Crypto asset management in an age of utility
Why we invested in Narval 🐋
Fabric is thrilled to have invested in Narval’s pre-seed and seed rounds alongside Blocktower, a16z crypto, Frst, Cherry, and others.
In an economy built on ownership, as crypto is, custody is a defining and requisite feature. To date custody has focused on custody for the self (both for individuals and businesses), making sure that assets owned are securely stored. Huge winners in this space include Fireblocks and Safe (for business custody), and Metamask and Ledger (for personal custody).
When assets are predominantly tokens for trading, with little or no “utility”, the aforementioned solutions are sufficient.
We expect, however, that as newer verticals in crypto achieve product market fit, users will demand more complex interactions with their assets. Specifically, we expect that they will want to allow their assets to interact with other users who are both within and outside of their organizations, and in a way that is secure, seamless, and agnostic to the underlying method of custody.
Narval is building a secure management platform for web3 assets. This means that companies can easily delegate assets to other users, while trustlessly preventing unwanted user actions such as selling or transferring to others. They integrate with all the major custody providers and so are able to offer a solution to end customers that is custody agnostic. The solution is tailor made for crypto organisations, whose members currently juggle an array of personal and organizational accounts in various different forms: Externally owned Accounts, smart contract wallet multi-sigs, and MPC based solutions.
When they launched late last year, Narval immediately found a customer base among the segment of crypto which has the clearest expression of utility today: gaming. Gaming guilds coordinate assets for their distributed, affiliated user base and need to securely delegate NFTs without worrying about unauthorized user actions. As a result the Narval platform has grown to manage several thousands of assets. They have since expanded beyond this vertical; working with web3 brands and organizations looking to incorporate and use their unique access control layer to manage any on-chain interaction.
Longer term, this is the vision for Narval. Access control and permission management are hugely important (and valuable) parts of all internet-facing businesses, not vertical specific ones. We expect that to remain true as enterprises move to web3; all could benefit from Narval’s policy engine, which allows companies to focus on their core competencies rather than worrying about custody and who has access to which wallets or tokens. This shift will be accelerated as new application layers and new productive digital assets emerge.
In Greg and Matt, Narval have the executive team with the clarity of vision and operational expertise to deliver this vision. Laser focused on skating to where the puck is going, their previous experience as operators and founders have served them well, as they balance servicing the current pain points for existing crypto organisations while also building towards their longer term beliefs about where this space must go.
We are also delighted that Narval is the first fully fledged graduate of our Fabric X programme in France (Le Crypto Fellowship). Supporting founders at the earliest stages, and being as hands-on as possible to enable their success has always been part of Fabric’s DNA as venture contributors. We started the programme in France in 2021 as an experiment to onboard talented entrepreneurs to the space at the earliest ideation stage; a space that remains overly opaque to the vast majority of outsiders. Greg was one of that very first cohort, and has developed his vision for Narval over the ensuing 18 months, teaming up with Matt to create the right team to deliver their ambitious vision. We look forward to launching more incubators across more geographies in the coming months.
We are excited to continue to back Narval as they build the future of web3 custody management!
Fabric is a venture contributor: building, backing and accelerating the boldest ideas in Web3, to create a more open and fair economy. As a top European Web3 fund, Fabric focuses on being the “first institutional cheque” invested in companies, crypto assets and digital networks on a path to be global winners, identified primarily through its peerless pan-european footprint. The Fabric team is made of founders and operators who have built companies to greater than $3 billion in value, and holds operational and investing experience from Google, PayPal, Sun Microsystems, Visa, Accel, eVentures, and EQT.
Fabric Ventures’ portfolio includes Sorare, NEAR Protocol, Coinbase, Sky Mavis (the team behind Axie Infinity), Nansen, Consensys, Messari, Polkadot, Ledger, Ramp.network, YGG, Argent, 1inch, and The Graph. For more information on our portfolio, opportunities and our thesis please see www.fabric.vc.
