Here’s the coverage of the announcement on TheBlock
The Move Ecosystem
After several meetings with Evan Cheng, the CEO of Mysten Labs, gumi Cryptos Capital continues to look for opportunities to support the Move ecosystem. In particular, since Sui is pre-mainnet, there may be some unique opportunities to make early-stage investments. We are fans of VM and language-level innovation in blockchain, a preference dating back to partner Miko Matsumura’s origins as the Chief developer evangelist for the Java programming language. Language-level innovation produces some initial friction but represents both a flywheel as well as a competitive moat. In particular, Sui Move has some very attractive properties including composability, language-level semantics on scarcity as well as unique mechanisms to parallelize execution that provides additional performance improvements in addition to the high performance characteristics of Narwhal, Tusk, and Bullshark consensus.
We also invested in Agoric, a JavaScript focused VM and novel L1 in the COSMOS ecosystem.
Overall, we believe that the Ethereum ecosystem is the most liquid and trusted smart contract platform. Our approach to investing outside of the ETH ecosystem is to look for 10x improvements over what is available in ETH. We do think that the Move language and ecosystem do provide such advantages.
Team Conviction
The CEO of Mysten Labs confirmed for us that the Ethos team had been working in Sui Move since the very early days of the ecosystem. We feel this type of conviction is important, as we are wary of “chain hoppers” who may be overly opportunistic. We’ve seen a number of teams who have exhibited this kind of frequent hopping from chain to chain. This kind of context-switching is costly and generally doesn’t enable a team to compete well with others who exhibit deep and lasting conviction. Obviously the counterpoint is that if the thesis (reason for their conviction) gets broken, then of course a pivot can be sensible.
Team
Nadia Eldeib fits our template for what we call “gumicorn” founders. Having been a starter for four years on the NCAA Division 1 Harvard fencing team and having been a Resident athlete at the US Olympic Training Center and training with Olympians, she has a strong competitive spirit in a sport that combines a profound degree of self-reliance as well as a team aspect. Her professional experience includes a 3 year and 4 month tour of duty as a product manager at Lyft. Between Nadia and her technical cofounder Jared Cosulich, they represent our favorite template for an early pre-product-market-fit startup team–namely one experienced product person and one hands-on engineering person.
Approach
The Ethos approach to wallet is focused on app discovery and integration. Therefore it is equally appropriate to look at Ethos from an “App Store” perspective. Obviously many cross-chain wallets that support Sui Move will exist, but having a “Sui Native” wallet that focuses on utility, integration and app discovery represents both a logical and necessary component of the Sui Ecosystem. As an official Sui partner with Mysten Labs, Ethos is in a strong position to become the de-facto standard wallet for the Sui Ecosystem. Ethos wallet is open source software, which gives it a stronger case for standardization and allows for faster ecosystem development, better integration and represents a proven way to create secure, reliable and well maintained software.
Conclusion
gCC continues to steadily invest out of our $110M fund II through this bearish cycle for web3. We continue to look for ambitious, visionary and world-class builders applying their skills in fast-growing and well considered innovation areas in blockchain. We are proud and excited to work with world-class entrepreneurs like the team at Ethos Wallet.
Disclaimer
Information is provided for general educational purposes only. This presentation is not an offer to sell securities or a solicitation of offers to buy securities. Nothing contained herein constitutes investment or other advice nor is it to be relied on in making an investment decision. For more important information, please see disclaimer
