Andreessen Horowitz’s Cryptocurrency Fund Makes its First Investment
After the launch of a blockchain and crypto-focused hedge fund, Silicon Valley investment houseAndressen Horowitz (A16Z) has announced a $45 million funding in blockchain-based privacy emphasized cloud project “Oasis Labs.” The team emphasizes the importance of data security in a way that no other firms have done so far. The investment marks A16Z’s first investment from its $300 million cryptocurrency fund.
A16z’s First Steps
Venture capital legend Andreessen Horowitz has been causing a lot of noise in the cryptocurrency & blockchain investment space as of recently. The Silicon Valley billionaire caused an initial stir when he announced he was raising $300M to start a cryptocurrency based hedge fund and VC firm. The firm would be interested in investing in the latest blockchain technologies set to rival existing enterprises and centralized technologies.
The cloud computing provider startup “Oasis Labs” is a privacy-first emphasized firm, with a private test net available through a separate application process. The project is led by CEO Dawn Song, a current professor of electrical engineering at The University of California at Berkeley. The cloud platform will run entirely upon the blockchain and focus on the privacy aspect of cloud computing. This will put it in competition with Amazon Web Services, a centralized cloud computing provider which does not emphasize privacy. A16z is reported to have led the fundraising of its private token sale for a total of $45 million.
In an email to TechCrunch, Song provided a closer look at her vision for Oasis Labs in an ephemeral explanation of the platform:
“We use a combination of trusted hardware and cryptographic techniques (such as secure multiparty computation) to enable smart contracts to compute over this encrypted data, without revealing anything about the underlying data.”