Union Square Ventures, a New York-based venture capital firm that oversees a billion dollars in capital, has revealed that it is investing in cryptocurrency and major digital assets like bitcoin as long-term investments.
Winning Blockchain Will be Worth Many TrillionsFounded and operated by Fred Wilson, a prominent venture capital investor known for his early investments in multi-billion dollar companies Twitter, Tumblr, Zynga, Etsy, and Coinbase, Union Square Ventures has quickly become a leading investment firm within the blockchain sector and technology industry within the past decade.
Within a decade, the company has built a valuable portfolio of startups valued at several billion dollars such as world’s largest online developer community Stackoverflow, Foursquare, audio sharing platform Soundcloud, the world’s biggest crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, and the global cryptocurrency market’s largest exchange and brokerage Coinbase.
This week, in an interview with CNBC, Albert Wegner, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, said that USV has allocated a significant portion of its capital into the cryptocurrency market as a long-term investment and it intends to continue investing in both emerging cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.
But, Wenger said that the venture capital firm is not ready to create a major fund dedicated to the cryptocurrency market unlike Andreessen Horowitz, another leading VC firm that created a $300 million fund committed to the cryptocurrency sector.
“We’re not planning to do it,” said Wenger, referring to the creation of a separate and independent fund for the cryptocurrency sector. “We see a lot of upside to keeping it under the same roof.”
Wenger added that whichever cryptocurrency that survives and weathers large bubbles that will emerge in the future will be worth several trillions of dollars.
“Investors are rationally pouring a lot of money into this sector, because I think people are seeing the winning blockchain here might be worth a trillion, or a couple of trillion dollars. It’s not at all crazy to think that. Certainly, for any one particular project there’s an extremely high chance it won’t work. As a result, if it works, the rewards will be very high.”
Wenger is a Bitcoin Holder But Says Holding Only Bitcoin Isn’t RecommendedWenger has been an early investor in bitcoin for several years and has extensively observed the cryptocurrency market over the past few years. He emphasized that investors should not only hold bitcoin and hope it to remain dominant, especially of investors have a significant share of their life savings in bitcoin.
“I don’t think you should be in the space and say ‘I’m going to only hold bitcoin. At the moment, this whole space is a high risk space and I don’t think anybody should be investing all of their life savings.”
The best investment strategy to utilize in a high volatile market that is still at its infancy is to diversify investments in various cryptocurrencies that have active developer communities and user activity, rather than allocating all of the life savings into a single digital asset.
