Wyre Capital

Walden Bridge Capital

IOSG Ventures

QUESCHAIN

1confirmation

FBG Capital

Polychain Capital

Maker

a16z crypto

The global economy exists as a web of relationships between individuals and firms. These relationships take the form of contracts defining the creation and utilization of money, real and intangible assets, equity, debt and other instruments. Within the legacy financial system, intermediaries have established control over the lifecycle of these economic primitives, administering them within siloed systems which require placing trust in a centralized third party.

This legacy architecture has fundamentally failed to take advantage of the internet, a global, standardized and open communications network available to almost everyone on earth. The current financial system is plagued with administrative, compliance and transaction costs, geographic isolation, counterparty risk, downtime, invasions of privacy, restrictions on economic freedom and the perpetual risk of currency inflation. The current system also fundamentally limits the scope and nature of economic interactions between people, firms, software and machines.

A competing financial system has emerged in the form of internet-native, distributed software systems founded on cryptography. These systems present a fundamentally differentiated architecture that offers a universal standard for money, assets and debt, while introducing a novel asset class that is enabled by the distributed trust inherent in these cryptographic protocols. Bitcoin established the concept of digital scarcity, where an internet-native good or asset cannot be replicated. Bitcoin and other crypto-assets are bearer instruments that can be transmitted peer-to-peer over a network that is not controlled by a centralized party. This allows bitcoin to operate as a reserve asset resistant to seizure and transaction censorship.

The concept of digital scarcity is now being implemented in a broad range of crypto-assets, with differing structures to suit a range of applications being deployed. The unification of a global asset register, digital money and arbitrary programmability enables limitless innovation, bringing applications that facilitate asset exchange, debt issuance, derivative trading, identity management, data storage and computing markets, prediction markets, insurance, machine to machine payments, asset securitization and unitization to this parallel financial system. We expect that, in time, the financial services offered by legacy intermediaries will be replicated in code and executed within this distributed economy, enabling the market to source these services freely, while retaining control of their assets and personal data.

The maturation of these distributed systems will catalyze a paradigm shift away from the traditional means of developing, distributing and monetizing software. The advent of crypto-assets and crypto-economic incentives enables a distributed group of network participants to deliver software in a market subject to perfect competition. The combination of open source software and commoditized service delivery has the potential to reshape the economic model of the software industry in a manner not seen since the SaaS revolution.

Wyre Capital seeks to invest in the infrastructure and applications that will form the foundation of this decentralized financial system and distributed economy.

Portfolio

CypherHunter Plus

Wyre Capital

Funding Rounds

Co-Investors