North Island Ventures

We believe that the best technology investment opportunities arise from the emergence of new enabling technologies. Enabling technologies are platforms for innovation – they offer a set of new capabilities, which entrepreneurs can leverage and combine to create applications and experiences that could not previously exist.

The quintessential modern enabling technologies are the computer, the internet, and the smartphone, which have created tremendous value and changed the world. These technologies are now mature, and the time is ripe for a new revolutionary platform.

We believe that crypto is the next great enabling technology. Like all great enabling technologies, crypto offers unprecedented capabilities. These include automated trust, fair and open platform design, native incentivization, privacy protection, censorship resistance, and community governance. Bold startups are building the infrastructure and applications to deliver these benefits. 

Recently, more people have come to agree with our thesis, as the big ideas in crypto have started to materialize; over the past few years, open blockchains have processed trillions of dollars of payments (stablecoins), developers have deployed automated software that abrogates the need for financial intermediaries (DeFi), millions of consumers have interacted with novel digital assets (NFTs), and passionate communities have sprouted digitally-native organizations (DAOs). We believe these early products represent mere proofs-of-concept, and that more advanced infrastructure and better user experiences will push crypto beyond experimental and speculative use cases in the coming years.

Over the longer term, we anticipate an internet of invisible, interoperable crypto networks, facilitating the seamless and secure exchange of value across national and institutional borders. We anticipate a convergence between the currently segregated crypto universe and established industries, including finance, gaming, social media, entertainment, science, and beyond. We believe that crypto’s unique capabilities can be harnessed to rearchitect these markets, thereby producing novel organizational forms.

The nascent crypto industry is extremely volatile and faces massive challenges, and there is no guarantee that it will live up to the hype. Nonetheless, we believe that crypto has the potential to solve some of our world’s most pressing economic, social, and technological problems, and we are honored to support the great entrepreneurs bringing these solutions to life.