A first-check crypto fund investing in the

We believe next-generation networks will grow bigger, faster because they are owned and operated by users.  

Variant partners with founders at the earliest possible stages.

/writing/the-ownership-economy-crypto-and-consumer-software

Variant Team

Silicon Valley has known for years that ownership is a keystone of building great products. In order to build the best products, startups need to attract the best talent, and to attract the best talent, offering equity in the form of stock options is a best practice to align employees with the company’s success. But today, only a small group of insiders — founders, investors, and employees — get to reap the rewards of ownership, while the broader community who are also instrumental to a company’s success are locked out of this opportunity for life-changing wealth creation. Just imagine: if every early Uber driver had received $5,000 of Uber stock when it was a seed-stage company, that equity would be worth $25 million by the time the company went public. 

Given the overhead of legal contracts and legacy financial infrastructure, it has historically been infeasible to distribute ownership at the scale required to reward every user who participates in the value creation of today's largest platforms. Crypto tokens are an innovation that enables the movement of value with the speed of information, akin to data packets. Tokens can unlock the vision of more meritocratic distribution of ownership and align incentives toward building networks that grow bigger, faster. We call this the ownership economy — products and services that are built, operated, and owned by their users — and it is unfolding even faster than we initially imagined when we started Variant. 

We believe that ownership will be a keystone of all next-generation products and platforms. The first to realize this were the developers and technologists who contributed to the movement by building and operating the first multi-billion dollar internet scale networks: Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, a new generation of entrepreneurs are rebuilding the internet with this more meritocratic and competitive model in mind. From developer-facing infrastructure to financial marketplaces, social media, gaming, digital art and collectibles, ownership has unlocked a new design space for scaling products faster than predecessors because users are aligned with their success. Some examples from our portfolio: Uniswap is a financial exchange, similar to Coinbase, where users who make the exchange liquid are rewarded with fees and given tokens conferring governance rights. Mirror is a publishing platform and toolkit for Web3 creators, where users — rather than the core team — decide how to grow the platform. Blitmap is one of the healthiest communities in Web3, whose users are anchored around ownership of NFTs created by artists and remixed by community members. And the list goes on.

The insight that next-generation networks would be built, operated and owned by their users is the reason why Variant was founded: to support and push forward the ownership economy. Beyond driving positive social outcomes in terms of how wealth is built and distributed, we believe that moving and distributing ownership at the speed of information is also the most optimal way to scale software services and communities. This is proven out by quantitative data: in April 2021, $122 billion in transactions took place on decentralized exchanges, up from less than $1 billion a year earlier. Ethereum settled more than $6 trillion in transactions in the past year despite being only 6 years old. Art Blocks, a curated digital art marketplace has seen billions of dollars in transaction volume grow alongside a fanatical community of collectors, including us.

Success for Variant is a world in which everyone becomes an owner of the products and services that they use. For this future to become reality, we need to continue to pull it forward. We believe it will take the support of a new kind of investor — one that is crypto-native but also has deep empathy and intuition for mainstream consumers. That is why we are thrilled to announce that Li Jin — our friend and a former colleague at Andreessen Horowitz — is merging her esteemed Atelier Ventures with Variant. The New York Times called Li the “It girl of venture capital,” but those that have worked with her know that she is an incredibly smart, thoughtful, and mission-driven investor. Li deeply believes in the values of the ownership economy, and her expertise in consumer and creator products is unparalleled in the crypto space.

As Li beautifully outlined in her blog today, crypto and the ownership economy are how we fully realize the vision of the passion economy that she laid out in 2019 with her seminal essay. The future of consumer technology is in crypto, and for it to fully blossom, we need investors who can help navigate the next wave of adoption from the early majority of internet users.

With that, we are pleased to announce a new $110 million first-check fund to continue investing in the ownership economy — from consumer platforms to gaming to infrastructure to DeFi. By design, we are sized for early-stage investing, where our expertise in startup building, protocol design, and consumer-focused go-to-market strategy can really move the needle for companies, networks, and DAOs.  

Given our vision of user ownership, we also felt that it was imperative for Variant to embody and live our own thesis as a firm — to be owned by our users, the founders that we back. Therefore, we purposefully expanded Variant’s investor base to include over 100 of the brightest minds and builders in web3, crypto, and technology, including builders from Uniswap, Compound, Foundation, Zora, Yield Guild Games, Mirror, and more. This enables us to take a decentralized approach to scaling our operations. The Variant Community will take an active role in shaping the fund's success and supporting projects in our portfolio. We aim to build a firm that adds value by turning our network into a product that founders can use and own.

If you believe in a more equitable internet and are building a crypto project in the ownership economy, we’d love to hear from you.

A first-check venture fund investing in the Ownership Economy

Variant Fund II: $110 million fund built for the ownership economy - Variant

Variant Fund II: $110 million fund built for the ownership economy

Li Jin

The passion economy is the what, the ownership economy is the how

Last summer, I left Andreessen Horowitz to start Atelier Ventures, an early-stage venture firm devoted to the passion economy: new platforms that enabled users to “monetize individuality.” In a world in which one-third of people’s lives are spent working, providing more freedom in how people make money is a direct way to improve their quality of life. The mission has been crystal clear since day one: to create paths for economic mobility at scale by allowing people to monetize their skills and creativity and lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship. In the midst of COVID lockdowns, that mission became even more urgent as large swaths of the population suffered job loss and turned to online platforms for income.

As I was starting Atelier, Jesse Walden was working on Variant Fund, a seed-stage venture firm focused on the ownership economy thesis, backing software that is built, operated and owned by users themselves. I first met Jesse Walden when we were both working at a16z: he was on the crypto team, and I was on the consumer team. In those days (2018), there was a wide gulf between consumer applications and crypto, and the deals that our respective teams evaluated hardly overlapped — yet in spite of that, we often mind-melded over internet creators and online platforms. 

Fast forward to today. Both of our funds are notably different in a sea of venture firms: they exist not just out of a desire for financial returns, but to support companies that catalyze greater social and economic equality. Our missions were, and are, two sides of the same coin: ownership is a cornerstone of financial freedom and enables greater enfranchisement of participants in the networks to which they contribute their time and energy.

The ownership economy has the opportunity to address one of the biggest and most morally troubling issues of our time: economic inequality. As the wealth gap continues to widen to levels not seen since just before the Great Depression, the best way to combat this is to enable everyone to become an owner of wealth-building assets. For too long, ownership has been restricted to a privileged set of individuals — whether on the basis of geography, network, expertise, access, or for regulatory reasons. This phenomenon is especially true in the online creator economy: despite platforms’ critical dependence on the contributions of creators and users, platforms’ value accrues to a cadre of founders, early employees, and investors, rather than to users themselves. Furthermore, to maintain defensibility, creator platforms own and lock in users’ data, content, identities, and interactions — leading to erosion of creator leverage and lack of control of their own businesses. As more of our time spent and work opportunities become mediated by online platforms, giving ownership of these platforms — in terms of value, content, and data — to their participants becomes a powerful vector for facilitating social and economic empowerment. Yet, broader distribution of ownership isn't just a more socially optimal outcome, it’s also the most optimal way to scale a network. Platforms that reward their users with ownership align incentives towards creating internet-scale armies of talent that will enable them to outcompete those who don't.

Crypto has showcased the power of ownership in rallying independent participants all over the world to help steward and grow internet-scale networks. The first to realize this opportunity were developers and technologists who were critical to the growth and operation of networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum; since they owned a piece of those networks in the form of their native tokens (BTC and ETH, respectively), they were eager to contribute to those protocols in deeper ways. Now, founders are pushing this more cooperative economic model towards mainstream consumer adoption, resulting in an avalanche of new platforms whose participants engage with the products and services they use in deeper ways because they’re aligned with their economic success. The future of consumer software is crypto, centered around the belief that what users create and the value they engender belongs to them.

User-owned and operated networks are nascent but already percolating in various verticals. For example, in gaming, Yield Guild Games is providing on-ramps to income-earning opportunities in the metaverse via a scholarship program that is community-owned and operated. In the creator economy, Mirror offers crowdfunding and publishing tools and plans to distribute governance tokens to its community; members can use these tokens to propose grants from Mirror’s treasury and influence how its product works. Uniswap, a crypto exchange, distributes its fees to the traders that provide liquidity and make the product useful. And this is just the beginning! 

Today marks a new chapter for both of our funds as I’m excited to announce that Atelier Ventures and Variant Fund are joining forces to invest in software that is owned and operated by its users. Together, we will lead investments in early-stage crypto companies out of our new $110 million fund. Enabled by crypto, the ownership economy is how we can truly deliver on the promise of the passion economy, and consumer technology more broadly. As someone who has worked and invested in Web2 companies for my entire career, this was not a decision I took lightly. But I arrived here in full confidence that the intersection of the passion economy and ownership economy is the future I want to work towards, and the area of technology that holds the most entrepreneurial and equitable potential for humanity. 

Our merger represents a belief that the future of the passion economy, and of consumer software, is crypto. Together, our partnership — Jesse Walden, Spencer Noon, and I — will back founders at the earliest stages. Jesse was an early believer in crypto’s consumer potential and gained hard-won insights from a number of vantages: as a founder of Mediachain, an early protocol that pioneered ideas since popularized by NFTs; a research lead at Spotify, which acquired his startup; and as an investor, where he has written the playbooks on emerging best practices for founders building in the crypto space. Spencer was an early expert in DeFi; a one of the first crypto investors to leverage on-chain analytics to value the fundamentals of new financial marketplaces at DTC Capital; and was also a crypto entrepreneur, starting Bitcoin on-ramp company BTCity in 2014. Together with my expertise in consumer marketplaces and platforms, we provide a diverse and unique perspective that will help founders execute on strategy decisions unique to crypto projects, but also bridge the gap in go-to-market for crypto’s next leg up towards mass-market adoption.

If you’re a founder aligned with our vision for a more meritocratic internet, we’d love to chat.

Atelier Ventures and Variant Fund are joining forces - Variant

Atelier Ventures and Variant Fund are joining forces

The Creator Economy is in Crisis. Now Let’s Fix It.

Jesse Walden

At a16z crypto, we’ve talked a lot about how crypto networks are analogous to cities in that both cities and crypto networks benefit from bottom-up growth on top of shared infrastructure.

A traditional business is generally best positioned setting up shop in a location with existing residents, utilities, law, security, and a vibrant market economy.  Similarly, developers benefit from building on top of shared resources such as an existing user base, data, security and running code.

We call this composability. A platform is composable if its existing resources can be used as building blocks and programmed into higher order applications. Composability is important because it allows developers to do more with less, which in turn, can lead to more rapid and compounding innovation.

The trustless nature of blockchain computers is a major unlock for composability, as it allows developers to build atop shared infrastructure without fear of lower-level dependencies being yanked from underneath them.  This is true because blockchains are both permissionless (what’s great about open source) and stateful (what’s great about APIs like Twilio and Stripe).

In looking at the evolution of blockchain computing, I’ll sketch out a mental model of four distinct eras, each with varying architectures and priorities with regards to composability:

Calculator Era – application specific, limited composability

Mainframe Era – turing complete, high composability

Server Era – application specific, punt on composability

Cloud Era – turing-complete, scalable composability

As I describe these, I will walk through the pros and cons of each as I see them. But let me say up front, there are many open ended research questions in this domain, and it is not at all clear how things will shake out. Each is an experiment worth running.

Bitcoin is the forebearer of blockchain computing. It is a full-stack solution to an application-specific problem: sound money or digital gold. Besides the simple function of tracking balances and transfers, bitcoin offers a scripting language that can be used to construct more complex functions.

A number of projects have leveraged Bitcoin Script to compose higher order applications. For example,  Proof of Existence leverages the OP_RETURN  datastore to create a proof that a specific person had a digital file at a given time. Projects like Colored Coins and Counterparty enable the creation of custom tokens atop the pooled security of Bitcoin’s blockchain. But a number of other attempts to further extend Bitcoin’s functionality, or the functionality of tokens, have been limited by the intentional constraints of the Bitcoin scripting language.

Many argue that that the most important property of a decentralized money system is security, not programmability, and that a limited scripting language is thus a feature, not a bug. Through that lens, we can view Bitcoin as more of a calculator than a computer (and that is intended as a positive remark!). It is purpose built and good at it’s task, but for developers keen to tinker and build new applications an evolution to a new architecture was required.

Built upon the key ideas pioneered by Bitcoin, Ethereum generalized the blockchain computer by including a turing-complete virtual machine. This means developers can deploy and run any program across a decentralized network of machines.

Today, for veracity, each node in the network must execute every program function. This makes it slow and expensive to use, but Ethereum is unrivaled on one dimension: its computations are trustless. Each program can be expected to obediently execute (as verified) and it’s output, or state, is available for all others to see. A program on Ethereum can thus serve as a dependable and neutral building block for developers to compose into higher order applications. We see this happening today:

Marble enables flash lending for exchange arbitrage: “A trader can borrow from the Marble [smart contract] bank, buy a token on a DEX, sell the token on another DEX for a higher price, repay the bank, and pocket the arbitrage profit all in a single atomic transaction.” To do this, Marble leverages Ethereum’s singleton VM to execute a sequence of functions across independent projects, and the result is a simple utility that anyone can use.

Primotif is a financial derivative that can track real-world indexes, like the S&P 500. It uses Augur shares to track the price of the underlying index, dYdX  short tokens to  hedge against the volatility of ETH, and dYdX use Maker’s Dai stablecoin under the hood.  Built in a weekend, Primotif is a great example of composability leading to compounding innovation and strong developer network effects.

Network effects through composability are not a new phenomenon. Here is Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, on composability of their API in 2007 (via AVC ):

“The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas, and build things like Twitterrific, which is just a beautiful elegant way to use Twitter that we wouldn’t have been able to get to, being a very small team. So, the API which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us.”

Unfortunately, composability didn’t last on the Web 2.0 scene. One problem was that there was no way to “send money through the API,” nor an effective and fair means to govern the rules of the platform, such as ad display. This created an incentive misalignment between developers and platforms that resulted in the re-centralization of data and the loss of third-party innovation.

My partner Chris has written about how crypto tokens can better align incentives around sustainable, open networks. The foil, today, is that incentive-aligned, composable networks do not scale.

This is the “mainframe era” of blockchains. While there are no doubt early network effects due to composability—pooled security, userbase, data, and running code—this comes with diminishing marginal returns as adoption pushes against the throughput limitations of the mainframe. This, in turn, drives up cost for each additional user and developer. Plotted on a chart, it looks something like this:

Due to resource constraints, the marginal cost per user increases and eventually exceeds the marginal value of composability (shared resources and developer network effects)

In search of scalability, some developers are foregoing composability and shared network effects, and are instead reverting to application-specific architectures. The vision of projects like Polkadot and Cosmos is one of multiple, heterogeneous chains—each custom tuned for it’s bespoke application. Polkadot’s Substrate and the Cosmos SDK are modular blockchain building kits to roll your own full-stack “app chain.”

Going full-stack is a lot more work than composing atop existing network resources. For developers, it means means building down to the state machine and up to the application interface, bootstrapping minimum viable security for the network, and sussing out interoperability with the others in the ecosystem.

But historically, full-stack strategies have proven successful at pulling the future forward and bringing early technologies to market. Wang Technologies offered a very functional word processor as a bundled hardware/software solution long before PC applications were up to par. Later, AOL bundled an ISP, a content delivery system, email and instant messenger—a superior user experience to the early web while it was under construction. And RIM bundled together a mobile device, operating system, and early applications like BBM and push email in order to catalyze smartphone adoption.

full-stack platforms, pulling the future forward.

In the early days of the web, each website had a custom-built server running in a closet somewhere. In order to own the experience end-to-end, developers needed to own a slice of the infrastructure too. The same may be true for the next era in blockchain computing. This is what I’ve been calling “the server era.”

“Server era” blockchains explicitly trade off composability for control. And this plays out on two-dimensions: control over the end-user experience, and more granular control over the economics of the supply-side resources of the network. An assumption of “server era” architectures is that network resources, such-as security, storage, and compute are demand constrained. That is, they can be scaled up, on demand, as the application gains adoption. This stands in contrast to “mainframe era” architectures where resource costs vary as a function of all of the other traffic on the network. The theory is that a full-stack “server era” architectures can mitigate the risk of a gentrifying “mainframe” chain.

“Server era” blockchains are different from their full-stack platform predecessors in that they’re still blockchains! Whereas Wang, AOL and RIM were closed platforms, “server era” blockchains are still verifiable, open data structures with programmable incentives. This property enables them to be composed into hubs (which is what both Cosmos and Polkadot do.) One blockchain can be a light client of another, developers can build atomic swaps, and otherwise extend functionality.

This means that even “server era” blockchains are still composable, but on a different dimension than “mainframe era” blockchains. Rather than running a single virtual machine, these blockchain computers require new standards for communicating with one another in order to enable composition across applications. These communication interfaces are the subject of ongoing research and standardization, and will no doubt add complexity to the developer experience with regards to composibility. But in spite of that drawback, the benefits of a bundle may prove to be the catalyst for a new wave of blockchain architectures and I expect we’ll see many more projects taking a full-stack approach in the near term.

The “cloud era” is meant to invoke a scalable, generalized substrate for trustless computation. This is the promised land, where composition is only bounded by creativity, not scale or communication complexity, and where innovation can compound without hitting diminishing returns.

How exactly this will work is very much in the realm of open research. Proponents of “server era” architectures posit that a “cloud era” experience will emerge through standardization and abstraction of inter-blockchain communication among heterogeneous blockchains. Others, like Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity) and Dfinity, are converging on sharded versions of homogenous, turing-complete chains. You can think of this as a world of many “mainframes” that share a pool of security, but split state and computation among homogenous virtual machines. And still others are researching entirely new architectures that move computation off-chain.

Given the size of the research community, and the potential prize for such a solution, I would not be surprised if “cloud era” blockchain computing is hot on the tails of the so-called “server era.” We’ve already laid the cables and built the data centers— “cloud era” blockchain computing is mostly software innovation. Whenever we get there, it seems clear that trustless composability will be a new superpower for developers, and when developers can do more with less, we’ll all be the beneficiaries of more collaboration, creativity, and choice on the internet.

At a16z crypto, we’ve talked a lot about how crypto networks are analogous to cities in that both cities and crypto networks benefit from bottom-up growth on

4 eras of blockchain computing: degrees of composability – Variant

4 eras of blockchain computing: degrees of composability

One of the most stunning things about the technology we consume everyday is the degree to which it is built, operated and even funded by its users.

The device you’re using to read this post, the software that’s displaying it, the server hosting this content and so much else on the internet are built with open-source code contributed by a global community of developers. Platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Airbnb all operate around content and products sourced from individuals, not corporations. And increasingly marketplaces like Kickstarter, Patreon, Substack, and many other Passion Economy platforms enable users to directly fund the products, information, and services that they consume.

As the role of the individual in value creation becomes more commonplace, the next evolutionary step is towards software that is not only built, operated, and funded by individual users—but owned by users too.

Ownership, via employee stock option plans, has been a powerful tool for incentivizing talented people to dedicate their skills to building startups in Silicon Valley. While this model has been extremely successful, it hasn’t been accessible to all, constrained by geography and legacy financial infrastructure, among other factors. One result is that the economic interests of the biggest internet platforms are concentrated and often poorly aligned with their most valuable contributors, their users. Now, new technologies are shifting work and value distribution to be accessible online, resulting in a new generation of platforms that thrive on contributions from a permissionless and global talent pool.

Ownership is a powerful motivator for users to contribute to products in deeper ways, be it with ideas, computing resources, code, or community building. This more cooperative economic model helps ensure better alignment with users over time, resulting in platforms that can be larger, more resilient, and more innovative.  This is the Ownership Economy, and beyond being a positive social endeavor, the platforms building it are able to leverage the strongest form of market incentives to grow network effects.

While most prevalent in crypto today, The Ownership Economy is expanding to other areas in tech. To understand why, we can look to recent history and observe how protocol innovations often expose disruptive new models that, when productized, influence broader trends and go on to impact billions.

Identifying Disruptive Models Through Protocol Innovations

The history of protocol adoption fits a pattern: first, early-adopters use new protocols to do things that were impossible before the new technology empowered them to do so. Very often, this new behavior involves breaking the rules. Then, a winning strategy for founders is to build products that make these new models more accessible to a wider audience. 

Consider the early web protocols: IP, HTTP, standards like HTML, then RSS. At first, popular websites used these protocols to create carbon-copies of physical analogues, like newspaper cover pages or classified ads. But as internet adoption went mainstream, users began publishing their own content: independent blogs, podcasts, newsletters and forums paved the way for the user-generated content platforms that dominate publishing today.

Another example is BitTorrent, a protocol innovation of packet distribution, but a disruption that underpinned the streaming revolution. When BitTorrent first became popular, Netflix was still mailing DVDs in the mail. Meanwhile, the peer-to-peer technology enabled consumers to access music, movies, software, and video games instantaneously, as if the files were already on their hard drives. By 2004, BitTorrent comprised one-third of all internet traffic.

Consumers’ passion for torrenting signaled that they wanted to access the world’s media at their fingertips, but for many, BitTorrent wasn’t a user-friendly experience; trackers were moving targets, cluttered and difficult to navigate. 

One person who saw an opportunity through the noise was Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify. As CEO of µTorrent, one of the most popular BitTorrent clients, Ek understood that piracy wasn’t about stealing—it was about access. The winning formula was providing access to the world’s music in a clean, well-designed product.

Today, crypto tokens are the latest protocol innovation to expose a disruptive new model. Just as BitTorrent allowed us to exchange packets of information instantly and without an intermediary, crypto tokens let us distribute value in the same way.

The protocol innovation of tokens is akin to packets for value, but the disruption is in the way new software platforms can be built and gain adoption. The breakthrough of early crypto networks is a new model for market-driven networks, where users build, operate and own a piece of the products and services that they use everyday.

The Ownership Economy, Pioneered by Crypto

The idea of user ownership is at the core of the success of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the first user-owned and operated networks at scale. Bitcoin arrived in 2009, the year that marked a rapid acceleration of economic inequality and the role of the internet in people’s daily lives. Bitcoin promised a new economic means to participate in modern technology history, simply by running open-source software on your computer. Rather than needing to live in a specific place and pursue a specific career in order to reap the benefits of the new economy, anyone with an internet connection could participate by “mining” or securing the network. In return, they earned newly minted Bitcoin, an ownership stake in the network itself.

Ethereum’s 2015 launch expanded the type of computation possible on blockchain networks, enabling a broader range of applications and allowing developers to experiment with new ways of expressing ownership in code. The best-designed Ethereum-based applications leverage a business model similar to traditional Web 2.0 marketplaces, but encode them in autonomous “smart contracts” run by Ethereum’s network of miners. This means these applications have no central operator. Rather than a platform’s inner circle of founders and investors taking home the value, users are able to earn the majority of value generated from their collective contributions. 

Needless to say, one of the most challenging problems any startup or new technology faces is adoption, especially where network effects are necessary—and even more-so when competing against the existing network effects of today’s dominant platforms. As the early Bitcoin and Ethereum communities came to realize, ownership is a tool to help surmount this problem. Those early communities were largely composed of technologists, developers, and enthusiasts who were naturally among the first to recognize the power of tokens as direct economic incentives. But today, founders are bringing the idea of ownership —  or at least, better economic alignment between platforms and participants — to new verticals in tech, from developer infrastructure, to financial services, and from consumer marketplaces to social.

How next-generation platforms are driving an ownership economy

The ownership economy doesn’t always mean a literal distribution of tokens, stock options, or equity. It also doesn’t necessarily mean that an application or service is entirely built on a blockchain. Rather, it means that ownership — which may manifest in the form of novel economic rewards, platform governance, or new forms of social capital — can be a new keystone of user experiences, with plenty of design space to explore.

Some examples: In payments, Celo is making digital dollars and financial applications accessible to anyone with an internet connection via a blockchain network that, like Bitcoin, is entirely user owned and operated. In finance, startups like Binance and Numerai have leveraged tokens to distribute revenue from the platform directly to their users, fueling brand loyalty and growth. Compound, a money market, recently completed its journey of progressive decentralization to become a community owned marketplace for borrowing and lending.

Uniswap, a crypto exchange, has a business model similar to Coinbase or Binance in that it imposes a fee on transactions. But rather than the company capturing that fee, it’s instead distributed to the market-making traders that provide liquidity and make the product useful. Since Uniswap is open source and user-owned, third-party developers can have confidence building on the platform and a rich ecosystem of integrations has grown around the project.

In social, Reddit recently announced that 300 million users will have access to tokenized community currencies through their mobile app. The platform will reward participants in the r/FortniteBR and r/Cryptocurrency subreddits with tokens that can be used to pay for membership, tipping, and badges in the Reddit app, giving them ownership over the economy of each subreddit.  

Consumer marketplace Foundation is transforming the Kickstarter model by allowing creators to tokenize their projects in a marketplace where tokens can be bought, sold or redeemed for goods or services. This programmable, digital representation of ownership unlocks new revenue streams that gives buyers and creators access to new value streams in secondary markets. 

Global talent marketplace Braintrust connects top tech talent with large companies looking to hire them.  Their marketplace transacts in USD but uses an Ethereum-based token as its core incentive and governance system to distribute value to contributors.  

In consumer products, the house-of-brands startup Arfa is rewarding customers who contribute to product development—The Arfa Collective—with a 5 percent share of company profits. They hope these direct economic incentives can help build a more loyal customer base with lower marketing costs over time. 

Other platforms like Bird and Dumpling are putting a new spin on the gig economy by allowing suppliers in their marketplaces to run independent franchises, which they own and operate. These platforms combine the scale of software-driven marketplaces with equity value accrual for operators.

The world increasingly understands that “software is eating the world,” so it’s no surprise that narratives around personal economic empowerment on the internet are resonating now more than ever. Just as the barriers to professional productivity online have fallen dramatically, so too have the hurdles that previously prevented the equitable and secure distribution of economic value. 

Introducing Variant: a firm dedicated to the ownership economy

Crypto exposed the power of ownership as a tool to drive users to contribute to protocols they use in deeper ways. Now, the opportunity is to follow the pattern, and build more accessible products (and protocols) that bootstrap adoption & participation through better economic alignment with users.

After building and investing in the space for nearly seven years, I am doubling down on the pursuit of a more equitable and innovative internet. In 2014, after starting my career in music as an artist manager, I cofounded Mediachain Labs. The company’s goal was to build infrastructure that would allow creators to capture more of the value they generated on media platforms. That project was acquired by Spotify, where I led blockchain R&D with similar goals in mind.

In 2018, I joined the investment team at Andreessen Horowitz to take a wider view of crypto networks, their capabilities, and their applications. And now, at Variant, I hope to work with this generation’s Daniel Ek’s: product-driven founders who understand how ownership can be a disruptive cornerstone of new products. 

To help build the ownership economy, I’ll partner with entrepreneurs and communities at the earliest possible stages.

If that’s you, please reach out — I’d love to hear about what you’re building.

Join the discussion on Twitter and subscribe for updates from Variant.

From crypto to consumer, ownership is emerging as a new tool for bootstrapping network effects in new software platforms that are increasingly operated by their users.

The Ownership Economy: Crypto & The Next Frontier of Consumer Software – Variant

The Ownership Economy: Crypto & The Next Frontier of Consumer Software

If you are interested in career opportunities in the Variant portfolio, please fill out our Talent Form

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Variant is a venture firm built for the ownership economy. We take a decentralized, network-driven approach to scaling our operations and value-add, from sourcing new opportunities to supporting the portfolio.

Our investor base is comprised of 100+ builders in crypto, who each own a piece of the fund.

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We will follow-up with select applicants to schedule interviews. Variant Fund is remote first, based in New York City

We are hoping for candidates from a myriad of backgrounds and hope you’ll consider applying!

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Variant

A first-check crypto fund investing in the ownership economy

Team – Variant

Why crypto is becoming the “port of entry” for all internet media. Before tech, I was an artist manager in music. When I started the firm, I believed one thing about the music industry very firmly: ownership endows power. Typically, labels had ownership over the music, and thus, power over artists. Our goal was to help […]