.
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