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RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖
Open Deals, Portfolio Updates, Crypto News, RBV Fund I Closing & More
Joshua Howard
March 22, 2023
RBV Weekly Newsletter🧔📖: Open Deals, Portfolio Updates, Crypto News, RBV Fund I Closing & More
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It’s an exciting time for RBV, as we just announced a partnership with Outlier Ventures in their new Zero Knowledge Base Camp. This is an accelerator specifically for Web3 companies developing or utilizing Zero Knowledge Proofs. These proofs have tremendous potential to improve many aspects of the Web3 tech stack, and this partnership is our first foray into the accelerator space (but it will not be our last!). We decided to make this investment out of the fund, as well as the mentorship and guidance we will provide to the cohort companies, in an effort to gain very early exposure to companies utilizing this tech.
You can read more about ZK Base Camp HERE
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🚨 TLDR: This Week in Crypto
Magic Eden dips toes into Bitcoin Ordinals
Coinbase goes to Supreme Court
Elizabeth Warren blasts crypto audits
Bitcoin back up to 28k
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📣 As a reminder, Red Beard Ventures has both a syndicate and fund:
The Red Beard Ventures Syndicate is stage agnostic and invests in Frontier Technology with a focus on Web3, Space, FinTech, Robotics, Biotech, and Climate. We invest anywhere between $100k - $1.5M.
The Red Beard Ventures Fund I invests $250k - $1M in Pre-seed and Seed blockchain-based companies. Our 2nd and final close will be March 31, 2023.
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🔔 Active Investment Opportunities:
Degen Labs: an NFT solution to sales commission in the gig economy
They’ve built TAP (Tokenized Affiliate Protocol), which allows for any organization permissionless access to a decentralized and globally distributed salesforce
Any company can connect to a globally distributed salesforce to reduce overheads
Salespeople can hold the NFT to accrue commission, or sell to value investors who want the passive income
Pilot program Degen Distillery has already partnered with UK’s largest pub chain
The Sandbox: Global leader and largest metaverse platform
$SAND is a Top 50 Cryptocurrency >$2B
$250M+ current virtual real estate LAND value
>$700M digital asset portfolio
$4.3M highest LAND price paid
~3X more LAND sales than competitor Decentraland
250K+ creators and brands are using the no-code tools to mind new items and experiences each month!
GET protocol: The Premium NFT Ticketing Solution
GET has been building NFT ticketing since 2016
They have a full range of ticketing products for event holders, from self-service to full concierge, and also whitelabel solutions
Issued nearly 3.4 Million tickets (1.7M in 2022 alone), over 17k events
Investment includes a token grant AND discounted token purchase rights
Colossal: A Real-Life Jurassic Park
Colossal is using genetic engineering to clone extinct species
The Woolly Mammoth is set to once again walk the Earth in 2027!
Their technology of reconstructing ancient DNA to the point of cloning is revolutionizing the biotech field
This is their series B, and we are co-syndicating with our friends at C3
They have signed ten LOIs with zoos for paid exhibits, with a projected $500M in yearly revenue
Simply Eggless: The Future of Egg Alternatives
Simply Eggless is the second-largest producer and supplier of plant-based eggs globally, with a revenue of $2M in 2022
Their products are sold in over 2.8k stores in North America and the company is looking to expand to 1k more stores, serving their massive popularity among Gen Z and Millennials
The main ingredient used by Eggless is lupin bean, which offers high protein, excellent baking functionality, and is environmentally friendly
The competitors in vegan egg alternatives all fall behind Simply Eggless, which has a much more versatile and shelf-stable product
Emerge: Real Touch Feedback in Virtual Worlds
Featured in the World Economic Forum and invested in by the best of the best
A16Z, Soma Capital, Eric Schmidt, and other industry leaders are in this round or converting their SAFE
This series B round is at a great valuation for how much the company has done, and is accelerated by a deal with Disney and Star Wars for a VR game Spring ‘23
Knights of Degen: Co-Founded by Drew Austin! Web3 Sports & Gaming Ecosystem + $10M in Sales + Acquired League DAO Defi Fantasy Protocol
KoD is building a meta-game for sports betting fans that rewards degen activities, from betting, to fantasy gaming, to building as a DAO contributor.
Assets of KOD include fantasy gaming software, bet2earn protocol, mobile application, media network, p2e gaming assets and teams, professional sports ownership stakes, nfts, and more.
The KOD Inc. cap table will be allocated 30% of the Degen Token market supply.
BoostVC (Coinbase, Etherscan, Alta, Wyre) is leading the round w/ participation from RBV Fund I
Seed, $30M Post-Money + Token
Blocklords: GoT Meets Axie - Revolutionizing Play-To-Earn Gaming
Blocklords already has 120k pre-registered for their play-to-earn game
The medieval-based game allows players to craft their narrative while simultaneously earning cryptocurrency for tasks they complete within the game (Play-to-earn model).
Blocklords is focusing on delivering value to the user first to build up the user base and ecosystem first - This approach seems to be working by their massive sign-up and connection numbers
Money earned can be used to progress in the game or traded on crypto exchanges.
Bitscraft, Delphi Digital, and Animoca Brands are all investing
SAFT, $100M FMV
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🥳 Upcoming Events:
In-person events are a great way to stay informed in our industry, so we are planning for a very full 2023. We would love to hear about any other conferences you will be attending this year, so please let us know as we are still planning our event calendar! We have provided our tentative list for 2023 below:
NFT NYC
Consensus
VeeCon
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🎙️ New Podcast Episode:
In this week's episode of The Girls Table, Elana Dickman, also known as TradingFemale is joined by Jacob Jaber who is currently the Co-founder & Chairman of Philz Coffee.
If you haven’t been to Philz Coffee yet, I must say you are missing out. Philz Coffee’s unique blends, community-oriented stores and one-cup-at-a-time approach have drawn a cult following nationwide. Founded by Phil (Jacobs Dad) with Jacob by his side, the first store opened in the Mission district of San Francisco in 2002. Jacob started running the business at the age of 18 and has since guided Philz to national expansion, opening more than 70 stores on the East and West coasts.
Philz has raised $75 million in venture capital, and the once-small Bay Area cult coffee shop is becoming a force to be reckoned with in the national coffee scene.
Watch the Latest Episode Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB8NHsReS9w
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🪙 Crypto News:
This is the first case heard by the SCOTUS that involves a the crypto industry
The case does not deal with digital assets per se, but a matter of arbitration freezing court proceedings
An inexact wording of a law passed by congress revealed this legal question
CBDC - Central Bank Digital Currency
Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed the bill, which would not recognize CBDCs as legal tender
Just last year, President Biden issued an executive order to study the uses and risks of CBDCs
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🗃️ Portfolio News:
The liquidity organization is designed for prediction markets, such as sports betting
Traditional liquidity pools are generally split into binary yes/no pools, which does not work for many real-world applications
Azuro based this off a Segment Tree, a computer science primitive
The Web3 browser created a quest with Layer3 to teach privacy and safety using the Brave Wallet
In its first day, the quest had over 500 users that completed the quest
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💸 NFT Alpha
The Bitcoin “NFTs” are now tradable on Magic Eden
ME will support Hiro and Xverse wallets, allowing traders to list and trade P2P
Three ordinal projects are the first to onboard users to ME - Taproot Wizards, Inscribed Pepes, and Bitcoin Bandits
“Quantum”, an NFT by Kevin McCoy, was sold at Sotheby’s for $1.47M
When the domain the NFT was hosted on expired, the company Free Holdings purchased it
The case relied on Free Holdings to assert that ownership of the hosted file translated to ownership of the NFT itself
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🎉 We had a successful first close for Red Beard Ventures Fund I, and started receiving commitments towards our second and final close. We would love to talk if you are interested in learning more about the fund, you can reply back to this message to schedule a time to speak with the team.
Below we have provided some additional information about RBV Fund I:
Red Beard Ventures Fund I is a full-stack web3 fund investing across blockchain consumer applications, infrastructure, gaming, the metaverse, and DeFI in both equity and tokens and Pre-Seed through Series A
Fund I closing March 31, 2023
We have completed 15 deals, deploying $6.5M in capital
All LPs in the fund will have their carry reduced by 50% (20% reduced to 10%) on any investments made via the syndicate going forward
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🤝 We are hiring!
We are looking for syndicate vertical leads in the following categories - if you are interested please reach out and we can discuss the opportunity in greater detail:
Biotech
Space
Robotics & Automation
Climate
Fintech & SaaS
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Onwards 🚀
Drew, Elana, Whit, Mitchell, and Lauren