You don’t need to watch that ridiculous Matt Damon commercial on loop to understand that the crypto markets have been on fire. Venture firms, in particular, are placing huge new bets on the crypto market: FTX, the crypto exchange, just launched a $2 billion fund, competing with similarly sized funds from a16z ($2.2 billion) and Paradigm ($2.5 billion) last year. On the other side, however, Jamie Dimon says “cryptocurrency has no intrinsic value” and called bitcoin “worthless.” 

There are a couple of different things going on here. The VCs are focused on the Next Big Thing and believe that the blockchain technologies behind digital currencies, smart contracts, and NFTs will lead to a whole new architecture for the Internet and a wave of important new businesses that could become the next Google, Amazon, or Meta. They are raising these big funds, or have already raised them, with the intention of placing lots of bets on what they hope this future will look like.