Deepening Connections with Builders in Bogota
As the CoinFund team is looking forward to the events in Bogota next week, we feel a renewed sense of excitement at of course seeing familiar faces, but more importantly, meeting new people building the next generation of web3 tech enabling financial access, participation, and representation across LatAm. To help make the most of the opportunity, we wanted to prepare some thoughts on what we are most focused on for DevCon 6. The below is a series of Q&A-style responses between myself and Christian Murray from our investment team, to help frame some current areas of research that are relevant to us currently in a more readable format.
Christian: How is CoinFund thinking about LatAm web3 opportunities?
Evan: We’re looking at both teams that are based in Latin America, but also expats or any global team building for the emerging markets in LatAm. Some of our existing portfolio companies with large LatAm operations include Community Gaming (where it’s a major user growth driver), and we’ve also in the past diligenced LatAm-based projects building wallets, yield aggregators, NFT marketplaces, just to name a few.
Christian: What are your expectations for Bogota?
Evan: Given there are several events before, during and after Devcon itself, I expect to see and hear the cutting edge of research and development in a post-ETH2 merge world. I suspect the continued application of ZK-technologies to scaling and privacy will remain popular, while hearing how EVM-focused devs think of the progress other monolithic L1s are making will be a valuable data-point. Most importantly, I expect to hear some more granular detail on the path towards onboarding the next 100M users, especially given LatAm countries with weaker local currencies are the earlier adopters and experimenters at a state-level.
Christian: What are a couple things that interest you about LatAm investments?
Evan: While some US-centric investors may paint the entire region with a broad brush, we appreciate the geographic, linguistic, and cultural differences that actually result in a fair amount of heterogeneity across different countries. This may manifest in different cross-border settlement policies for fiat currencies that themselves differ in strength and convertibility, not to mention the varying attitudes of local governments to web3. Luckily, we have several members of the CoinFund team who are fluent in Spanish or Portuguese, grew up in the region, and/or have experience investing in LatAm in the past (at my prior hedge fund role, I covered telcos like América Móvil, Telefónica etc).
Christian: What are some unique synergies between LatAm and web3?
Evan: High smartphone penetration and burgeoning tech hubs like São Paulo, Mexico City, Santiago, Buenos Aires, and of course Bogotá have started closed ecosystem network effects uniquely positioned to help web3 token-driven products go to market. Specifically we have seen fast adoption and high participation by LatAm players and guilds in the first wave of the “play to earn” movement led by Axie Infinity. While the next big breakout game is still unclear, I’m positive that the Latin American player base will likely over-index.
Christian: How can founders get in touch?
Evan: I’ll be making sure to reserve time to mingle at conference events and satellite social events to say hello to anyone building and looking to get to know me / CoinFund better. If you want to send along any materials or a self-introduction beforehand to bogota@coinfund.io to reach the team on-site, please feel free to do so.
In conclusion, I’m thrilled at the prospect of gaining a better view of the user behaviors, tech trends, and core motivations of the devs and fans attending Devcon 6, and look forward to hanging out in person. Please feel free to reach out via email or Twitter DM if you’re building something cool!
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Evan Feng is a Partner on the CoinFund Investment team, where he also serves as the Director of Research.
Evan started his finance career at Barclays, completing the 2-year investment banking analyst program before graduating to fundamental long/short equities investing roles at Citadel, and later Point72, where he covered stocks in the tech, media and telecom sector. In his spare time, Evan enjoys spending time with family, gaming on all platforms, outdoor precision sports, and binging nonfiction books on Audible.
Evan grew up around Boston, Massachusetts before heading off to New York University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Accounting and a minor in Philosophy.
