Hashed 2018 Recap
Recap on the first year of Hashed team
Kicking off the year with all-time high prospects on crypto, 2018 was inarguably a wild ride for the whole community. For Hashed, it was a year of bootstrapping the crypto community in Asia and accelerating the growth of infrastructure and mass adoption projects. We moved fast and focused on the core values. We will continue to invest aggressively.
The opportune timing of establishing Hashed at an infant stage of the industry has allowed for tremendous growth and opportunities. All of the above, however, would not have been possible if it weren’t for the incredible team at Hashed. Because we were not afraid to challenge each other in achieving tangible results, we have not only inspired others but also ourselves. The following highlights some of our core philosophy that we have been able to cement as a result.
Peculiar team
“Are we a Startup or a Fund?” Since the beginning, we have actively debated this question to align our interest in creating the kind of future we envision for the industry. The founding team consisted of engineers, serial entrepreneurs and blockchain evangelists who share a mission of establishing Korea as a leader within the global crypto community. To achieve this end, we have focused our efforts on impact investment and community engagement for thought leadership and research-based growth.
Today, we have a better understanding of ourselves: Hashed is a network building networks.
Kickstarting a sustainable network takes a tremendous amount of energy and coordination among experts from various fields. Throughout this year, we were fortunate enough to onboard superstars from media, engineering, government, private equity, and legal practices to support our network founders. At a very early stage of networks where we typically join the journey, networks’ utility value is near zero. Here, the role of investors’ is critical to the bootstrapping process of the network. in addition to adding value like traditional investors with capital and company building expertise, we consider ourselves a crypto-native fund, which means we can participate in networks by running nodes, clarifying governance, and evangelizing.
Direct network participation is a novel privilege that wasn’t available to an investor before crypto.
Investors can now play various roles as a service provider, a validator, a governor, a liquidity provider and more — a precious opportunity to understand the network first hand and continuously discover ways to both contribute and incentive align with the project.
This thesis has held strong throughout a dynamic year in crypto. Our team has experienced a zero-turnover rate to this day.
Research focused
Regardless of the diverse backgrounds of our team, research is the core role of every member at Hashed. Crypto is a fast space with innovation and breakthroughs happening at the founders level. Yesterday’s success does not lead to tomorrow’s. Unlike in more mature industries where early-stage startups are laser-focused on building a product, founders in crypto relentlessly question each other and debate to define the whole ecosystem. This research-oriented culture directly impacts how we work with our founders.
We grow with our founders. Although we provide support for projects in all steps of the process of becoming a competitive global participant from the very beginning, many of the challenges our founders encounter are also our first time. As we aid in governance modeling, token model design, and market monitoring, we are learning with them.
At the core of this firm-wide focus, we have our researchers. For the past few months, Kenny, Daniel, and Kevin have been deep-diving in all aspects of project design with tech leads and management at Klaytn — a blockchain initiative by Kakao to reach its full potential at a global stage. We are excited to be part of its journey to deliver an enterprise-friendly blockchain that can accelerate mass adoption by welcoming institutional service providers and onboarding Kakao’s existing 100M+ users.
Emphasis on community
The definition of ‘community building’ has been evolving over the year for us. In the beginning, by introducing the Hashed Lounge meetup and Hashed Post to the Korean community, we focused on education and bringing industry thought leaders to Seoul. Korea is an inarguably strategic market for many crypto networks seeking to build serious mass adoption. The penetration rate and the familiarity of digital assets in Korea are incomparable to other regions, still driving much of the trading volume in today’s bear market. Our next goal is to position Korea and Asia as a technical hub optimal to run crypto experiments on very challenging problems such as governance, token economics, and UX to push the boundaries in the crypto industry. Edward and the community team have already made a bold step through organizing Korea Blockchain Week, presenting the potential of Korean market to the global community.
Sharing memories with our friends…
Hashed Family
Given the uncertainties and volatility, founders of crypto startups are often under an intolerable amount of stress. Emotional support is often forgotten but one of the biggest part of a crypto investor’s role in helping founders’ long-term value creation. With highly liquid assets, founders are directly exposed to market judgments while solving countless technical problems in their project. The best thing you can do in an unpredictable adventure is having a group of close friends to pioneer together. This is the same for us investors as well. Our attempt is through building Hashed Family of our founders. We are constantly humbled to learn from our strong founders who are pushing boundaries in each of their fields. Having this close community fosters true network effects of networks — a collaboration between protocols like Terra providing Stability as a Service to Dapps, tackling common technical challenges in infrastructure, and building a developer community.
Can protocol-based networks build culture? As the internet fulfilled much of Tim Berners Lee’s vision of “a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write,” we are eager to find out in crypto. We will continue to be idealists in the space and build out the culture of decentralized community-driven collaboration and innovation.
Please keep an eye on our updated hashed.com for the future steps.
#HappyHolidays from Hashed Family
