Kevin Rose on crypto winters, pseudonymous founders and his buzzy Moonbirds NFT project

Kevin Rose, a serialentrepreneur whose efforts, including most famously, Digg, have been well covered in TechCrunch over the past couple decades, spoke with Chain Reaction this week.

Rose is a partner at True Venture, but his latest project is an NFT startup called Proof Collective, which recently launched a much-hyped 10,000 NFT collection of pixelated owls. Rose and his partners banked $80 million off the primary sale of the Moonbirds project, and are using that money plus a much more conventional $10 million funding round led by Ohanian's venture firm Seven Seven Six.

Rose says they are in this to build a big, massive, brand new kind of media company from the ground up.

The Moonbirds are currently trading for around 25 Eth, which is about $50k at today's prices, though the exchange rate has taken a bit of a haircut in recent weeks. In our conversation, we talked about the recent market downturn, which Rose said was a risk in the midst of a very long journey away from currencies.

If nothing fundamentally about the mechanics behind the scenes has changed, which I guess obviously is not the case when it comes to something like UST or Luna, but if everything else is sound in terms of the technical infrastructure behind the scenes for Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever.

The retreat in public markets over the past couple weeks has been modest, but last week's aggressive retreat knocked firms with large holdings particularly hard. Rose says his firm isn't looking to be proactive in order to try and avoid a bear market.

We have never sold a token, so we can say we are not in this to flip it. I don't care if we're sitting on a 20x or 50x, or negative 50% discount to the token price, we believe that it will take you a decade to build something really substantial.

Over the past couple years, Venture firms have found a lot of new backers to invest in funds and vehicles that are focused onCryptocurrencies. Rose believes that most backers know what they are getting into when they back these LPs.

I think that individualLPs wouldn't invest in a fund if they didn't understand the multiples that they were hoping for and the risks that they were taking on.

We discuss his mixed feelings towards the metaverse, the challenges facing pseudonymous founders and web3's inclusion problems in the interview above.

Crypto VCs can’t just buy ‘community’

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