Top Five Companies In Crypto Tech

As more businesses hop onto the crypto bandwagon, it’s a good time to take a closer look at just who exactly is making the biggest investments into well known blockchains. In our Post-Covid world, remote work and digital products are creating profitable opportunities that corporations have already taken notice of. Here’s a look at some of the biggest names behind the most notable crypto-tech as of March 2022:

Andreessen Horowitz

A16Z has been well aware of the potential in blockchain technology for years now. As one of the predominant venture capital firms in the Silicon Valley, Marc Andreessen is closely involved with OpenSea and Coinbase. He currently sits on the Board of Directors at Meta Platforms as well, taking a front row look at everything in the tech world. 

Just recently, the firm invested in Yuga Labs, the company responsible for popular NFTs such as Bored Ape Yacht Club with “a $450 million funding round led by a16z crypto.” While public reaction to the BAYC has been anywhere from lukewarm to outright anger, what drives the investment decisions at a16z is the technology behind the business and whether or not it is capable of providing a product. 

In an interview with Bloomberg Wealth, Andreessen was asked about the technology of bitcoin and his response was “money is one application of being able to have distributive consensus, but it’s only one of those applications. There are many other applications, many other things that people are going to be able to do with this technology. And many of the smartest people in computer science are going into this field.” As a pioneer of Web1 and with billions of dollars in assets, Andreessen’s experience growing tech companies is monumental for Web3. 

Bridgewater Associates

With $223 billion of assets under management, Bridgewater Associates is the premiere hedge fund around the world. After years of studying the concepts of alternative moneys, the firm’s founder Ray Dalio has made the decision to begin investing into crypto funds.

With plans to begin investments at a “miniscule” amount, Dalio expects to see different use cases for Altcoins to ramp up. While claiming bitcoin to be “a hell of an invention,” his preference for other tokens which are run by entities that have the ability to evolve and modify their blockchains such as Ethereum and Tezos is evident in an interview he has with David Rubenstein. He tells Rubenstein “We’re now in an era where we’re going to have different types of money. Where going to question money as a medium of exchange, but it’s also a store hold of wealth.” 

For Dalio and the team behind him at Bridgewater Associates, cryptocurrencies represent the privatization of money and a new medium for capitalism. By utilizing more than just bitcoin with investments into crypto funds, which diversifies assets across a broad range of altcoins, Dalio predicts blockchain technologies will bring “other forms of that competition.”

JP Morgan Chase

MetaMask is a familiar name to anyone involved with cryptocurrencies. It is one of the most popular wallets available with its ability to access various blockchains by inputting an RPC URL and Chain ID among other pieces of information which gives users the ability to switch across networks within seconds. The application is quick, effective, and runs as a Google Chrome browser extension making it easier for new users to join.

In a recent lawsuit, it was discovered that ConsenSys, the developers behind Metamask, exchanged a 10% stake of their company for an offset of a $39 Million dollar loan which resulted in “JP Morgan Chase acquiring an influential stake in MetaMask and Infura, two of the most widely used infrastructure tools in Ethereum.”

While skeptical about bitcoin, Chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon is a big proponent of blockchain technology and believes that the ability to exchange money transparently and at a quick pace is fundamental to the future of fintech companies. In a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, Dimon said “the payment systems today, they do work very cheap, but the fact is [blockchain] might be a faster way - faster, it comes with data, and everyone will have the same data at the same time. So, instead of us having to call each other’s banks up saying ‘what happened to that shipment from Singapore?’ we just go to the same screen and see it right away.”   

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has made his thoughts on crypto for a long time now. He is a public figure known to buy and sell companies which have generated him billions of dollars. For the past couple of years, Cuban has become well aware of cryptocurrencies and is one of the leading investors in the industry telling Jon Stewart in a podcast “80% of the investments that I make that are not on ‘Shark Tank’ are in or around cryptocurrencies.”

Cuban has found NFTs to be such a dynamic new technology that he, along with a16z, decided to invest in OpenSea knowing that NFTs offer a new form of business for people to create. While Cuban has a significant collection of NFTs, he doesn’t fully believe that the current lineup of NFTs fully capture the value of NFTs. In an interview at the Bitcoin Conference Cuban said “NFTs have been great and there will be more and more applications for them, but again to me they’re just a proof of concept for smart contracts.” What Cuban really sees with NFTs, and a big reason for his investment in OpenSea, is their ability to exchange value through smart contracts saying “The royalties add a big feature. That is why artists are transitioning to this because you can get paid more than once.”

As a businessman, Cuban also sees the value that blockchains can bring to businesses, but he isn’t convinced that just by incorporating NFTs and tokens into a company they will generate revenue. To him, blockchain technology is much more than the get-rich-quick-scheme that so many seem to think it is. He says quite critically in the interview “One thing that’s being under-considered is the amount of revenue any given blockchain generates because they’re still a business. It doesn’t matter if it’s a DAO or standard centralized business you still got to pay the bills and if they’re not generating revenue and the only source of revenue is token sales - that runs out.”

Goldman Sachs

One of the oldest investment banks in America worth over $100 billion dollars just redesigned the homepage of their website to clearly say that they are all in with crypto. Looking further, the company offers a plethora of posts explaining the different applications that are possible with cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and the Metaverse. 

While former CEO Lloyd Blankfein was hesitant about bitcoin during his time at the investment bank saying “it’s not for me, I don’t do it, I own no bitcoin. Goldman Sachs as far as I know... has no bitcoin” the investment bank was one of the most active with its investments in blockchain companies and that trend has not gone away for them. 

The bank has already begun making trades using bitcoin through their digital holding company Galaxy, marking them as the first major U.S. bank to do so. By leading the trend of using bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, Goldman Sachs is telling the American economy that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. As an investment bank which manages over $2 trillion dollars in assets, their understanding of digital financing is going to create long-lasting effects for average citizens in the United States and around the world. 

What began as a niche curiosity has grown into something that is impossible to ignore. Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi, and all other examples of blockchain technology have all caught the attention of America’s most important people. These investments are diversified as well. We see Ray Dalio taking up Altcoins. Mark Cuban looking into NFTs. Goldman Sachs is making trades with bitcoin. Marc Andreessen is investing in CeFi and DeFi exchanges. Jamie Dimon is investing in wallet technology. All of these actions prove that blockchains are no longer the fringe technology that they started as. People are taking notice and if these guys are getting into crypto you should be too.