Hey, folks, I have Juli Tajwani, who's the head of Coinbase Ventures joining me.
Hooley, great to have you. Thanks for having me.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at Coinbase.
Sure, So, I've been at Coinbase coming up on seven years, and I look after Coinbase Ventures, which is our early stage and strategic investing arm. We have now become one of the most active investors in the crypto space. We've made over five hundred investments across the world, continue to actively invested in crypto based startups.
That's a lot of investments. Tell us about the difference between the ventures and M and A, because there's obviously been acquisitions that coinbase has made, but the ventures may be a bit different, right.
Sure yeah. Separate, separate team, separate focused, separate mandates. So when we started Coinbase Ventures, the philosophy the mandate was broadly, we want to seed this ecosystem and help back accept optional founders who are pushing the space forward. So we invest very broadly. We'll invest in things that could be considered competitive a coinbased from percerin perspective, things that are
tangential could be completely orthogonal. Some of our investments in the portfolio naturally organically turn it to em andate conversations, but it's not our primary focus when we're making the investment.
Got it.
So it could be token projects, it could be infrastructure companies, and potentially they could be put into the coinbase ecosystem as part of the business.
Yeah, definitely, it could be all types of all the above, and sometimes there are like commercial relationships or business development partnerships that we do, but we also invest in a bunch of stuff that's outside of that platform.
Can you tell us about some of the most recent investments you've made.
Yeah, we were very active.
Like I said, We've made over five hundred investments and continue to deploy. Some recent ones that are notable of mind. We were investors in Privy, which was acquired by Announced It has been acquired by Stripe yesterday. We're large investors in BBNK, which is another stable coin provider. We have a bunch of founders for here today at State of Crypto, Shane from Polymarket, U T y T y b uh, and a whole bunch more Morpho. We could list a model mon Our website's a great place to them.
See like the business side of me would say coinbase should integrate poly market, like that'll be a natural segue, so to speak, as part of the platform. Let me go take some bets and things like that.
Yeah, we're definitely excited about prediction markets. There's uh, I think it's it's still early on kind of the final form factor, but a lot of credit to Shane and the team there for putting putting it on the map.
Sure, are there any AI agent slash AI blockchain technology companies that you're invested in.
Yeah, that's a big focus for us right now, the intersection of crypto and AI. We're candidly not as excited about some of the kind of like decentralized GPU type compute models. We just don't know that technically things have been figured out yet. But we're very excited about this idea of we're moving to agent based commerce system and that crypto and non chain rails should should play a
big part in how that new economy works. So a bunch of investments we've made there that we can't disclose yet, but it's we try to follow where like the best and brightest hackers are spending their nights and weekends, and that intersection points definitely where a lot of a lot of that activity is happening right now.
So are there any specific sectors that you focus on or you pretty much open so whether it be stable coins, AI, r W, a tokenization, DeFi or you know, you guys looking at all those sectors.
Yeah, so our mandate is very broad.
If there's some component of blockchain technology, it will cons will evaluate it. The space moves really fast, so the specific themes that we're focused on every any given time kind of refreshes every every couple quarters, every every six months.
Right now, there is where we're spending a lot of time. Are stable coins.
Stable coin related infrastructure, DeFi, all types of defied protocols, on chain consumer applications, So i'd put like prediction markets and poly market in that category, and the intersection of crypto AI. Those are kind of like the four areas we're spending a lot of time right now. But we have the humility to know, like we're not the smartest people in the room, and where where the builders are going is where we're going to spend time.
That absolutely makes sense. Yeah, it's and there's so many sectors that are coming up in this industry, Like one I'm really fastened by, fascinated by is deep In and you know, maybe over the next four years debt sectors are some mature even more so it's just exciting to see all the building that's happening.
Totally. Yeah, we're we're also excited about deep In.
I was my helium when you know, when that first came out, and that's that that's definitely an exciting category. We've we've made a bunch of investments there as well.
As far as you know from a venture standpoint, do you I don't know if you can share this information, do you have like a number you your team works on as far as investing capital that you can put towards.
These Yeah, we're we're investing off the coinbase balance sheet.
We do set we do set a kind of a guardrail for capital capital deployment, and so we manage it similar to how you know a series seed or Series A centric fund would manage it. And so yeah, but we're also adaptive with the market and we kind of let the opportunities drive us. So there's no like fixed number of dollars that have to go out the door every year. There's also like there's just flexibility on it.
So what's on your road map? I know you touched a bit on some things that you're looking at, but what can you share with us on your roadmap?
On the roadmap, so we've got it. We have like a core kind of early stage venture investing activity, which is kind of our our bread and butter wheelhouse. We're excited about. We recently stood up like a base Ecosystem group on Echo, which is a crowdfunding complying crowndfunding platform.
So we're excited about finding ways that we can fulfill Coinbas's broader mission around economic freedom, where we can expand access to folks in the market who want to invest behind the companies that we're investing in, and also bring that capital availability to founders and startups.
So that's like.
One initiative and we're kind of thinking through working through other other examples like that where we can basically match great founders and sources of capital where their inefficiencies.
Final the question herefore, I let you go, what are you most excited about for the crypto market this year?
And yeah, you know, like zooming out, it's it's it is kind of just been a wild wild ride over the past like years of ups and downs. I think if I was just talking a few folks that it feels really weird to kind of be in the mainstream right now, like the crypto people were kind of the edgy off to the side, like not the favored, favored
group of founders. I think what I'm scited about it is how just how much the conviction around crypto is going to eat the traditional financial system is proving out like you see it with stable coins right now. You see if you look at the numbers, payment volumes, and like penetration stable coins are happening. Bitcoin has crossed this chasm where it's we now have black rock here, you know,
with a Bitcoin ETF. So it's it's kind of cool to be here in New York and Wall Street and see how this, you know, this edgy cipherpunk thing has now really kind of integrated itself into the financial system
and is going to continue to penetrate. And also excited about the tone of where things are progressing from a regulatory front in the United States, So hopeful and optimistic that during this administration we get some clear rules of the road for founders and builders, and that's only just going to keep compounding the innovation of the space.
Yeah, it's exciting and boy, you know I heard well this was reported this morning that black Rock said they want to be the leader in the digital asset space, you know, by twenty thirty and holding the most assets. So it's kind of surreal. You kind of have to pinch yourself, like how did this happen? But it's exciting. This this technology is going to power the economy, the markets, and much more.
Yeah, and increase economic freedom in the world, which is our mission.
Absolutely, holy great stuff for joining me.
Thank you,