Story time. There will be a couple crypto wallet addresses at the end of this one.

1/ ETH reached 18-month low today and there is this narrative that the price of is dropping because ICOs are liquidating their treasuries. Well, it’s completely wrong. Let’s look at the data!

https://t.co/yG0vecC7VT

2/ The sum of ETH holdings of ICO treasuries is now a little over 3.57M ETH (3.5% of supply). In April, the treasuries held 4.65 million ETH (4.5% of supply) indicating that they likely liquidated (or moved) about 23% since then.

3/ Despite the decline in ETH price, the selloff hasn’t been as drastic as many analysts anticipated. In the past two months, treasuries of projects that held ICOs liquidated (or moved) 172,00 ETH, or ~4.6% of total holdings.

4/ The most aggressive sellers were Status, district0x and Tierion (in order), which sold (or moved) nearly 55,000 ETH combined since September 9. Out of the 57 companies I tracked, 50% didn’t touch any of the ETH in their treasuries.

5/ At least 11 ICOs currently have a smaller “market capitalization” than the amount that they hold in their ETH treasuries alone (see table below).

1/ crypto VC is going through an explosive 🧨 phase

there are big funds (>$500M AUM), a lot of small funds (<$50M AUM), and *tons* of prop firms + angels

i’ve done 15 deals in the last 3 months as an angel + small fund @CoinSharesCo VC.

observations + implications... 👇🏾

2/ the big firms need to deploy in size - $5M checks and up

a $250M fund could do a $5-10M deal every month for two years and still be under-allocated

and there aren’t enough companies raising series B / C / D rounds!!!

every deal i’ve done lately is under $50M valuation

3/ so we see firms competing to take down entire rounds.

a recent series A financing had two firms competing to take down the ENTIRE ROUND, and it eventually got upsized, a LOT.

if a company is putting up user acquisition / growth and a revenue story, it’s highly competitive

4/ most projects and co’s don’t need money tho - why would a founder take 20-40% dilution when they’re banking cash and crypto? so they do 5-10%

so the valuations go up, but available allocations go down, resulting in an even bigger squeeze on allocators who *need* to deploy

5/ add in the onslaught of non-crypto M&A that’s coming, which is culling the herd of investable unicorns

add in the wave of SPACs and direct listings taking later stage opportunities out

there just aren’t enough places to put capital in size rn

what’s a fund to do?