Polychain Capital

Basics

• Launched in September, 2016 with $5 million from 30 investors.
• Crypto/blockchain hedge fund.
• From this interview (17-12-2018) with Set's Felix:

"I think another interesting thing is that in crypto, money has tended to flock to the highest quality projects, right. There are a certain number of projects that have stellar founders or groundbreaking protocols and everyone is interested in those particular projects. And usually there’s so much interest that they end up increasing the size of their round to accommodate everybody. So there, maybe even if an investor started as a lead, other funds end up coming in and creating this party round setup.

I think one exception to that is Polychain — they have the AUM to confidently lead rounds, especially on the equity side of things. And they’re also set up to do equity, so I’ve been hearing that they’ve actually been kind of monopolizing all of the good equity deals because they’ll take up a majority of a round.

RB: Yeah for sure — I mean you look at them leading a $60M round into Dfinity, there’s not many crypto funds that are set up to do that.

FF: Or let alone have the conviction to do that. I think many crypto funds are actually very risk averse. They rely on social proof in making investments versus digging deeply into the code and understanding whether a project will work or not because there’s only so many people who are capable of doing that technical analysis. Polychain has the capabilities — they hire really, really smart research analysts to perform this analysis. Whereas most crypto funds are maybe one or two people who have nontechnical backgrounds and aren’t able to dig as deeply."

Investments

• Sees Tezos as a hedge against BTC. Is interested in Cosmos and IPFS
• "Asset's under management by San Francisco's Polychain Capital sit at $591.5M, quite shy from the $1B valuation held at its peak; according to close sources, the fall in valuation is best attributed to a decline in holdings' values and not withdrawals of holdings; Polychain's 39% drop in valuation from April to December still beat the market's valuation drop sitting at some 70%"
• 0x. Was the fund that kickstarted real development for 0x through their first seed round.
• Acala's aUSD Ecosystem Fund; one of the founding funds to grow the Acala stablecoin (23-3-2022)
• Agoric. Has funded (21-2-2020) Agoric.
• Allora; mentioned as one of its backers (2-2-2024).
• AltLayer; private round (17-1-2024) plus the $14.4M round one month later as well (19-2-2024).
• Anchorage. Invested in Anchorage (again also has investment ties with Andreessen) and in Coda (as did Coinbase Ventures)
• Arbitrum; took part in the $120M raise (1-9-2021)
• AVA Labs. Participated (16-5-2019) in an undisclosed 6M$ funding round for AVA Labs. Polychain and Three Arrows lead $230m investment in Avalanche (17-9-2021).
• Axelar; was part of one of their 3 financing rounds (1-9-2022).
• Babylon; part of their $70M pre-launch round (30-5-2024).
• BadgerDAO; was one of four parties that took part in buying a total of $21M worth of assets from the treasury (8-3-2021).
• Berachain; part of the $42M raise (20-4-2023) and part of the Series B $100M (12-4-2024).
• Bitclout; it's founder has mentioned this fund as an investor (23-3-2021).
• Celestia; participated in their $55M raise (20-10-2022).
• Celo; according to Messari (24-6-2021).
• Clover Finance; was part of a $3M seed raise (19-2-2021).
• Connext; part of the $2.2 Million raise (23-3-2021).
• Compound. Was part of an $8.2M seed round for Compound in May of 2018. And again participated in a $25mil Series A for Compound in 11-2019. Polychain is the second largest COMP holder and has been a relatively active governance participant (voted on 13 proposals). (15-12-2020)
• DerivaDEX. Is one of the backers in a $2.7M raise for DerivaDEX (2-7-2020).
• Dfinity. Invested in Dfinity.
• Drift; participated in the Series A $25.5M (23-1-2024).
• dYdX raised $10M Series A led by a16z crypto (which is from Andreessen Horowitz) and Polychain Capital
• EigenLayer; participated in their Series A of $50M and in their seed raise of $14.5M (28-3-2023)
• Enso Finance; part of a $5M funding round (13-4-2021).
• Espresso Systems; is mentioned on their website as an investor, while the project has no tokens out yet (25-10-2022).
• Evmos; took part in their $27M token sale (2-11-2022)
• Findora; led a private round (12-2020).
• Gauntlet. Is an investor in Gauntlet, according to their website (19-10-2020).
• Handshake. One of the backers of a $10.2M token sale (7.5% of the supply) for Handshake (3-8-2020).
• Keep. Invested (2018) in Keep. Is mentioned as a staker on the network (12-11-2020).
• KeeperDAO. Led a "seven-figure" seed round for KeeperDAO (31-7-2020).
• Liquity. Lead investor in a $2.4M raise for Liquity (29-9-2020).
• MakerDAO. Backs and advises MakerDAO; "In December 2017, Maker sold $12 million MKR in a private round to a group of investors led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain capital."
• Maple Finance; participated in their second funding round of $1.4M (18-3-2021).
• Nervos; is one of its backers (8-12-2020).
• Nifty's; part of a pre-seed round (26-3-2021).
• Nomad; led their $22 million the seed round.
• Notional, participated in a $1.3 funding round (2-11-2020).
• NuCypher. Backer of NuCypher (11-4-2018).
• Nym; part of their $300M Privacy-Centric 'Innovation Fund'
• Oasis Network; investor (13-11-2020).
• Overlay; part of a $2.215M funding raising round (18-3-2021).
• Paradigm. Led a $1M seed round for Paradigm Labs in 2018, but as of 3-2020 Paradigm Labs has closed down.
• Polkadot. From Proof of Work #79 (19-11-2019):

"New Polkadot Ecosystem Fund launched by Web3 Foundation and Polychain Capital to support teams building Polkadot parachains."

• Polychain owns (27-2-2020) 10% of Polkadot's on-chain governance tokens. They also created (10-2019) a fund to further Polkadot development, together with W3F. 
• Polymarket. Participated in a $4M raise for Polymarket (19-10-2020).
• Prysm
• REN. Participated in the ICO of REN. Will be a greycore member for REN (13-9-2021).
• Saddle; was part of a $4.3 million seed raise (19-1-2021). And again led the round of $7.5M on 11-11-2021.
• Scroll; part of the $30m Series A round (21-4-2022).
• Solana; part of a $314M raise with a token sale (9-6-2021).
• StakerDAO. Invested in StakerDAO (31-10-2019)
• Squid Router; led their $4M raise (31-1-2024).
• Talus; part of the $3M round (26-2-2024).
• Terra. Is one of the backers (9-3-2020) of Terra.
• TokenTerminal; they mention this as one of their 'community members' (1-8-2022), however, due to the nature of the ones named, we can assume these are investors.
• Umee; is mentioned as a backer on the Umee website (14-11-2022).
• Uniswap Labs; participated in the $165M Series B, and mentioned as a 'longtime investor'.
• Yearn. Polychain Capital has purportedly acquired 329 YFI. From Decrypt (11-11-2020):

"Crypto fund Polychain Capital has picked up a further 141 YFI. The fund can now boast owning 1.6% of the entire supply, all purchased from the open market."

Team, Funding, Partners etc.

• Carlson-Wee, Olaf; founder, used to be the first employee at Coinbase
• Zurrer, Ryan; used to build renewable energy around the world and for the last couple of years is an angel investor in the crypto space.
• Jacob Phillips
• Niraj Pant

Funding

• Ben Perszyk, an investor. Is part of the guidance team at the bootcamp (21-4-2020) of Celo.
• Has garnered $10 million in investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

Partners

• Is part of (2-3-2020) the first members of the Ren Alliance, as a Security member running a Darknode.
• It's founder is part of HOLDpac's first donors (23-3-2020).
• Member of POSA (10-7-2020).
• Mentioned as a partner on the website of Acala (6-9-2020).
• Is part of the initial council of StakerDAO (6-2020).