Rockefeller Foundation’s Venture Capital Arm Enters the Digital Currency Market

After a bumpy ride over the last week, the crypto markets are looking to start afresh this week after some positive news coming the way of crypto enthusiasts over the weekend. On Friday, April 6 Bloomberg reported that hedge-fund titan and billionaire investor George Soros is planning to enter the crypto space.

Another news that is making the headline is that the Rockefeller family - a giant of America’s financial market is joining Soros to the party. Venrock - a venture capital division of the Rockefeller Foundation has recently entered a partnership with Coinfund, a Brooklyn-based digital currency firm.

Getting associated with the prestigious institution like Rockefeller, Coinfund soon made the announcement on its Twitter handle saying: “We are excited to partner with @pakman and @Venrock for our work in #decentralization and #blockchain!”

Venrock (venture + Rockefeller) was founded back in 1969 as a new division to invest in new startups and companies. Over the years, Venrock has made some prominent investments and were also early investors in now big companies like Intel and Apple.

While commenting on this move, David Pakman, a partner at Venrock, told Fortune: “We wanted to partner with this team that has been making investments and actually helping to architect a number of different crypto economies and crypto token-based projects.”

However, Packman made it clear that is betting long and not interested in short-term investments in the crypto space despite its highly speculative and volatile behaviour. While describing this collaboration with Coinfund, Packman said: “There are a lot of crypto traders in the market. There are a lot of cryptocurrency hedge funds. This is different. In fact, to us, it looks a little bit more like venture capital.”

Co-founder at Coinfund, Jake Brukhman said:“We’ll be working closely with them to help mentor, advise, and support teams in the space.We’re trying to cultivate a unique synergy between teams as we see more experienced founders and more traditional tech startups taking up blockchain.”

However, both Brukhman and Pakman said that they see tremendous opportunity in the blockchain technology supporting cryptocurrencies and says that it is great in eliminating the middlemen in the process.

Pakman said: “Gatekeepers tend to charge rent or toll on users. The benefit of the advent of crypto is that we have fewer gatekeepers. Venture capital itself is effectively a gatekeeper industry and I’d actually like to see that undone. I don’t believe that a small group of people should make the decisions about which projects can raise some money and get off the ground.”