Blockchains & Crypto Archives | Page 2 of 2 | Union Square Ventures

Content on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

Dec 16, 2020

The Bitcoin whitepaper is now over a decade old and Bitcoin as a system has been up and running continuously since January 3, 2009. Much has happened in the crypto world since then, including of course the launch of Ethereum [...] Read more

Jul 8, 2019

I’ve shared my views on this before here at AVC. I believe business model innovation is more disruptive than technical innovation. A good example of this was moving from web apps to mobile apps, which was largely a technical innovation. [...] Read more

Mar 5, 2019

Earlier today, the Arweave team announced that they’ve raised additional capital in order to fund developers who want to build on Arweave through two new programs - Arweave Grants and Arweave Boost. People are already building lots of amazing things [...] Read more

Oct 1, 2018

We are not in an infrastructure phase, but rather in another turn of the apps-infrastructure cycle. First, apps inspire infrastructure. Then that infrastructure enables new apps. Platforms evolve from an iterative cycle of apps=>infrastructure=>apps=>infrastructure and are rarely built in an outside vacuum. Read more

Jul 30, 2018

One of my favorite things about the cryptocurrency / blockchain space is that our conception of “what it all means” is still very much in flux. Nic Carter just published a nice analysis of how the functional narrative around bitcoin [...] Read more

Aug 8, 2016

Note: see the 2020 follow-up post here: Thin Applications. Here's one way to think about the differences between the Internet and the Blockchain. The previous generation of shared protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.) produced immeasurable amounts of value, but most [...] Read more

Oct 31, 2013

We owe many of the innovations that we use every day -- from our favorite longstanding websites to the latest mobile applications -- to the existence of underlying highly technical protocols. End users don't need to understand these any more than [...] Read more