A fireside chat with Mint Ventures, a research-driven investment firm
Mint Ventures is an established and widely recognized venture capital firm that has successfully weathered the long crypto winter and countless market turns and high-impact events such as the FTX collapse that have driven many other players out of the market. Mint Ventures supports the development and growth of promising Web3 initiatives and is widely regarded as a leading investment firm – one that continues to blaze new trails in the crypto and blockchain spaces for others to follow.
We recently sat with Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures, and Blair Zhu, Brand Director at Mint Ventures, to talk about Mint Ventures, the team’s achievements, the future of Web3, how the firm has survived a harsh crypto landscape, and some of the underlying themes that will define progress in the crypto, blockchain, and Web3 spaces in the future.
Interviewer: Welcome to our show! So glad you could make it.
Alex & Blair： Thank you for having us, very happy to be here!
So just to square things up, our readers are most interested in learning more about your company, the team, and your investment thesis, as well as recent investments or initiatives and where you see important Web3 trends heading in the future.
Sounds good, let’s get to it!
Great! So, the first thing is if you could walk us through what Mint Ventures is, who is on the team, and what kinds of projects you specifically look at.
Blair: We primarily fund promising blockchain companies with positive and proven fundamentals and help them propel their business forward. In addition to private investments in emerging projects, we have participated in secondary markets as well by analyzing project fundamentals and getting involved where it makes sense to do so.
Besides, we call ourselves a research-driven venture firm. That means we do a lot of research into the projects that have built traction and are recognized in the crypto community by both users and high-net-worth individuals. We are aiming to produce independent research papers on various Web3 sectors and projects so that we can bring Web3 inclusion to everyone.
How much experience does Mint Ventures have in the blockchain industry?
Blair: We have very deep expertise in blockchain and have very prominent and recognized serial entrepreneurs and innovators on our team. We use our team’s integrated experiences, networks, and research capabilities to find tailored solutions to the recurring challenges faced by early-stage projects, including but not limited to strategic planning, business modeling, product development, and marketing.
Given the cumulative experience and deep expertise of the team, can you please outline how Mint Ventures approaches due diligence when making investment decisions, given the recent scandals we have seen in the market regarding the FTX crash?
Blair: Firstly, since we are a firm believer of value investing, we do not follow the hype without first performing our own comprehensive analysis. We do our due diligence and spend the time and effort needed to understand current trends in all Web3 sectors to determine the optimal investments based on that research. Our dynamic investment criteria also ensure that we take all possibilities into account so that our investments have the maximum upside with the minimum risk possible.
Alex: Absolutely. We manage our fund and allocate our resources wisely with proper due diligence and restricted risk management. To illustrate this point, consider the following. There are so many uncertainties for crypto start-ups… But with our multi-layer research and diligence, we can eliminate many of these unknowns even before we formally kick off the initial investment review process. Next, when reviewing the management team, market potential, product or service fit, and business model of the project – all while taking the relevant regulations into consideration – we can assess the fit for new projects and evaluate the amount of support and the proactiveness of the team based on a few simple criteria. We do the same for the resilience, integrity, and vision of the leadership team to make sure the projects we partner with are highly sustainable.
Based on the existing market conditions and future predictions, only those projects that are built on solid demand and provide practical solutions to long-lasting problems can survive. The entrepreneurs that join such projects purely out of speculation will end up being washed out, which leaves more room for good projects to grow, and those are the opportunities we strive to identify and work with.
Can you tell us about some of the projects you have been involved with in the past?
Blair: Sure, we focus on business opportunities in multiple areas of Web3 and have a proven track record of building a well-diversified portfolio and being a value-added asset to the companies we have invested in. These include successful projects such as Immutable X, NFTGo, Filecoin, 4everland, Casper, Cobak, WEB3 Port, FOTA, Ultiverse and many more.
So, if someone out there wants to work with you, what kinds of blockchain startups do you look at and what competencies are the most important to you and the Mint Ventures team?
Alex: We are looking for disrupters with a resilient, innovative, and ambitious team. These factors are key. If you have them, we’d love to talk! We can provide practical solutions to long-standing problems by leveraging blockchain’s core features and designing a winning economic circular flow that works perfectly for your business model. But you need the people, the groundbreaking idea, and the passion and ambition to make it happen if you want to work with us.
Sounds great! Moving to Web3, what is the value of Web3 and what is your vision for it?
Alex: In a nutshell, Web3 brings greater freedom and better, lower-cost trust to markets and transactions. Freedom comes in many forms, such as freedom at the monetary level, which is the freedom to create free accounts, being free to transfer money, and the property rights in the account being owned only by the user and free from appropriation by force. It also means freedom of collaboration and contracting, freedom to monetize your identity, the freedom to combine products like LEGO blocks to build more and better services, and freedom of open copyright by opening up IP copyrights so that they are public goods – resources that are not exclusive to use, such as open knowledge.
Because of these freedoms, the blockchain-based Web3 world has created the largest free market in human history. It also undoes the need for trust built on violent authorities, customs, cultures, or integrated consensus for people to collaborate and resolve divergences. Web3 does away with all of that and provides a new trust system that is based on a transparent public ledger on the blockchain, open-source traceable contract code, and unbreakable cryptography.
In this way, people will be more comfortable with interacting and transferring money with contracts, issuing their artwork and authenticating their rights simply, and doing so much more in Web3 because they know that their assets are difficult to misappropriate by force.
Given this background, we aim to build a diversified portfolio and being a value-added resource to the companies we have invested in. We also strive to bring Web3 inclusion to everyone by producing educational content in the form of research reports, podcasts, YouTube interviews with Web3 founders, and more. We also hope to bridge the gap between blockchain and crypto communities and projects in the east and the west thanks to our strong background and presence in Asian markets.
We have time for one final question, so can you tell us what, in your opinion, will be the next big development in Web3 and blockchain?
Alex: We believe that billions of Web2 users will gradually migrate to Web3. The public chain and protocols of future Web3 infrastructure will have the processing capacity of tens of millions of transactions per second, as well as the richness of the application layer that will far surpass the Web2 world, and all of it will have ownership of users themselves. There is perhaps no historical equivalent or corollary to this mass migration of data, ownership, wealth, value, applications, processes, businesses, IP, and so much more, and it is all built on the underlying value proposition of a user owned-and-controlled Web3 world, and that is the world that Mint Ventures is focused on building today.
Thanks very much for sharing that! The impact factor of your work is sure to be felt in markets, verticals, and industries across the globe. Thank you once again for your time and insights and we wish you and Mint Ventures the very best!
Alex & Blair: Thanks for having us, and best wishes to you and your team as well!