TVP launches a bitcoin-native institutional investment fund series

By Edlyn Cardoza

Trammell Venture Partners, a leading-edge venture capital firm, announced the closing of the venture industry’s first fund in a new series dedicated specifically to backing founders building on the Bitcoin/Lightning Network protocol stack. The TVP Bitcoin Venture Fund series leads the industry into this critical area for dedicated venture investment, shrinking the existing gap in venture funding for Bitcoin-focused founders and unleashing a torrent of new energy into the early-stage crypto market.

“Over the years, the Bitcoin community has rightly been extremely cautious about making changes to Bitcoin Core, but the development of Bitcoin’s protocol stack layers has been steady. We’ve been waiting for the right moment to lean into our North Star: Bitcoin,” said Christopher Calicott, TVP managing director and founding partner.

“Key Bitcoin ecosystem infrastructural pieces such as increasing channel capacity in the Lightning Network, robust growth in Bitcoin-backed credit markets, and other factors are beginning to give rise to a Bitcoin-native application layer. Now is the time to accelerate investment in the Bitcoin space,” Calicott added. “Increasingly, founders are building on the internet’s base monetary layer. Bitcoin has already won that title; it’s just not evenly recognized yet. The TVP Bitcoin Venture Fund series exists to accelerate that inevitability by backing founders building the future iconic brands of the emergence of a new sound monetary order—the last facet of our world still untouched by positive disruption.”

Since Bitcoin’s early days, TVP partners have experienced the challenges of being extremely long on Bitcoin while still desiring the opportunity to invest in other alternative asset classes. TVP has previously made investments around Bitcoin-derived credit markets and saw an opportunity to lead the vanguard. “No one should ever feel they have to sell bitcoin to make other worthwhile investments. TVP is becoming a platform, solving for the needs of other investors like us,” Calicott said. With this fund, TVP launched the industry’s first institutional feeder fund to allow investors to use bitcoin as base collateral to access alternative asset classes like venture capital.

“Investors should never have to liquidate bitcoin in order to invest, and at an institutional level that begins with our novel feeder fund approach,” noted Dustin D. Trammell, TVP founding partner.

Calicott added, “We’re eating our own cooking using Bitcoin’s protocol-native custody model to secure bitcoin over the length of the fund in order to invest without giving up our upside in bitcoin, which will be available for other investors in the future.” This new approach provides TVP with a rare opportunity to innovate while nudging the industry toward new Bitcoin-specific credit arrangements, term lengths, and facility types while also hinting at the longer end of the bitcoin interest rate curve. “Safe, secure return and yield from pristine collateral is the future for long-term holders of bitcoin.”

TVP Bitcoin Venture Fund I is also set apart in another important way: the capital was formed entirely from investors aligned on Bitcoin’s value proposition, values, and mission. This includes limited partners and an array of TVP advisors also investing in the fund, including Ryan Gentry, Robert Breedlove, Mark Moss, Stephen Cole, Lyle Pratt, Cory Klippsten, Yan Pritzker, Louis Liu, Karthik Srinivasan, Allan Stevo, and Will Cole.

Recently, prolific Bitcoin angel investor Stephen Cole joined TVP as a venture partner to source select fund deals. “I’m excited to share TVP’s vision for and focus on a bitcoin-based future. With this fund we’re positioning for the type of long-term value creation we believe can reshape not only fintech but the internet, venture capital, and even the global monetary system. In a sea of crypto noise, TVP is Bitcoin signal,” Cole said.