An ELI5 on #Bitcoin.

Think of Bitcoin as a startup founded in 2008, created by a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, initially bootstrapped with his personal capital. No VC funding; just electricity.

His product? An unobtainium.

1/7 🧵

1. Last week, @robbietilton sold this art piece for about 17305$ on @withFND.
I saw a lot of people asking questions on CryptoArt and NFTs (Non-fungible token) to understand how it works. I'll try to explain the basic concepts on this thread ↓

2. First, you don't directly buy the art piece, you buy a token. This token is what holds the asset that you're buying, it is a unique id that is used to represent what you bought. It can hold information like the name of the asset, an URL, a description, and so on.

3. On most marketplaces, you won't have a classic signup or login form when you'll want to create an NFT or buy one. Instead, it will be asked to connect your crypto wallet.

4. Now, why bother with a crypto wallet? Couldn't we just do an app that works with dollars? This is where things get interesting: when you buy an NFT, the data is not stored on the marketplace servers.

5. When you post a picture on Instagram, it is stored on their servers. If the app is shut down, your data might be deleted. But also, Instagram could delete your content if they want to, NFTs works differently.

1/ crypto VC is going through an explosive 🧨 phase

there are big funds (>$500M AUM), a lot of small funds (<$50M AUM), and *tons* of prop firms + angels

i’ve done 15 deals in the last 3 months as an angel + small fund @CoinSharesCo VC.

observations + implications... 👇🏾

2/ the big firms need to deploy in size - $5M checks and up

a $250M fund could do a $5-10M deal every month for two years and still be under-allocated

and there aren’t enough companies raising series B / C / D rounds!!!

every deal i’ve done lately is under $50M valuation

3/ so we see firms competing to take down entire rounds.

a recent series A financing had two firms competing to take down the ENTIRE ROUND, and it eventually got upsized, a LOT.

if a company is putting up user acquisition / growth and a revenue story, it’s highly competitive

4/ most projects and co’s don’t need money tho - why would a founder take 20-40% dilution when they’re banking cash and crypto? so they do 5-10%

so the valuations go up, but available allocations go down, resulting in an even bigger squeeze on allocators who *need* to deploy

5/ add in the onslaught of non-crypto M&A that’s coming, which is culling the herd of investable unicorns

add in the wave of SPACs and direct listings taking later stage opportunities out

there just aren’t enough places to put capital in size rn

what’s a fund to do?