Thiel’s Founders Fund Web3 Investments

SOL 5x Potential | $1.1B Bitcoin ETF Inflows

Marco Manoppo & Karon Pangestu
February 14, 2024

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Happy humpday 🐪,

The crypto markets breach $2T in market cap. $500M daily spot Bitcoin ETF inflows, the upcoming Bitcoin halving, the upcoming spot Ethereum ETF; all this not even considering high profile token launches like Startknet and zkSync. Are you still bearish???

Amira Valliani released web3acrossamerica.com, which maps web3 builders by Congressional district. It’s a pretty cool tool.

In Today's Email:

What Matters: Thiel’s $200M crypto investment 💰️
Case Study: SOL's 5x potential 📈
Governance & Features: Sei Arctic-1 v2

You read and share. We listen and improve. Send us feedback at marco@launchy.app.

Narratives: Max long, NFA

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WHAT MATTERS

Thiel Invested $200M in Crypto Before Bull Run

Peter Thiel - Tech in Asia

State of play: Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund invested $200M in bitcoin and ether ahead of the bull run, according to Reuters.

Founders Fund began buying bitcoin under $30,000 and later added more bitcoin and ether.
Founders Fund sold its crypto assets for $1.8B in March 2022, right before the onset of the crypto winter.
Founders Fund invested $15M to $20M in bitcoin during the 2017-2018 bull market.

Why it matters: Thiel is investing like the absolute veteran legend he is. Greedy when others are fearful. This move also signals that investors are starting to pile back into the crypto again after the 2022 crypto winter.

For builders and investors: Founders’ Fund crypto partners are Jennifer Campbell and Joey Krug.

Let’s also take a quick look at Founders’ Fund web3 investments in 2023:

Dynamic Labs, a multichain wallet-based authentication platform
Llama, an onchain governance and access control framework
Avantis, an oracle-based synthetic derivatives protocol
Layer N, a hyperperformat rollup L2 network
Ramp, a non-custodial full-stack payment infrastructure
The Animal Age, an animal-themed metaverse
Maverick Protocol, an AMM that maximizes capital efficiency

CASE STUDY

SOL's Potential 5x Growth

@0xjaypeg

Credit to 0xjaypeg for the original tweet.

State of play: @0xjaypeg is sharing his analysis and scenario for SOL price. He made a model based on specific market conditions over the next 18-24 months, here is the summary of his tweet:

The model starts with a hypothesis that the total cryptocurrency market capitalization will reach $10T within 18-24 months.
It's assumed SOL will maintain its current market dominance of 2.73%, translating to a future market capitalization of $273B for SOL.
With SOL's current market cap at $47B and a price of $108, accounting for a 5.5% annual inflation rate, the projected market cap in 18-24 months is approximately $52B.
If SOL's market cap reaches $273B, this would imply a price of approximately $550 per SOL, representing a more than 5x increase from its current price.
This scenario is part of a broader model that considers varying SOL market dominance (SOL.D) from 1.5% to 5% and total market capitalization ranging from $3T to $10T.

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INSIGHTS

$1.1B Crypto Flows This Week

CoinShares

Credit to James Butterfull and CoinShares for the original report.

Digital asset investment products experienced significant inflows of $1.1B, boosting year-to-date totals to $2.7B and raising AUM to a peak of $59B since early 2022.

The surge is primarily attributed to the US's new spot-based Bitcoin ETFs, which amassed $1.1B in the last week alone, totalling $2.8B in inflows since their inception on January 11th.

Despite a slowdown in outflows from established products, the potential sale of Genesis holdings worth $1.6B could lead to future withdrawals.
Meanwhile, regions like Canada and Germany saw minimal outflows, whereas Switzerland experienced $35 million in inflows.
Bitcoin dominated with nearly 98% of total inflows.

Blockchain equities generally saw a withdrawal of $67M from one issuer, other issuers collectively gained $19M in inflows, indicating sustained interest in digital asset investments across various regions and cryptocurrencies.

FEATURES & GOVERNANCE UPDATE

Sei Arctic-1 Devnet Upgraded to v2

Sei

The sei arctic-1 Devnet has been upgraded to "v2", now featuring a high-performance, parallelized Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

The Sei v2 proposal signifies a shift to a multi-threaded, efficient EVM blockchain, capable of thousands of transactions per second and finalizing in under 400ms.
This devnet release is a call to action for developers and innovators to begin to explore the capabilities of Sei.
Sei stated that users are free to join and contribute to this process, however they should be aware that it is not fully representative of the final Mainnet experience.

Why it matters: Parallelized EVM is a scaling thesis that recently gained popularity. Sei’s upgrade will further showcase how this thesis plays out in reality.

Other notable feature updates:

Dymension launches testnet.
Plum Network goes live on Arbitrum Orbit.
Frax Finance launches the Fraxtal testnet and mainnet.
Synonym Finance launches on mainnet with SYNO incentives live.
Restake Finance goes live on Eigenlayer with 3 days of boosted RSTK rewards.

QUICK BITES

PlayDapp loses $290M in two exploits.
Ripple to buy Standard Custody & Trust Co.
Franklin Templeton joins Ethereum ETF race.
South Korea crypto crime jumped by 49% in 2023.
CZ’s criminal sentencing is postponed to late April.
DCG’s Q4 revenue rose 59% as BTC prices increased.
Fear & Greed Index hits highest level since 2021 BTC high.
Starknet Foundation unveils STRK token distribution plan.
Aptos implements passkey authentication for transactions.
Crypto crime reports in South Korea jumped 49% in 2023.
Jito Foundation earmarks 12M tokens to governance delegates.

NOTEWORTHY READS & MEME

Our Network’s read on Cosmos.
Offchainlabs’ read on EIP-4844.
DeFi Ignas’ read on Ordinals & BTC DeFi.

— BoldLeonidas 🧙‍♂️ (@boldleonidas)
9:13 AM • Feb 14, 2024

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Disclaimer: All the information presented in this publication and its affiliates is strictly for educational purposes only. It should not be construed or taken as financial, legal, investment, or any other form of advice.