Blockchain-focused investment group Hashed, under the stewardship of its CEO Simon Kim, registered Hashed Ventures, Inc. in September and successfully raised $120 million in just three months.
Since 2017, Hashed cemented its position as the vanguard of the blockchain industry in South Korea. In addition to investing in seminal blockchain projects around the globe, Hashed evangelized and accelerated public blockchain projects for Asia’s biggest IT companies including Kalytn of Kakao and Link of Line. Recently, Hashed also announced its partnership with KB Kookmin Bank, the biggest bank in South Korea, to establish KODA, a holistic platform to manage digital assets for individual and corporate clients for the first time in the nation.
Through Hashed Venture Fund I, Hashed will be making investments in blockchain and other technology startups that can promote protocol economy. Originally conceptualized by Simon Kim, the term designates an open economy underpinned by independent and consensus-driven protocols that can reward participants more fairly and directly via digital assets. By strategically targeting problems faced by platform giants and investing in innovative solutions, Hashed aims to capture the potential growth of protocol economy’s future markets.
CEO Simon Kim shared, “By ushering in the era of protocol economy, the Korean domestic startup scene will witness the resurgence of the blockchain industry as well as its maturation market attracting both government and institutional support for the new paradigm.”
A recent article in the Financial Times listed several projects that are using the new distributed ledger technology to underpin their trading platforms: a London hedge fund that has already raised $125m, a Slovenia-based consortium led by Nisse Investor Group, and Singaporean exchange-traded fund called Bonaire Investment Management. The latter two projects represent the biggest participation so far in the open market, but cryptocurrency venture funds are only just starting to find their way into the mainstream of global finance. Cryptocurrency venture fund managers who are building companies on the bleeding edge of this new frontier realize that there are big opportunities ahead for those who can best utilize the technology in order to profit through it.
As we have noted before, a major part of the appeal of the new distributed ledger system that lies in the fact that it can be accessed, audited, and used by a wide range of participants in a distributed network. This is in contrast to the legacy banking system, which relies upon controlled and restricted access by a small number of trusted parties. Many of the largest cryptocurrency investors in the world currently use hedge funds to create additional funding for their businesses. If those same large investors are able to make their investments more transparent by providing a more comprehensive view of how their business models work, then they can truly follow-on funding to provide a supportive climate for budding companies.
An even more appealing aspect of this new distributed ledger technology is that it is capable of supporting a wide range of initial businesses – even if those businesses lack the ability to produce a profit. Even if a new company doesn’t manage to become profitable during its lifetime, the money that was raised by the venture fund will still have been recovered by the profits of the main shareholder. In fact, most hedge funds are structured as one continuous investment, with no specific periods of time when money is recovered. This ensures that the company does not miss out on any possible profits due to unwise investments during earlier periods. This can create a self-sustaining stream of income for many years to come, a much more reliable source of capital than that obtained through traditional means.
