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Four Futures
Rebecca Kaden – Dec 18, 2024
We are in a moment where the future is both wildly exciting and highly uncertain. The acceleration of AI has created a new paradigm of possibilities but also fundamental questions we can’t yet answer. Will we continue speeding towards exponentially [...] Read more
Code
Fred Wilson – Feb 6, 2024
USV participated in a seed financing of Code, which is building a global payments app on the Solana blockchain. Code announced the financing today on their blog. You can see a nice visualization of the Code payments experience here and [...] Read more
NFTs Have Evolved, NFTs Endure
Nikhil Raman – Jan 3, 2024
USV started playing with NFTs in 2017. First when Rare Pepes were starting to gain some niche popularity and then again when cryptokitties launched. Shortly after that exploration, we invested in the team behind cryptokitties and wrote: We think digital [...] Read more
Web3 Compensation and Hiring
Matt Cynamon – Dec 21, 2023
This post was co-written with Tom Dils and Calder Zwerling. A version of the post also appears on the Variant website Earlier this year, Variant and USV conducted an extensive web3 compensation survey of our portfolio companies. Our goals were [...] Read more
Chamber
Albert Wenger – Sep 18, 2023
Today we’re excited to announce our investment in Chamber, a new service for securely holding digital assets. One of the challenges for crypto adoption is the perception that it is unsafe. Research by Pew found “75% of Americans who have [...] Read more
Blackbird Labs
Fred Wilson – Oct 6, 2022
At USV, we are looking for applications that can bring hundreds of millions of users onto web3. As great as the decentralized finance and digital art applications of web3 are, they aren’t likely to get my mom or your mom [...] Read more
WalletConnect
Albert Wenger – Mar 9, 2022
For the original web to be widely adopted, people needed a web browser. This seems trivial today as every new computing device comes preloaded with one or more browsers. But early on this was a chicken and egg problem. There [...] Read more
Bright Moments DAO
Fred Wilson – Aug 25, 2021
Yesterday, USV sent 500 ETH to the Bright Moments DAO and we got back one million Bright Moments DAO (BRT) tokens into our wallet. This is the third time USV has invested in a DAO and we will blog about [...] Read more
Tokenized Natural Assets
David Gabeau – Apr 29, 2021
This is one of several posts on new areas we are exploring for USV’s Climate Fund. Natural resources such as fertile land and healthy oceans are the ultimate foundations of the economy and civilization, and their protection and regrowth are [...] Read more