The crypto market may be in its tenth month of the downtrend, but for Michael Anderson, the co-founder of Framework Ventures, this time represents possibly the best opportunity to invest in new startups and projects.
Framework Ventures entered the scene in 2019 amid the previous bear market, and such conditions, according to Anderson, “is the best time to be building.”
“The best entrepreneurs in the space are coming right now,” Anderson told Decrypt at last week’s Mainnet conference. “We were lucky to have launched our last fund, we are investing very actively right now, and we are very excited about everything we see.”
In April, Framework Ventures secured $400 million for its third fund, FVIII, with half of that amount earmarked to investments in blockchain-based gaming, which, as the firm said at the time, will be “one of the largest forms of employment in the world.”
Framework is long on crypto gaming
Six months later, Anderson still believes this is the case.
“Gaming, in our minds, is the category that is going to bring a hundred million people into Web3. They are going to have wallets, they are going to have Web3 addresses, and that’s the consumer adoption that we have been waiting for,” he said.
Speaking about what role non-fungible tokens (NFTs) may play in the future of blockchain gaming, Anderson said there are two aspects that have to be taken into account.
The first is that NFTs have been largely built on Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) chain, and the situation has changed after the network’s transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
Point number two, per Anderson, is that the business model of gaming has been largely trending towards a defund state, specifically when it comes to advertising. Game developers are now looking at blockchain and the monetization opportunities the new technology brings.
“They are saying that this is a new interesting platform to build on–potentially even the only platform to build on,” said Anderson.
Last week, Framework Ventures also led a $24 million Series A funding round for Immunefi, a bug bounty system for smart contracts and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects.
According to Anderson, Immunefi boasts a team of “world-class security specialists,” and security is one of the most important components of Web3.
“I think we can look at Immunefi in five or seven-year and think of it as one of the largest security providers in Web3,” he said.