The world of NFTs is never boring – as long as the money never stops. As investors continue to pour billions into the sector, albeit at a slower pace, more and more crypto buyers are sponsoring funds to support NFT platforms, projects, and the non-fungible tokens themselves.
While dedicated funds dedicated solely to NFTs as an asset class are beginning to emerge, this is still a risky space for the larger institutional firms. However, that doesn’t stop these investors from becoming LPs in the NFT funds themselves. A number of prominent Silicon Valley crypto VCs have backed a new nascent NFT fund led by Andrew Jiang and Todd Goldberg.
Chris Dixon is a general partner and has been at Andreessen Horowitz since 2012. He founded and leads a16z Crypto, which invests in web3 technologies through three dedicated funds with more than $3 billion under management.
Previously, Chris was the cofounder and CEO of two startups, SiteAdvisor and Hunch. SiteAdvisor was an internet security company that warned web users of security threats. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. Hunch was a recommendation technology company that was acquired by eBay in 2011.
Chris has been a prolific seed investor, cofounding Founder Collective, a seed venture fund, and making a number of personal angel investments in various technology companies.
Chris started programming as a kid, and was a professional programmer after college at the high-speed options trading firm, Arbitrade. He has a BA and MA in Philosoî7phy from Columbia and an MBA from Harvard. He has written about his theories and experiences as an entrepreneur and investor on Medium, and before that at cdixon.; his a16z Podcast appearances can be found here.
The $30 million fund called Curated is devoted to buying and holding NFT artwork. The fund is backed by a who’s who of crypto investors, with LPs including a sizable chunk of a16z’s investing team (Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Andrew Chen, Arianna Simpson and Jon Lai are all backers), as well as Alexis Ohanian, Justin Kan, Electric Capital’s Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer and a host of other investors and founders in the space.
The fund plans to invest about half of the fund in so-called “blue-chip NFTs,” including popular projects like CryptoPunks, Art Blocks and Bored Apes, as well as works from popular artists selling singular NFT works. The other half of the fund is going into what Jiang and Goldberg deem as “high potential collections” from artists with smaller existing markets.
