Crypto investment firm CoinFund has expanded its workforce, nearly doubling the number of people on the investment team outside its managing partners and increasing its overall headcount by 28% in 2024.
“We had such conviction that crypto is likely to be a fertile area to produce big investment gains that we focused on expanding the team during a bear market. So we added five people to the investing team over the last year,” David Pakman, the managing partner and head of venture investments at CoinFund, told Unchained.
The investment team now comprises 16 people with 11 investors and five managing partners, according to Julie Mossler, head of marketing and communications at CoinFund, in emailed comments.
“[Overall] the firm is about 30-31 people. We feel very strong [and] well-staffed going into what’s clearly an exciting growing market,” Pakman added.
CoinFund has 105 portfolio companies, one of which is Matter Labs, the firm developing layer 2 network ZKsync. In 2022, CoinFund made a Series A investment into Matter Labs and by June 2024, ZKsync conducted its token generation event. The network’s native token ZK has garnered a market cap of almost $806 billion at press time, market data from CoinGecko shows.
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In 2021, the investment firm made a seed investment into Ondo Finance, which creates tokenized money market funds. Ondo’s governance token, which grants holders the capability to vote on economic parameter changes and smart contract upgrades, currently has a market cap of roughly $2.9 billion.
A Multi-Pronged Strategy
CoinFund currently has three investment strategies: a seed fund, a venture stage fund, and a liquid markets fund. Roughly two-thirds of the investment team focuses on seed and venture-stage investing, while the remaining one-third is dedicated to liquid markets. CoinFund did not reveal its fund performance, but Mossler revealed that the firm led or co-led 95% of its last 20 deals.
Even though most of the best-performing firms have centered around infrastructure, according to Pakman, non-infrastructure investments will do well in this cycle as consumer-oriented projects will continue to gain traction such as ones involved in the gaming and social sectors of crypto.
While CoinFund was able to increase its staff, a number of crypto firms in the past year downsized. For example, centralized exchange Kraken, decentralized trading venue dYdX, and software development firm Consensys each announced layoffs in Oct. 2024.
Venture capitalists invested $8 billion in crypto startups during the first three quarters of the year, “putting 2024 on track to meet or slightly exceed 2023,” which saw roughly $10 billion in capital, according to an October research report from Galaxy Digital. However, the amount of venture capital investment in 2023 and 2024 is substantially lower than in 2021 and 2022, which each saw total capital invested exceed $30 billion.
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CoinFund’s staff growth in 2024 coincided with the crypto market reaching an all-time high valuation of nearly $3.9 trillion, and according to Pakman, he expects to see the firm continue to grow its headcount, especially in light of a more crypto-friendly environment in the U.S. “We are open to adding more investors. We have a lot of capital to invest and so having great investors on the table is great and we’ll also continue to invest in the non-investment functions that… help us achieve outcomes.”
The Government’s Upcoming 180 on Crypto
Following the 2024 election, many crypto-friendly government officials will be entering into the executive and legislative branches of the U.S.
Not only is Donald Trump, who has several NFT collections and is associated with a DeFi protocol called World Liberty Financial, the president-elect, but Congress has also seen an influx of policymakers who intend to make the U.S. less hostile to the crypto industry.
Prior to the recent change in the political atmosphere, CoinFund had to search for a number of projects outside of the U.S. “45% of all of our investments have been outside the U.S., because there’s been more hospitable geographies to develop crypto technology, and I think that’s going to change,” Pakman said.
“I think the U.S. could not only be hospitable but could lead in what defines the regulatory rules of the road for crypto that a lot of other countries [follow].”
