I was reminded that this article lacks sufficient background information, and many readers who joined during this period may not understand why someone's departure is worth discussing, or why it signifies the end of an era. Since the Chinese version lacks an introduction, I'll briefly fill in the gaps.
(Suddenly, I feel like I'm back to writing the transcript of "Solana's Rise and Fall," only back then there were more bearish investors, making it more conducive to writing. If this post reaches 500k views, I promise to dedicate my second solo talk to this topic, because I realize this is another story no one else can discuss.)
In 2018, the two young founders of Multicoin established Multicoin Capital on the eve of the 2017 bull market. Back then, internet attention wasn't as scarce, there wasn't the same hunger for traffic as today, and there was no such thing as CT (Crossfire). With their humble backgrounds, the two founders (especially Kyle) built their business from scratch by engaging in heated debates, publishing every tweet and comment with assertive and arrogant attitudes.
The traffic effect was excellent. A year after the initial successful hedge fund fundraising, VF 1 was established. This fund, later hailed as the most successful VF fund in history (not in the crypto industry, but globally), achieved a multiple of 410x (I think that's the exact figure; I've forgotten, this was typed manually).
This fund, with only 17 million USD in capital, was characterized by Kyle's three main investment themes: 1. Open Finance; 2. Web 3 (Data Sovereignty - Self-sovereign data); 3. Global, State-free Money.
These three investment themes guided Multicoin's investment strategy from 2019 to 2022 and inspired countless KOLs who started in 2018/2019. Many even used Multicoin's "stack theory" to find investment targets, buying top-performing stocks and reaping huge profits of tens or hundreds of times (at the time, the starting price for listing on exchanges was tens of millions, at most hundreds of millions).
The most interesting thing is that back in 2019, before anyone else (either in the East or West) was talking about exchange tokens, Multicoin achieved astonishing growth by heavily investing 15% of its BNB in hedge funds. I'll always remember Kyle telling me, grinning broadly, downstairs at Multicoin's Austin office in November 2019 that his dream was for CZ to invest in him. I told him I didn't know him, but I could try my best to help him achieve that. Later in 2021, after countless discussions with Labs, they invested in Multicoin's main fund, marking Labs' only investment in an external fund in its history.
Once I started writing, I couldn't stop. All this talk and various factors cannot deny that during this cycle, Kyle, due to some bias and information asymmetry, missed out on various Perp DEXs and didn't heavily invest in any exchange tokens.
However, his departure might be a blow to many people from the previous cycle, or even those who were already there. But looking at it another way, how can the industry develop without changes in ownership?
I might end up doing a podcast episode anyway, haha.
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