By Zavain Dar

In early 2013, as macro economic instability hit Europe with bailouts in Greece and Cyprus — a then tiny “digital” currency, Bitcoin, emerged in mainstream conversation and shot up in price as a hedge against volatility in the “physical” world. I’ll admit to having been blind to digital currency and the technology underpinning it then, but soon thereafter found myself reading everything I could to learn and understand more about it. My initial research led to teaching a quarter-long seminar in early 2014 on “Digital Currencies and the Blockchain” at Stanford, the first such course at any US University (to my knowledge). The seminar was a chance for my students and I to block out time and do research on the underlying technology, mathematics, atomic primitives, and economics behind the digital currency ecosystem. In the course of this research, what became obvious to us was not only were digital currencies a fascinating techno-economic implementation of traditional currencies with the ability to codify — literally in code — macro economic policy and regulations, but that the underlying technology was one with the potential to disrupt the increasingly server-centric “centralized” web.

The centralized web: the web that has emerged over the last two decades. It is an internet that takes data privacy away from end users while creating mechanisms to allow oligopolies and potential monopolies to emerge from online marketplace and network effects. Bitcoin, and more precisely, the Blockchain had the potential to remove the need for a centralized web which relied on centralized servers, and rather create a decentralized web where everyone owned their data and acted in harmony as compute and network got pushed to our increasingly powerful clients on the edge. From an investor perspective, the technology underpinnings were there, though present was nontrivial fundamental R&D to accomplish before such a reality could come to fruition. In 2014, we kept attuned to this thesis and possibility, but took a step back from the ecosystem as researchers, hackers, and entrepreneurs got to work building the underlying infrastructure for a decentralized web to emerge.

As we enter 2017, what previously felt to be techno-philosophical ponderings on the future of the Blockchain are increasingly convening to a singular tangible — though ethereal and digital — reality. With the kernel of a thesis born in 2014 and coming to fruition only now, I’m proud and excited to announce Lux’s first ever investment in the Blockchain and — what we’re calling internally — the Decentralized Web: Blockstack. We’ve known the company (FKA Onename) and the brilliant founders Muneeb and Ryan since they graduated from YC in 2014, when Lux partner Bilal invested as an angel. They’ve since been hard at work untangling, grappling with, and solving some of the most difficult problems in Computer Science and Distributed Systems. The company now sits on the cusp of unlocking the potential of a Decentralized Web and we’re proud to be partners in a $4M Series A alongside return investor Union Square Ventures to help realize this important potential vision.

If you’re a developer excited to push forward a new decentralized internet, I can think of no better team to join than Blockstack’s stellar group based in NYC. If you’ve got an application you want to write for the decentralized masses … early hints to the developing and future API are available right here ;)