Anyone that has been in the intersection of the general tech and crypto industry has been on a wild ride for the last couple of years. In the bear market, crypto has been largely under the radar, and if it hit the news

it was largely affiliated with scam and criminality (more about FTX later)

It was the same for me, when I decided to join a crypto startup after having worked at a generalist VC. I discussed the decision with a collegial generalist VC investor. And the conversation went like this

- Why dont you want to join an AI startup? I can connect you to some

- No thanks, I think I want to dive deeper into crypto actually

- Do you really want to go into crypto?? Its all scam anyway

This is interesting, because just 18 months earlier we frequently had catch up calls, sharing crypto dealflow. Save to say this was a pretty typical conversation.

How generalist VCs got interested in crypto - and eventually abandoned it

To understand generalist VC interest we need to look a little bit into what happened historically. It is best to look at the distinct cycles. I consider there to be four distinct cycles that you can observe in terms of generalist VC interest. Lets go through them one by one:

The early days ( June 2014 - January 2017)

We are talking the early, early days here. In July 14, Ethereum ICOs and goes one year later. First Challenger networks such as Cardano start ICOing as well (October 2015). Bitcoin is still in the sub 1000 USD category.

This is also the beginning of the professional Crypto VC industry, with a lot of OG crypto funds either being launched or starting to deploy, such as Blockchain Capital, Polychain (funded by generalist VCs such as) or Multicoin.

You can also see generalist VCs investing both in seed rounds of long forgotten companies, but also doubling down on some winners in larger rounds, These larger rounds are more focussed on centralized companies creating services around crypto. Examples of this are Coinbase's and Circle's Series C.

The most frequent investors are.

Overall, Deal frequence is quite low and generalist VCs have a low, but constant participation in Deals.

The first craze ( June 2014 - January 2017)