Super excited to double down on Caldera with Founders Fund
and Sequoia Capital in their quest to innovate at Ethereum's frontier and bring a billion users into crypto.
We're excited to announce our $15M Series A funding round led by Founders Fund to build the Metalayer, a unified rollup ecosystem on Ethereum.
Over the past two years, we've had the honor of working with top web3 teams like ApeCoin, Manta Network (MANTA), Rarible, INJECTIVE, Plume Network, and others to deploy high-performance, customizable rollups on Ethereum. Caldera chains cumulatively hold over $800M in total value locked (TVL), having executed more than 60M blockchain transactions.
Even though Ethereum Layer 2 and Layer 3 rollups have helped scale its blockchain network to millions of users, the rollup landscape itself remains widely fragmented. Ethereum can't reach web-scale without seamless connectivity between its various rollup frameworks.
The Metalayer is the final frontier of Ethereum and will help it reach web-scale.
We're honored to receive the backing of the incredible teams at Lattice, ArkStream Capital, TrueBridge Capital Partners and others and couldn't be more proud to have Sequoia Capital, Dragonfly doubling down after leading our seed round last year.
More on our blog by Matthew K. & Parker Jou: https://lnkd.in/djpYBQqn
We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Prodia!
Like many others, Dragonfly has been watching the galaxies of crypto and AI collide; we suspect that this intersection will produce some of the most generational companies of this era.
And we think that Prodia perfectly fits this mold.
Their image generation API has generated over 300 million images in the cheapest and most performant way possible. On the surface, according to Bloomberg, the generative AI market is set to expand to $1.3 trillion by 2030.
And yet, this demand requires, in turn, a tremendous amount of chips, but the market is currently fragmented on the supply side.
Interested parties must typically go to a large vendor like AWS or GCP today, sign multi-year contracts, and have to pay per compute hour.
Many companies overpay because they have to include projections of expected demand – high demand means they have to pay above market rates for these GPUs at peak time, including when demand is normal most of the time.
If there is a spike in usage, it will often temporarily make the customer’s service unusable or slow down inference. Conversely, if there is not enough usage, the customer is wasting money by letting GPUs run empty as they have already paid for the supply.
Prodia swiftly sidesteps this issue by charging per generation, meaning all their performance benefits go straight to the consumer, alongside unrivaled optimization on their backend to juice speed.
It’s cheaper because the customer doesn’t have to spend engineering efforts to deploy nodes, maintain servers, and design complicated servers to reduce empty GPU capacity.
It's the equivalent of serverless compute for AI — paying only for your workload, rather than for the underlying hardware, and allowing the vendor to manage the load balancing and hardware efficiency.
Ultimately, the Prodia team has done this before: they previously worked on Storj, one of crypto’s OG projects in storage.
Ultimately, we’re incredibly grateful to be on this adventure with them and can’t wait as they unveil more over the ensuing months.
We raised $15M and couldn't be prouder of the team and honored to have started Prodia with Shawn Wilkinson & Monty Anderson. Excited to get closer to building an AI-powered future that is more accessible, democratic, and open.
Reflecting on our journey, it feels like destiny. We've been experimenting with generative AI for years. After the release of Stable Diffusion, we launched an app to simplify access and were blown away by the response.
Over 100K users signed up in under 2 months! Think of the scene in Silicon Valley with GPUs on fire—that was our reality, with some hardware still running in our basement.
Getting GPUs from traditional cloud providers was nearly impossible. Fortunately, I was working with two experts in distributed systems. We just launched our own distributed GPU cloud because we had to.
From that point on, our mission became clear: to ensure a world with open and equal access to AI, a distributed compute system must exist. A future where you can contribute to the network or access the best models is the future we envision.
Thank you to our amazing investors, would not be possible with you. Anirudh P.Patrick DaiJeremy VossMatthew Roszak Balaji S. Timothy ChenJermaine BrownAllen NanceCurtis ChengErik HuddlestonAmit VasudevLauren FeldZachary GinsburgSajid RahmanRyan CondronXan DitkoffNicolas PintoThomas FranceShawn LimSalvador GalaEtiënne V.HashKey GroupLeon MarshallMarlon WilliamsJason KamRichard Dai, CFAKenzi WangNicky MontanaMatthias BuschleJason ChoiBenson Y.
And also all the folks I couldnt find on Linkedin :)
Today, we are proud to call some of the largest image generators in the world our customers. With a recently launched low-latency API, we’ve achieved best-in-class generation times. Try it here: https://sdxl.lol/
"Chevron Doctrine" overturned!
In a landmark decision, the US Supreme Court has overturned the long-standing "Chevron Doctrine" in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, marking a pivotal shift in agency authority. This decision, splitting along conservative/liberal lines, ends decades of judicial deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous laws.
My take on the implications for ongoing and future cases:
Ever wondered why software companies can release buggy software often without being found liable?
In my recent TheLawVerse.com blog post, I explore the legal barriers and industry norms that protect tech giants from liability. From contractual moats to recent case law trends, discover the factors that allow these companies to dodge legal bullets.
🔗 : https://lnkd.in/gRSRUmaN
Excited to hang with a few long-time friends to discuss what we've observed as a crypto VC talent team (and they as a crypto talent agency) wrt/:
📈 Market trends
🛠️ Role demands
💁 Candidate sentiment
💵 How VC investments shape career opportunities
🤔 and more, plus live Q&A.
Mark your calendars for this Thursday @ 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET. Hope to see you there. :)
Crypto: State of the Market w/ Zack Skelly & Chris Ahsing (Dragonfly x PoT)
Join us as we welcome Zackary Skelly (Head of Talent) and Chris Ahsing (Talent Partner) of Dragonfly, two of the brightest minds in VC and Crypto talent, to a deep dive into the current trends shaping Crypto and Venture Capital!
China offloaded a record $53.3bn of US treasuries and Agency bonds in the first quarter, putting global dollarization at risk. We are slowly entering into an currency "cold war" as dollarization becomes a new battlefield. Congress needs to quickly realize that stablecoin proliferation is an obvious weapon in our arsenal, and push forward on regulatory clarity. If that happens, the $15tn eurodollar market is in sight for the overtaking.
I talked about this a couple weeks ago with Will Beeson, CFA on the Rebank podcast. Check out the below clip or listen to the broader conversation on their feed.
Had a great time chatting with Talia Kaplan yesterday on CNBC's Crypto world. We talked about a lot of topics, but check out this quick snippet below on how Dragonfly is approaching this market and how the venture market is evolving more broadly.
I’m very proud to have submitted a Comment Letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on behalf of Dragonfly on the proposed rule on impersonations. This rule could impact anyone who creates tools and services that are used downstream in impersonation scams—yes, that includes any AI software company and developer!
Both AI and crypto are transformative technologies that face similar challenges, such as regulatory uncertainty and accountability. Despite these issues, these technologies provide significant mutual benefits:
1. Blockchain technology enhances AI transparency and mitigates deepfake risks.
2. Blockchain also democratizes access to AI development resources.
Given the continued convergence of these technologies and the likely expansion within our investment portfolio, we felt compelled to write this letter to support the development of a nascent industry, its creators, and our current and future portfolio companies. After all, imposing broad liability on software companies for issues like unlawful deepfakes is a slippery slope, as software code is safeguarded as free speech under the First Amendment.
Just like Gutenberg's printing press, software developers are neutral parties who equip others with the tools to innovate freely. Restricting these tools could stifle innovation, free expression, and technological progress, potentially missing revolutionary ideas and breakthroughs.
We hope the FTC will consider our recommendations, focusing enforcement on those who misuse this zeitgeist technology for harmful ends.
A big thank you to all the AI folks who spoke to me and voiced their opinions on regulation. Your insights have been invaluable, and I hope this letter helps the furtherance of dialogue between regulators and industry.
Full Letter: https://lnkd.in/gGN6hUC7
🤖 Confused by all the legalities of AI? In this LawVerse blog post, co-authored with Anahita Arora, we explore the multifaceted legal challenges emerging in the rapidly evolving AI sector. From regulation and intellectual property to privacy and competition law, we've outlined a robust framework to help legal professionals navigate this complex landscape.
Whether you're an AI developer, a legal practitioner, product manager or just fascinated by the intersection of tech and law, this article offers a 360 perspective on a nascent industry.
🔗: https://lnkd.in/gS_gCsRX#ArtificialIntelligence#LegalTech#AIRegulation#IntellectualProperty#DataPrivacy#AI
