Under new partner and ConsenSys alum Thomas Klocanas, the hedge fund’s venture arm is looking to bring financial chops—and liquidity—to early-stage crypto projects.
BlockTower Capital founders Matthew Goetz and Ari Paul tapped Thomas Klocanas to lead their firm’s first venture fund.In the noisy venture capital landscape, crypto investors have emerged as some of the most aggressive to make their business into a brand. They’ve written white papers and launched podcasts; on social media, partners at multi-billion-dollar firms have become minor celebrities themselves within the crypto bubble, sharing predictions and memes for their legions of followers.
“We’re living and breathing the stuff we’re investing in because otherwise, who are we to give them advice?” Klocanas says. “We want to lead by actions and hope our actions speak for themselves.” By teaming up with Klocanas, Goetz and Paul saw an opportunity to dive deeper into the private, startup-side of investing, where the firm had already made more than 40 investments on its own. The pitch: BlockTower could combine the expertise and financial clout of its traders with the deep domain expertise of Klocanas on the startup side. “You can’t fake being a crypto native,” Goetz toldin July.
Investments include Lighthouse, a would-be search engine for the metaverse in which the firm co-led a $7 million funding round with Accel in May, and Aptos, a startup founded by ex-Meta employees attempting to carry the torch from the Facebook parent company’s abandoned blockchain project. BlockTower’s ability to bring resources to such projects as not just an equity investor, but an early institutional user, can play a valuable role in the ecosystem, several peers in venture capital told. “Many other funds are not set up to support this, so I can see it being a valuable addition to the ecosystem,” said one prominent crypto-focused investor who asked not to be named as they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.
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