Choosing the winners of the next cycle – Wyoming Blockchain Symposium VC Panel

Executives from Blockchain Capital, MetaGood, Dragonfly, Arche Capital and Breyer Capital appeared on a panel on August 21, 2010 at this year's Wyoming Blockchain Symposium to discuss venture capital strategy.

Rob Haddick, general partner at venture capital firm Dragofly, explained that investors with traditional institutional approaches lag behind their crypto-native peers in terms of investment performance because crypto is a separate asset class with a completely different profile than conventional finance. The executive director told the audience:

“The liquidity profile is different, the development time is different, the scale of risk and attack is different, the nature of open source and what we do is different – you have to have a broader understanding of what's going on.”

Bart Stephens, founder and managing partner at Blockchain Capital, shares the company's long-term approach to holding tokens and equity in crypto startups. This includes slowly nurturing the companies the firm invests in and helping the companies grow organically, as opposed to trading and having short-term pre-token sales.

Related: Unicoin exec explains why projects fail – Blockchain Futurist Conference

Bill Tye, co-founder and chairman of MetaGood, touched on the importance of choosing teams and projects that are mission-focused, not just revenue-focused. The venture capitalist cautioned against narrowly selecting teams, choosing projects with high technical talent but no general purpose.

“You get a lot more productivity when people are mission-driven and believe in what they're doing, rather than trying to engineer a solution if you throw a bunch of paid best practices into a bucket.”

Crypto VC funding in 2024

While the total number of crypto startup deals fell quarter-over-quarter in Q2 2024, the total amount of capital invested in these companies rose by 2.5%, bringing the Q2 total to $2.7 billion.

Venture capitalist Adam Cochran recently told Cointelegraph that he believes the slowdown in VC funding in the crypto sector is mainly due to the massive price appreciation of holding blue-chip digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC) or Ether (ETH).

The VC explained that many institutional investors are good at taking advantage of the higher upside of the S&P 500 and avoiding the unnecessary risk of investing in relatively risky startup projects.

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