Polychain hedge fund embraces Tezos
We are proud to announce that Polychain Capital has added Tezos to its hedge fund by preordering Tezos tokens. We are among the first blockchain platforms to be backed by the fund.
Polychain was started by Olaf Carlson-Wee, formerly the first employee of the popular bitcoin startup Coinbase. The fund is designed to invest directly in the blockchain market through the purchase of tokens on different platforms. Polychain recently closed a $10M round of funding led by venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and others.
Cryptocurrencies comprise a $17B market. Bitcoin commands most of that market cap. But as new blockchain technologies emerge, many feel that the overall value of the market will grow astronomically. In fact, as Carlson-Wee said in an interview with Forbes, it could one day be “in the trillions of dollars.” Since the field is still in its infancy, new advances are happening every day, and many are happening outside of the Bitcoin blockchain.
“We are excited to watch Polychain’s vision take shape around Tezos and other promising blockchain startups,” adds Joel Monegro, Analyst, Union Square Ventures. “2017 will prove to be an important year for blockchain networks. We believe Tezos, which pushes our thinking on decentralized governance, is particularly important and has the potential to become key piece of infrastructure for decentralized services, and we’re excited to see Polychain participate in its creation.”
“Tezos is an attempt to solve the blockchain governance problem in a principled way,” said Zooko Wilcox, CEO of Zcash and an advisor to Tezos(*). “The company is led by a strong team, and I’m delighted that they have gotten funding to pursue their vision.”
Tezos is building a smart contract platform that will be more resilient and future-proof than others, thanks to our unique governance system, which provides a decentralized, transparent, and accountable way for the stakeholders of the Tezos system to reach consensus on upgrades to the protocol.
Why is governance important? For a blockchain platform to stay current, it needs to incorporate ongoing changes and upgrades. Often, however, different groups of users may disagree about which path to take. Tezos provides a built-in mechanism for stakeholders to make distributed, collective decisions about which upgrades to pursue — and even allows them to implement changes within the protocol itself.
Over the last year, we’ve witnessed firsthand why governance is so crucial to blockchains. Ethereum’s post-DAO hardfork literally split the network into two parallel blockchains, and Bitcoin’s progress to increase its transaction speed — so it can compete with payment systems like PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard — has been held back by the seemingly endless debate over block size.
When a distributed platform fails to reach agreement on what path to follow, growth stalls and the community (core developers, investors, and stakeholders in the system) becomes divided. Tezos is designed from the ground up to avoid that fate.
Tezos is also unique in that it offers a smart contract language that permits code to be formally verified, so you can feel confident that your smart contract performs as intended, before you upload it to the blockchain.
Learn more about Tezos by reading our position paper, looking at our FAQ, or by joining our Slack channel.
Our system is in active development. We plan to launch the test network in the next few weeks, and begin a pre-sale of Tezos tokens during Q1 2017. Stay tuned!
(*) Note: Wilcox holds a minor financial interest in Tezos as an advisor.
