American venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners is planning for a new cryptocurrency investing project which will be led by one of its partner Aaron Batalion. The company said that the project will be a bigger fund to be spent solely on crypto investments in future.
Further, some sources say that Lightspeed will use some of its newly raised funds and cash for crypto deals preferably than creating an entirely separate fund.
Moreover, Lightspeed’s internal deliberations are one of the examples related to the struggle faced by venture capital firms. Approximately, every top-tier firm in Silicon Valley wants to set up in order to invest in crypto which is probably the next wave of innovation.
A spokesperson from Lightspeed stated as
reported by Recode "We’ve been making many investments in the fintech space over the past several years, including Affirm, Blockchain, Basis and more that are unannounced. Blockchain-based technologies are a huge area of interest for us and we have partners focused on this. In terms of a dedicated crypto fund, we have nothing to announce at this time."
There are three main options that are considered by Lightspeed:
A carve-out: In this option, the company plans to invest in blockchain-related startups under their new marketing strategy.
A new fund: The Company has started an entirely new and a separate fund that would focus particularly on crypto investments.
A spinout: The Company wants Batalion to work with the company with the existing funds in order to launch a crypto project of his own.
This is a great move by Venture Capitalists starting their own fund so that to have more control over the raised money.