The Venture Codex

Led · Series A · Aug 2022

NFT Genius builds experiences and marketplace technology for NFTs, including Gaia, a secondary market for sports, entertainment, art, and culturally relevant digital collectibles. The company has created global NFT collections such as Ballerz and partnered with athletes and artists including Shareef and Shaquille O’Neal, golfer Bryson DeChambeau, WNBA’s Kelsey Plum, and Duncan Robinson. Founded by Jeremy Born, Kurt Braget, and Karl Meier, the company is based in Los Angeles, CA. NFT Genius closed a $10.5M Series A at a $150M valuation. The company intends to use the funds to expand beyond sports into broader entertainment and culture deals and to scale the Gaia marketplace to support thousands of companies and brands reaching mainstream consumers. Anuke Ganegoda of Dapper Labs will join as a board observer, and past seed investors include Mark Cuban, Anthony Pompliano, Sound Ventures, and HOF Capital. NFT Genius is developing a music-focused NFT marketplace and immersive-experience platform built on Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain. The marketplace is still under production; the company says it will create a verticalized destination for interactive fan experiences and meaningful virtual connections. While primarily focused on music, NFT Genius expects to expand NFTs into sports, gaming and comedy. The company released a Bitcoin-themed NFT collection in fall 2020 that included a cross-platform treasure hunt for a 1 BTC prize. NFT Genius raised $4 million in a seed round and is betting on immersive, collectible NFT experiences despite a recent market cooldown. The team positions NFTs as a way to restore collectibility and deepen artist-fan storytelling.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2022

The Incentive Ecosystem Foundation is a community-led foundation that supports development on the Serum network, a decentralized exchange and liquidity infrastructure built on Solana. Serum provides an on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) that gives developers access to matching services and shared liquidity across protocols. The IEF manages a Serum ecosystem fund and will allocate a portion of newly raised capital to support projects leveraging Serum's liquidity infrastructure. Planned support focuses on DeFi, NFTs, gaming, the metaverse and DAO tooling, alongside business development, marketing and ecosystem integration services. According to Serum Analytics, over 70 projects are built on Serum and applications on Serum account for upwards of $2bn total value locked; on December 4, 2021 daily trading volume hit an all-time high of $350mm. The foundation says the added funds will promote innovation, development, and growth of protocols built on Solana that utilize Serum's DEX and liquidity infrastructure.

Participated · Equity · Dec 2021

Hxro Network is a liquidity, risk, and margin primitive for risk-based applications built on the Solana blockchain. It provides support for a full suite of on-chain derivative markets and offers protocols that enable market makers, traders, operators, and other participants to create and connect to globally aggregated liquidity. The protocols combine the risk, margining, clearing, and capital efficiencies of centralized derivatives with the open, trustless, and censorship-resistant elements of DeFi. Solana is described as a key component, supplying the censorship-resistant infrastructure, speed, and low marginal transaction costs needed to facilitate derivatives markets at scale. The Network plans to initially support markets for crypto-assets and later extend to markets for any high-fidelity data supplied by network-approved oracles, with v1 network components scheduled to launch to Solana mainnet next month and into Q1 next year. Hxro Network closed a $34M strategic funding round to fund the network treasury, bootstrap early protocol liquidity, and finance network rewards. Hxro is a crypto derivatives firm that built the Hxro Network, a decentralized protocol on Solana offering permissionless access to liquidity in options markets. The network aims to increase liquidity by combining an automated market maker with access for traditional options market makers. Hxro began with a gamified binary futures product called MoonRekt. Founders Dan Gunsberg and Rob Levy drew on prior careers as traders to design products for crypto traders. Company leadership highlights the need to enable hedging and position-taking for larger funds during periods of expanded volatility. The firm recently completed its largest single-investor fundraising to date.