Three former executives from Tinder, Stripe and Facebook have set up a fund to develop the crypto sector.
Chapter One, the investment fund for the crypto sector
The $50 million fund was put together by investment firm Chapter One, founded by former Tinder VP of Product Jeff Morris Jr.
Also part of the initiative are Jason Marder, former head of design at Stripe, Menelaos Mazarakis, who worked on Facebook’s crypto initiative (Novi) and product expertise at Instagram, and Doug Dyer, former investment manager for Texas Children’s Hospital.
The goal of the new fund is to help startups bridge the gap between the so-called Web2 and the emerging Web3, whose applications are often still difficult to use.
In particular, Web3 needs to make it easier to use mass-market tools such as wallets and exchanges, so much so that Morris says he considers MetaMask’s user experience, for example, to be “not ideal”.
He added that many things that worked in Web2 could be integrated into Web3 to improve the user experience.
Moreover, Chapter One has already had experience in the crypto world in the past, as it has invested in several startups that have evolved into major players in this sector, such as Compound, Dapper Labs or Lolli.
How the fund will be used
The new fund is backed by venture capital firms such as Sequoia and Lightspeed, and prominent crypto investors such as Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.
Of the 50 million in funding, a fifth will be dedicated to projects related to the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), partly because according to Morris, the next phase of crypto development will be user identity.
Other funds will go to projects working on gas reduction on Ethereum, such as those based on Solana’s blockchain. Chapter One, however, reveals that it is not tied to any particular blockchain.
In addition, the company plans to hire people who can spend time at startups supported by the fund to help them solve user experience and design issues.
The strategy is to focus on crypto companies specifically in their early stages, issuing relatively modest funding from $500,000 up to $2 million.
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