Haun Ventures Capitalizes on Bitcoin Surge

This week, the company invested $5 million in Agora, a front-end solution for DAO governance amidst bitcoin price recovery

During the year 2021, when Katie Haun departed from Andreessen Horowitz to establish her venture firm with a concentration on cryptocurrencies, blockchain startups were trendy.

FTX and cryptocurrency prices plummeted shortly after Haun disclosed that the combined value of Haun Ventures’ two funds was $1.5 billion. 

Although Haun Ventures possesses an extensive collection of dry powder, it still needs to acquire low-cost interests in cryptocurrency and Web3, leaving many observers to speculate when the company will accelerate its deployment pace. 

Although Haun Ventures asserts that it did not idle its capital (or hands) during the cryptocurrency market decline, the company may have been more cautious than it had initially intended. 

However, since the bitcoin price has recovered to its previous peak, Haun Ventures’ investment activity has significantly increased.

Haun Ventures has placed 48 investments across its later-stage acceleration funds, which range from $500 million in early-stage to $1 billion, to include a portion of its token positions. 

The firm’s most recent investment is Agora, an application that facilitates voting and other decision-making processes for decentralized autonomous organizations.

On Tuesday, the firm led a pilot round of $5 million invested in Agora, which included Pilot Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, and additional participants. 

Sam Rosenblum, a partner at Haun Ventures, stated that the absence of a straightforward user interface that permits members to vote on or authorize the implementation of software upgrades to the protocols they govern was a significant barrier to DAO participation. 

A significant portion of the procedure was fragmented. Specific determinations were deliberated in an independent Discord channel; Rosenblum stated,

“had the community opted to vote elsewhere on the allocation of treasury funds to a particular project.”

Agora resolves this concern for DAO members by providing a simple community and protocol governance solution.

Rosenblum stated,

“Historically, in order to participate in the resource allocation of a protocol treasury, one was required to perform a number of on-chain operations manually, which likely requires hardware and software configurations that the average person lacks.” 

Agora is designed to simplify DAO participation for non-technical users. Coinbase, according to Rosenblum, simplifies coin trading for most users. 

In 2022, Charlie Feng, co-founder of the financial technology firm Clearco, Yitong Zhang, a product designer for Coinbase, and Kent Fenwick, a software engineer, established the organization. 

ESC and Uniswap are among the protocols that have already adopted Agora, which is essentially a SaaS offering. 

Rosenblum explained that these protocols are willing to pay for Agora to reduce the barrier to community participation. 

Although activity in the cryptocurrency industry is undoubtedly accelerating, Rosenblum did not specify when Haun Ventures will complete deploying its current fund. However, he intends to continue investing in the following year.