I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Variant as an investment partner. After spending the last six years on teams designing layer 1s, layer 2s, and onchain applications, I look forward to investing in the next generation of engineers, builders, and researchers.
Here’s a bit more about me, my journey to Variant, and what I’m excited to invest in:
I believe we are living through one of the most transformative periods in history.
Over the past 20 to 30 years, the internet has fundamentally changed how we distribute, preserve, and use information. This shift is one of the defining moments of our society, and we’ve had the unique opportunity to witness it unfold. But we’re not just spectators in this evolution; many of us have played a role in advancing the information revolution, and we're continuing to push the boundaries.
Just as the internet democratized access to information, emerging technologies built on mathematics and cryptography are now revolutionizing how we establish and manage trust. For the first time, we have the chance to engage directly with the systems that underpin our social and financial frameworks, bypassing traditional intermediaries. I believe this is just the beginning, and why the blockchain industry is the most exciting place to be working right now.
Why Variant
I decided to become an investor because there's still a clear need for investors with a deep technical understanding of the industry. It's not just about using web3 systems (which many still surprisingly don't) but knowing how they're built and the trade-offs involved.
When searching for a venture fund to join, I wanted to work somewhere that focused specifically on early-stage investments and had a team fundamentally aligned on a vision for a more decentralized future. I remember watching Jesse's videos from his time at a16z Crypto Startup School, and Variant has historically stood out as an early player with this as an exclusive focus, making it a natural fit.
I know firsthand that success in this industry often depends on navigating a complex and evolving regulatory landscape. That's why the chance to work with experienced top legal experts, Jake Chervinsky and Daniel Barabander, who are both philosophically and technically insightful, was a unique opportunity. Ultimately, I value working with great people, and Variant is full of them. The team — Jesse, Li, Alana, Geoff, Derek, and others — has built a strong reputation with an impressive portfolio, with early investments in projects like Blackbird, Blockaid, Gevulot, Morpho, and Turnkey, among many others.
We invest in an internet that turns users into owners. That is something that I'm fundamentally excited to spend my time supporting. Personally, I think that investing in high-quality founders, and helping ensure their success, is one of the most impactful possible ways to do so.
My journey to Variant
My first foray into the crypto industry was as a software developer for the project behind the hashgraph consensus protocol, which later launched the Hedera network. I worked on the first application deployed to the mainnet and ultimately led Hedera’s developer evangelism efforts.
At the time, I was attracted to our novel approach regarding enterprise and institutional adoption, in the form of the Hedera governing council. I’ve co-authored various Hedera protocol improvements, such as HIP-18, which enshrined token royalties into the network. Through this experience, I learned firsthand what it truly takes to get not only a network or protocol off the ground, but an entire supporting ecosystem and community.
A few years later, I had the opportunity to work with NBA player Spencer Dinwiddie at Calaxy, where I served as the founding Chief Technology Officer. In this role, I helped the team fundraise while overseeing the development of an application that used social tokens and NFTs to foster more direct connections between fans and creators through features such as live video calls and personalized DMs.
Most recently, I led the Product team at Aztec, a privacy-focused layer-2 rollup filled with the brilliant cryptographers behind the Plonk proving system. I fundamentally believe that Aztec is solving one of the biggest outstanding problems in the industry: onchain privacy. While there, I oversaw the research and development of the network's decentralized infrastructure, including its sequencing and proving protocols, upgrade mechanisms, and economic models — and I realized how much further there is to go in decentralizing critical infrastructure. I also learned how difficult it is to try to create a category-leading project in this industry, even one that is so obviously necessary.
What I’m excited about
I’m excited to invest across all verticals or categories where founders are solving tough problems with underexplored solutions — specifically, where potential solutions can deliver orders-of-magnitude improvements over existing alternatives, or where there are no known viable alternatives. Here are a few examples:
Differentiated execution environments and virtual machines
Examples: Aztec (ZK-based), SUAVE (TEE-based), =nil; (sharding-based)
Novel consensus protocols and blockchain development platforms
Examples: MCP block-building protocols, alternatives to Tendermint
Vertically integrated infrastructure
Examples: L1s with opinionated identity & data storage solutions
Zero-knowledge cryptography-based applications
Examples: zkTLS, zkEmail, zkP2P, zkPassport, zkID
If you are working on these things, or on other important but difficult problems in the industry, I’d love to chat and potentially help. Please feel free to get in touch via email (cooper@variant.fund), Twitter or Telegram (@cooper-variant).
