2018-7-31 20:05 |
Cryptocurrency investment firm Scalar Capital recently raised money from new, high-profile investors. After raising $8 million in a funding round in January, the company attracted new investments from Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon.
The new investments bring Scalar’s total assets to more than $20 million. Andreessen and Dixon are just two of the high-profile names attached to the company. Other notable names include Bain Capital Ventures, for example, Coinbase co-founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, and angel investor Elad Gil.
Scalar Capital aims to offer investment management specializing in cryptoassets. The company has been described as a hedge fund specializing in cryptoassets, and they hold a basket of cryptocurrencies from across the industry.
Scalar Capital was co-founded by Linda Xie and Jordan Clifford. Xie, 26, has been passionate about investing since college and worked in risk analysis at AIG for two years. She later purchased her first bitcoin and joined cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to work on compliance, helping law enforcement catch criminals by tracing bitcoin transactions.
Clifford, 33, met Xie while working at Coinbase as a growth engineer. He helped the San Francisco-based startup recruit new users.
Xie and Clifford left Coinbase in fall 2017 before launching Scalar Capital in January 2018.
“Coinbase is a training ground for entrepreneurs,” Xie said in a statement to Forbes.
Forbes reported on the new investments from Andreessen and Dixon. In a statement to Forbes, Dixon mentioned that he personally invested in Scalar because of Xie and Clifford’s deep experience in the space.
Today, Scalar Capital owns approximately 20 cryptocurrencies. The company’s long-term investment strategy is to hold each crypto asset for 3 to 5 years. Bitcoin occupies a large share of the company’s portfolio, as does Ether.
Other notable coins owned by Scalar Capital include privacy coins. Xie and Clifford see privacy coins as valuable cryptocurrencies that hide the identities of buyers, sellers, and transaction amounts. They’re ideal for privacy-focused transactions. Monero and ZCash are two privacy-focused coins mentioned by Xie and Clifford.
Meanwhile, both Xie and Clifford see bitcoin not as a daily peer-to-peer form of electronic cash – like Satoshi’s whitepaper states – but as a “buy-and-hold asset – like gold – instead of a payment currency.”
Xie and Clifford also believe in the importance of scaling solution cryptocurrencies. These cryptocurrencies aim to process more transactions per second than coins like Ethereum and bitcoin. Some of these style of coins owned by Scalar Capital include Kadena and Dfinity, both of which are Ethereum competitors.
Scalar does not, however, own EOS,
“largely because they feel its architecture isn’t decentralized enough.”
In any case, this latest investment round from Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon is yet another example of mainstream investors getting involved in the crypto space. Marc Andreessen is one of the best-known investors in Silicon Valley. As head of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen sits on the board of directors at Facebook, eBay, and Hewlett Packard, among other companies.
Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, the 47-year old billionaire co-authored Mosaic and co-founded Netscape, two of the most prominent browsers in the early days of the internet.
Moving forward, Scalar Capital Management, LLC plans to offer investment management services specializing in cryptoassets. TechCrunch recently described the company as “a hedge fund for crypto assets”. You can learn more about the company online at scalar.capital/
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