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http://a16z.com/2015/03/11/21/

by mwilcox • 11 years ago

25 10 11 years ago

a16z.com

woah2• 11 years ago

What does 21 do?

pault2• 11 years ago

It's been speculated that they are developing a consumer-oriented hardware bitcoin wallet/node.

woah2• 11 years ago

This would indeed be very lucrative, as it is the missing component for adoption, IMO. I wonder why it's taken them 3 years though.

bgilroy26• 11 years ago

I didn't know either. It looks like they're a company who want to 'take bitcoin mainstream'

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/03/10/secretive-bitcoin-sta...

Mahn2• 11 years ago

According to CrunchBase [1]:

21 Inc is a Bitcoin mining pool. It is working on specially designed chips that will drive new equipment specifically aimed at doing this more efficiently

Though I guess that description is outdated now. Go figure. Perhaps they are randomly pivoting bitcoin stuff until something sticks?

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6

thesausageking• 11 years ago

His dual roles brings up up an interesting question:

If you're founder of a Bitcoin startup that's doing well and has its pick of investors, do you pitch a16z, knowing that the founder of what could be your largest competitor is a partner there ?

nostrademons• 11 years ago

I thought that a16z doesn't invest in multiple companies that are competitors. The reason they gave for not investing in companies that were likely to pivot was the Burbn => Instagram pivot, which put one of their investments (Instagram) into competition with another (PicPlz) [1].

This makes me really wonder what's up with 21, though, because a16z has already funded a major Bitcoin startup (Coinbase [2]), and did so after Balaji claims to have founded Instagram. Does that mean that 21 has no intention to become a Bitcoin payment processor or exchange?

[1] http://www.bhorowitz.com/instagram

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinbase

Mithaldu• 11 years ago

We just took the wraps off 21

Yet when going to that website it has literally no description of itself and demands your email address.

I can see this going two ways:

1. He's honest and 21 is just another way of harvesting email addresses.

2. He's dishonest and hasn't taken the wraps off anything.

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