Monthly Mint — 02.2024
A curated selection of hires and promotions from across crypto and web3. If you would like to sign up to receive this newsletter, please visit our website.
We’re Following
Happy March 1st, Minters! 🎉 Not only is it a Friday, but we’re also just weeks away from the official start of spring. 💐 Actual spring is nigh, but a metaphorical spring is well upon us…😏
🧊 Ice is thawing, birds are chirping and markets are finally looking, dare we say, 🐂 bullish. The new spot Bitcoin ETFs almost broke the internet and definitively broke trading records this month. 📈 Clocking a combined $2.4B in volume — led by the BlackRock fund with $1.3B in total flows — these ETFs traded well above the previous daily record set on their launch date, January 11th. In fundraising land, crypto payments app Oobit raised a $25M Series A from Anatoly and friends. On the back of its “wallet-as-a-service announcement,” Fordefi closed a $10M Seed extension from the likes of ⚡Electric Capital, Paxos and Alchemy. Eigen Layer raised a jaw-dropping $100M Series B from a16z crypto. The fintech-turned-crypto payments team at Meso cinched a $9.5M Seed. 🌱 We even saw a Founders Fund and Dragonfly-led Seed round of $27M into the Polygon spinoff Avail. Speaking of Founders Fund, thanks for the cash infusion last winter, Peter 🙏🏼. Much appreciated.
🌷Spring is springing, funds are funding and you better believe the legislators are making noises about legislating. Just this month, ⚖️ Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged Congress to pass legislation around a number of crypto topics — stablecoins, market structure and anti-money laundering to name a few. 💪🏼 OFAC is flexing its muscles on the back of a JPMorgan Tether-skeptic call. Even the SEC got in on the action with a Franklin Templeton ETH ETF filing. Oh, and did we mention three Americans were indicted for the FTX heist 🚨that mysteriously siphoned $400M from the now anemic coffers on the day FTX declared bankruptcy? Things are looking up, my friends. Springing forward ⏰ has never felt so good.
Let’s wrap things up with a bit of cultural news, shall we? Wrap, not rap 🎤 — though we are still reliving Luda’s verse in this halftime show 🤩. Despite leaving 2023’s infamous “Crypto Bowl” behind us, this year’s annual sporting soiree 🏈 brought its fair share of bitcoin. From Jack Dorsey’s Satoshi tee to Biden’s accidental laser eyes 👀, crypto culture was alive and well…much like Lil Jon, who is literally 53 years old now 🤯. Take that and rewind it back.
🍾Cheers & happy Spring,
The Intersection Crew
We’re Backing
This month we sat with Herman Narula, Co-Founder and CEO of London-based metaverse start-up, Improbable. Founded in 2012, Improbable has raised >$700+ million from leading investors including a16z and Softbank, while inking partnerships with mega-brands across web3, sports and entertainment. Herman is one of the most engaging and passionate thought leaders in the metaverse and web3 space and author of the book, Virtual Society.
Improbable was launched by you and Rob Whitehead in 2012 while you were both CS students at Cambridge University. Can you tell us more about the company’s genesis and how the firm has evolved?
Rob and I shared a love of virtual worlds, but wanted them to be richer and more interesting, and so we set about building simulations of worlds that could support thousands of people in the same shared space. We began with games, but realized we wanted a bigger story and that these unprecedented experiences could be transformative for music, sports and culture. So our journey has been an enormous multi-year undertaking to meet the technical challenges to realise this vision, along with learning as much as we can about the psychology and economics of what brings people together to make real a genuine virtual society.
And how about MSquared? What are you building here and how does it fit in with Improbable?
MSquared is an ecosystem of interoperable metaverses that unites a community of builders, businesses and users by enabling mass-scale virtual experiences connected through a shared digital asset economy, creating a network of interlinked worlds greater than the sum of its parts.
It’s powered by an ecosystem of open content standards, protocols and ground-breaking platform and engine technology, enabling lean teams to quickly build and iterate on meaningful, fulfilling, community focused experiences that are accessible to all and allow tens of thousands of people to interact with each other in a dense space.
Although initiated by Improbable, MSquared was established as a distinct entity to better enable governance in partnership with other businesses and eventually its community.
The term ‘metaverse’ is a loaded one: it elicits a wide range of reactions and is defined differently by various participants. What is the metaverse to you, and why is it important?
The metaverse is a network of connected realities — virtual worlds that society imbues with meaning — that overlaps with and extends the real world. It is a place where technology, creativity and human interaction can converge, providing immense opportunities for people to connect, innovate, build together, shape our future and have unprecedented experiences that go beyond what’s possible anywhere else. And to be successful, the metaverse has to be a useful reality, facilitating meaningful fulfilling experiences and allowing individuals to generate shared value.
To use a blatantly American analogy, what inning do you think we’re in with the metaverse? What are the key unlocks needed to propel the ecosystem forward?
It’s absolutely in the first inning, and we’ve seen people take a few swings and get in a couple of good hits — but if we’re going to get a home run, we need all that good stuff I’ve been talking about. We need users having a wealth of options when it comes to having genuinely meaningful experiences that can happen uniquely in the metaverse. It requires interoperable worlds built on open standards, where organisations can leverage a wider network and build value together, and ways for people to come together in mass-scale events that merge the real and virtual worlds, to find meaning and fulfilment. If the metaverse cannot provide these things, there’s nothing there.
What book would you recommend to our readers? Snowcrash or Neuromancer?
The interesting thing about these books is they were instrumental in creating visions of what the metaverse might become, but their fictional worlds are representations of our flaws as a species, and serve as warnings and predictions that inhabiting complex virtual worlds will harm humanity. They’re great for sparking the imagination and conversation and I’d suggest reading both, but they’re also responsible for misconceptions about what the metaverse will do and mean. In part, this is why I wrote Virtual Society, which rather than being a work of fiction is instead a kind of handbook to explore how we can together build a version of the metaverse that works for everyone, to create and exchange meaning and value, and that seamlessly links with — rather than serves as a means to escape from — the real world.
Meta Quest 3 or Vision Pro?
I’m all for more immersive experiences and as a techie am super excited about anything that adds more opportunities for innovative ways to connect with others. But I also want to reach people with 4G phones who can tap a link and meet their heroes. So shiny new headsets are compelling, but we have to balance this by making sure the metaverse is accessible to everyone on some level, and reach people who’ve never been reached before.
We’re Tracking
Aragon: Anthony Leutenegger was promoted to CEO. Anthony was previously the Head of Business Development and Partnerships at Aragon. Link
Binance: Steve Christie rejoined Binance as Deputy Chief Compliance Officer. Steve was previously the Senior Vice President of Compliance at Binance. Link
Blockaid: Glenn Rachlin joined Blockaid to lead its go-to-market efforts. Glenn was previously the Head of Sales & Partnerships at Alchemy. Link
Circle: Corey Then was promoted from Vice President of Global Policy to Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Global Policy. Link
CoinDesk: Sara Stratoberdha joined CoinDesk, an independent subsidiary of Bullish, as CEO. Sara was previously the Head of Business Development at Bullish. Link
Crystal: Navin Gupta joined Crystal as CEO. Navin was previously the Managing Director of South Asia & MENA at Ripple. Link
GSR: Andreas Koukorinis joined GSR as Head of Trading. Andreas was previously Global Head of Credit eTrading & FICC ETF Systematic Trading at JPMorgan. Link
Layer N: Luc Froehlich joined Layer N’s Advisory Board. Luc was previously the Global Head of Digital Assets Solutions at Fidelity. Link
Morph: Azeem Khan is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Morph. Azeem was previously the Head of Impact at Gitcoin. Link
Ondo Finance: Chris Tyrrell joined Ondo Finance as Chief Risk and Compliance Officer. Chris was previously the Chief Compliance Officer at EDX Markets. Link
The Block: Duke Kim joined The Block as Senior Vice President of Revenue. Duke was previously the Head of Institutional Solutions at Ledgible. Link
Uniswap: Medha Kothari joined Uniswap to lead product for all wallet-related things. Medha was previously an investor at Variant Fund. Link
Yuga Labs: Greg “Garga” Solano returned to Yuga Labs as CEO. Link
Intersection Growth Partners is the leading executive search firm in crypto and frontier fintech. We connect our clients with game-changing talent and invest our own capital for true alignment.
