Investing in Pluralis Research
Our seed investment in Pluralis Research is premised on using crypto ownership to solve the resource problem of foundation AI models.
Variant
First-check crypto venture capital firm investing in an internet that turns users into owners
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Things We’re Excited About in Crypto
DAOs 2.0
The World Network Opportunity: A Greenfield for Builders
The Marketplaces Edition
What Credit Card Networks Can Teach Us About Stablecoin Opportunities
There is a particular type of coordination problem ownership via crypto is well-suited to solve: open software with a “resource problem.”
The Reserve and Stockpile are likely good for US fiscal policy and market prices, but neither are enough to make the USA the crypto capital of the world. For that, we need new policies empowering entrepreneurs to launch protocols and products made in the USA.
On policy, Ethereum is punching way below its weight in Washington, D.C.
We’re sharing a mix of our latest thinking—along with some of the biggest product launches and fundraises from our portfolio companies.
At Variant, we believe that all of the world’s value will one day be tokenized and live onchain. This conviction is a driving factor in our pre-seed investment in Whetstone.
I've been interested in how AI agents could lead to DAOs 2.0. So Jack, Daniel and I jammed on some specific products we are actively looking to invest in.
With the rise of agents that heavily interact with Web2 applications, primitives that help users unchain their Web2 data will become increasingly important.
In this edition, our investment partner Daniel lays out AI’s resource problem—and how crypto solves it. Jesse looks at the boom of AI “agents” onchain and sees it as a potential starting point for truly autonomous DAOs. Then Daniel suggests two tools that protocols can use to deal with “squishy/dynamic problems” DAOs aren’t suited for.
Since the last update, there have been three big inflection points that have altered (or likely will alter) the state of crypto: President Trump won the election, an AI agent called Truth Terminal started posting about a token called $GOAT, and Hyperliquid airdropped its token.
In 2014, Vitalik defined a DAO as follows:"an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do…"