/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>53980816
based and truthpilled.

The Company had private investors before they launched the ICO.

It was an open ICO, without any kind of OTC VC deal. It came out at the end of the ICO boom too, and at a period where crypto VCs were relatively small fishes compared to now. The few crypto VCs were instead backing complete dogshit that died in 2018.

Despite the immense backing of swift, WEF endorsement etc. the team was surprisingly lacking in public VC connections. The major part of the 2018 era biz enthusiasm was due to how surreal it all felt. If you did basic due diligence and put various pieces together, it was blatant how huge and legit critical it was, yet no one was talking about it outside of biz, and it lingered in the rank 150 for a couple of years.

The few VCs that were in the ICO exited very early. You have to remember what it was like between 2017 bull and 2018 bear. Blockchain had no utility, no applications yet. Just white papers.

The irony of course is that actual developments in the smart contracts space mostly occurred thanks to chainlink itself. But VCs then didn't see it or cared.

The only VC that bet big on it was Framework. A small new fund with no other connections, just a couple of rich dudes with FANG experience and daddy's money. They missed out on 2017 and the early ICOs but they saw it like biz saw it, and they went big on it, and the early projects that adopted it like synthetix.

That was the birth of defi. The first real utility in smart contracts, and how crypto recovered from bear to bull again, which allowed new L1s narratives, yield farms etc. There would have been no bnb or ftx success without defi.

Framework significantly derisked over the years but still remain close to those early defi players to some degree. They since tried flipping and betting on shit like NFT gaming garbage, probably losing already. They're just like the other VCs retards now, it's about connections instead of actual flair.

Other VCs don't want to touch link.

>>53028177