In Fall of 2014, Lightspeed Venture Partners invested in Blockchain. Our core investment thesis as we outlined it at the time of investment was as follows:
- Bitcoin has the opportunity to be a big disruptor in financial services.
- Wallet companies will occupy a central position in the Bitcoin ecosystem since they own the relationship with the consumer. This is the area that has attracted the most VC investment.
- Blockchain is the biggest wallet company and is currently growing faster than the #2 player.
- Blockchain’s user-controlled architecture will prove to be more valuable over time, leading it to maintain and increase its leadership position.
It is gratifying to see our investment thesis play out as we anticipated, although perhaps a little slower than we initially hoped! We remain Bitcoin enthusiasts — eager (yet patient) to see the fruits of its disruption. That patience is the result of an acute awareness that the Bitcoin industry arc must be viewed as a long-term game.
The industry’s pot of gold (and ultimate success metric) will be a world in which digital currency is a payment mechanism as widely accepted as Paypal or American Express, or any other major world currency, and we are seeing more evidence of this happening, mostly outside the US. Countries like Brazil, India, and Russia are leading the way in bitcoin adoption and bitcoin usage has increased by 332% since two years ago.
Blockchain has continued to maintain its market leadership. At the time of our initial investment, Blockchain was the largest Bitcoin wallet provider with 2.3 M wallets. In the relatively short time since, Blockchain’s market dominance has cemented it as the undisputed leader in the space: Over 9 million wallets powering over 100 million transactions, with over 50% market share.
The user-controlled architecture clearly continues to be a favorite for Bitcoin users because of its inherent resilience to attack. A hacker would need to break into not a single master account, as is the case with custodial architectures, to be able to steal Bitcoin from many accounts at once, but instead need to break into each account individually, a daunting and dis-economic prospect.
The disadvantage that a user-controlled (“non-custodial” is the industry term) wallet has historically had relative to custodial wallets has been ease of on ramp. Custodial wallets like Coinbase have enabled new users to easily buy and sell Bitcoin right from their wallet because they control the ingress and egress of Bitcoin from those wallets.
That disadvantage has been erased. Blockchain, through their partnership with Coinify, will now enable unprecedented, nearly instantaneous wallet funding without compromising user security or control. A user can now buy or sell Bitcoin from within their Blockchain wallet. The partnership doesn’t just improve the features of the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet, it fundamentally addresses the three dimensions of currency consumption that have stymied Bitcoin adoption (speed, ease and security).
· Speed: The partnership removes Bitcoin acquisition delays by enabling instantaneous wallet funding via credit and debit cards. (Users will also be able to purchase Bitcoin directly from their bank accounts, although wallet funding through this channel will only happen as fast, or as slow, as the bank transfers themselves are able to settle.)
· Ease: Bitcoin acquisition has, in the past, been hampered by opaque, complex and lengthy identity verification procedures. Simply said, it’s a process that’s neither easy nor easily understood by the average consumer. With this news, Blockchain has materially improved a notoriously convoluted process. Now, users funding their wallets can instantly authenticate payment methods and purchases by simply confirming the values of two separate, nuanced transactions charged to their cards. It’s straightforward, fast, easily understood and easily executed.
· Security: Previous attempts by the Bitcoin industry to increase both speed and ease have come (at the hand of custodial wallet providers) at the cost of compromised security. It’s been a compromise Blockchain (and many Bitcoin advocates) have been unwilling to make. The Blockchain Coinify partnership is a milestone because it represents, for the first time and at the same time, improvement across all three critical currency dimensions.
As the world sees more tumult, ranging from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to South America, this improvement in Blockchain’s functionality makes it well timed to serve the next 8 million, and indeed the next 80 million Bitcoin wallets even more seamlessly.
To learn more about Blockchain and Coinify, head over to the Blockchain blog: https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/11/14/its-here-buy-bitcoin-from-your-blockchain-wallet-in-4-simple-secure-steps/.
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