- Viktor Fischer is a managing accomplice at Europe’s largest blockchain and DeFi fund, Rockaway blockchain fund.
- He breaks down how the investing staff function as engineers however do not essentially backstop tasks.
- He shares 2 work-to-earn tokens to observe as momentum builds round move-to-earn venture STEPN.
“Blockchain for me represents freedom,” mentioned Viktor Fischer, managing accomplice of the Rockaway blockchain fund.
Fischer grew up in Czechoslovakia, which he describes as a communist nation that supplied little freedom till its dissolution in 1989.
“We couldn’t journey overseas,” mentioned Fischer at an interview during Crypto Bahamas. “We couldn’t even get one other foreign money.”
This upbringing knowledgeable Fischer’s curiosity in blockchain expertise.
“It actually permits everybody to entry the identical monetary companies,” Fischer mentioned. “Because of this I acquired obsessed with it.”
Now he runs Europe’s largest blockchain and decentralized finance fund, the Rockaway blockchain fund, which has $120 million assets under management, in accordance with its web site.
The fund provides publicity to leading crypto investments firms from Multicoin Capital to Framework Ventures in addition to direct exposure to projects like solana, cosmos, uniswap and vega.
Conventional enterprise capital fundraising has started to slow amid a more challenging macro environment, however crypto fundraising stays on a tear.
JPMorgan
Rockaway’s edge for moving into these offers is by getting in early and serving to founders construct, whether or not that is operating validators, offering yield, constructing good contracts and even organizing hacker homes.
“We’re mainly engineers,” Fischer mentioned. “We run the staking operation. We even have a yield fund, we offer
liquidity
into protocols, and it helps them to bootstrap, as a result of then the TVL grows earlier after which they will use the cash we lend them to mainly bootstrap the operations.”
One instance of Rockaway’s assist is within the administration of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).
“DAOs do not essentially work, they’re undoubtedly not autonomous … So there needs to be somebody who places within the calendar common calls, mainly tells the blokes that there must be an replace of a brand new model and when you find yourself early, somebody has to do it. And sometimes, it is not the founders as a result of they produce other priorities, like growing, like coding.”
Regardless of having an engineering strategy to investing, Fischer would not need to need to step in if one of many tasks he invests in fails. A current instance of that is when Leap Crypto stepped in to backstop Wormhole, a cross-chain bridge, after it was hacked and lost $320 million.
Fischer explains that Leap Crypto’s assist of wormhole made sense as a result of it’s a venture inside their very own ecosystem, nevertheless it’s totally different for enterprise capital corporations.
“We do not need to bail out tasks as a result of I feel it additionally units a precedent,” Fischer mentioned. “The founders should be accountable and the VCs as properly to be sure that there aren’t any points by hackers.”
“When you bail them out, then what’s their pores and skin within the recreation?” he added.
Regardless of the safety points dealing with cross chain bridges, this can be a key focus space of funding for Fischer alongside oracles.
“We predict that proper now, mainly it [is] the period of cross chain bridges,” mentioned Fischer, who just lately invested in cross chain bridge Axelar.
The work-to-earn development
He is additionally intently watching the move-to-earn and work-to-earn development as STEPN (GMT) takes off.
STEPN is a Net 3.0 recreation the place gamers earn crypto by strolling, operating or jogging. For the reason that token’s launch in March, it is surged 900% from $0.15 on March 9 to $1.44 on Monday, according to CoinMarketCap. However Fischer is not but satisfied on the enterprise mannequin.
“I spoke to somebody who was utilizing STEPN, they usually advised me for them to stroll one mile was $500,” Fischer mentioned. “However STEPN is a unique enterprise mannequin, it is mainly simply if you’re doing one thing, you get tokens, however there isn’t any profit on the opposite aspect that you’re doing this work.”
Fischer as a substitute seems to be to different gamers out there like Helium, a decentralized wireless internet network, the place people do work however this output is then of worth to another person. He highlights two firms doing this:
1) Hivemapper
Hivemapper pays people to gather map information utilizing a dashcam and in return receives HONEY tokens. The corporate goals to create a neighborhood owned map community the place people will purchase map credit utilizing HONEY to then entry the dataset.
2) RealityMaps
RealityMaps is a 360-degree imagery dataset platform on the solana community.
People submit prime quality pictures of city areas and in return obtain RealityCoin for his or her work as soon as verified by the community.
Enterprise firms then use RealityCoin to entry and pay for RealityMap information.
