Rapture #144: Multicoin Likely Has the Best Fund Record of all time
While I thought I was finished writing about crypto funds for a bit, I came across an article from Axios on Multicoin that was published on December 29th, 2021 that caused my eyes to nearly pop out of their sockets.
Who is Multicoin
For those of you who do not know, Multicoin is a fund that was founded in late 2017 by Kyle Samani (the trigger puller) and Tushar Jain (the counter balance). Kyle and Tushar both had entrepreneurial backgrounds, but neither came from finance, making their success even more impressive. I went to the first couple investment summits they hosted in Half Moon Bay near San Francisco, which were by far the best executed summits I have attended in crypto.
Multicoin calls themselves a thesis driven fund. You can find their theses here. Early on, Multicoin was one of the first funds to prolifically produce content. Furthermore, they were the first American fund to actively pursue the Chinese allocator market.
Early on, Multicoin was able to attract investment in the GP from Andreesen Horowitz and other large traditional venture capital firms. While the opted to give up some of the GP in order to attract that capital, it undoubtedly helped them attract even more capital, especially early on when no crypto funds had track records.
Now, I will be the first one to say that in 2018, my money was not on Multicoin to become a top tier fund. I found Kyle dogmatic and far too stringent in his investment thesis. Furthermore, they were not focusing on what I viewed as the most compelling areas of the market for growth at the time, which were DeFi and NFTs.
I could not have been more wrong.
20,000%+ Net Returns since October 2017
As I have mentioned before, I am a returns guy. Multicoin's returns speak for themselves. Since their hedge fund's launch in October 2017, it has returned 20,000%+. I ran into Kyle yesterday at EthDenver, and he confirmed to me that that number indeed represented a true representation of net returns up to that point in time.
That track record is the only one that I have come across that beats my own. Quite frankly, Multicoin's track record has to be one of if not the best all-time 4 year track record for a fund. Some of the assets that largely made up those returns include a seed round allocation in Solana, a position in HNT (Helium), and a position in AR (Arweave). All of these positions at the time they were made were incredibly contrarian and I know of no other large funds that took large positions in Helium and Arweave.
Multicoin supposedly has more than $5 billion AUM now, making them one of if not the largest fund in crypto.
Their venture returns have also been impressive, as their venture fund 1 returned more than 28x net of fees.
I am excited to watch how Multicoin's investment theses evolve over the years, and, more importantly, if they are able to continue to be the kings of crypto investing.
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