Rockefeller's VC Arm Venrock Partners With Coinfund, Exec Highlights Focus On Long Term

Venrock, the official venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, has partnered with crypto investment group Coinfund to support cryptocurrency and Blockchain business innovation, Fortune reported April 6.Coinfund has recently added token-based financial services platform Coinlist, a spinoff of startup connection website AngelList, to the number of projects that it backs.

Coinfund is also known for backing chat messenger app Kik, which raised almost $100 mln in the Initial Coin Offering of its Kin token last fall.

Fortune notes that Venrock and Coinfund met through their mutual investment in the live video streaming app maker YouNow.

"We're really patient long term investors we're wondering what happens over the next five to ten years. Can we have fundamental change to a number of different markets because of a disturbed ledger, a token economy that all participants can take part in?".

"It may finally be possible to build widely-distributed networks without centralized trust or control, and to allow user consensus to govern their future In this scenario, 'commodity' applications like messaging, social media and application infrastructure like file storage and compute become very much like public utilities?-?and they are owned and governed by their participants. For many of us, this is the mission behind crypto."

When asked by Fortune about the potential for scams running ICOs, specifically mentioning the recent news of the Centra-related arrests, Pakman referred to the crypto ecosystem as a "Wild space up and down the whole stack," with ICOs as "Certainly one of the most wild spaces of it all."

Pakman added that he supports regulations of the crypto sphere in order to clear out the "Bad actors," but that one needs to be careful not to "Throw the baby out with the bathwater here".

Coinfund co-founder Jake Brukhman told Fortune that Coinfund will be "Working closely with [Venrock] to help mentor, advise, and support teams in the space."

Major traditional investor George Soros, who had previously referred to Bitcoin as a "Bubble," will also reportedly be investing in cryptocurrencies, through the Soros Fund Management.

In mid-February, Soros's investment fund become the number three shareholder in Overstock, a retail company that accepts Bitcoin as payment and whose CEO Patrick Byrne is widely known for his pro-crypto stance.