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Crypto investment fund Chapter One has recently announced a $50 million crypto fund that aims to be a new type of VC fund that focuses on making crypto accessible.
The Chapter One team is led by founder and former VP of product at Tinder, Jeff Morris Jr., who spoke in an interview with Decrypt about how Chapter One is aiming to address a number of issues currently facing companies trying to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3.
Alongside founder Morris, the fund is led by former executives of Tinder, Stripe, and Instagram,
Chapter One’s recent $50 million fund raise reflects the company’s mission to make crypto accessible, and is is backed by VCs Sequoia and Lightspeed,as well as key figures in the crypto world including Chris Dixon, Marc Andreessen, and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.
One of the issues that founder Jeff Morris brought up is the issue of high gas fees, which plague users of the Ethereum network, stating:
"The average fee is $40. If you’re building any social or gaming applications, it's not reasonable to ask users to pay those gas fees, especially non-crypto users. We’ve become numb as we mindlessly accept these fees,"
As part of their $50 million fund raise, $10 million will be allocated to supporting projects related to the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain that maps human-readable names to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses. Chapter One sees this is a step to “humanizing” cryptocurrency, and making it more accessible for the masses.
Chapter One will also be supporting projects that run on the Solana blockchain, which has much cheaper transaction fees, with Morris noting:
"Solana has a really interesting opportunity right now,"
Morris also revealed ChapterOne’s intention to focus on supporting early-stage crypto firms, to help founders grow from seed, but also to support the message of true decentralization that underlies crypto:
"We're starting from first principles for what would a VC fund look like if you were building for Web 3,"
