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Earn-to-move token Since its launch in March, STEPN has gone up by 920 percent. A crypto VC at a $120 million fund talks about two good alternatives to keep an eye on

'I spoke with someone who was using STEPN, and they informed me that walking one mile cost them $500,' said Viktor Fischer, a crypto venture capitalist.

"Blockchain for me represents freedom," said Viktor Fischer, managing partner of the Rockaway blockchain fund.

Fischer was born and raised in Czechoslovakia, which he says was a communist country with little freedom until it broke up in 1989.

Fischer said in an interview during Crypto Bahamas that we couldn't go abroad. "We couldn't even get a different kind of money."

Fischer became interested in blockchain technology because of how he was raised.

Fischer said, "It really lets everyone use the same financial services." "This is why I became so interested in it."

Now, he runs the Rockaway blockchain fund, which is Europe's largest blockchain and decentralized finance fund. Its website says that it is in charge of $120 million in assets.

The fund gives investors direct access to projects like solana, cosmos, uniswap, and vega. It also gives investors access to top crypto investment firms like Multicoin Capital and Framework Ventures.

In a tougher macro environment, traditional venture capital fundraising has started to slow down, but crypto fundraising is still going strong.

Crypto VC funding chart from JPMorgan research note
Crypto VC funding chart from JPMorgan research note 

Rockaway has an advantage in these deals because it gets in early and helps founders build, whether that means running validators, giving yield, building smart contracts, or even setting up hacker houses.

Fischer said, "We are mostly engineers." "We are in charge of staking. We also have a yield fund, through which we give liquidity to protocols. This helps them get started because the TVL grows faster, and they can use the money we lend them to get their operations going."

Rockaway helps with things like the management of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

"DAOs don't always work, and they're not really independent. So there has to be someone who puts regular calls on the calendar and basically tells the guys that there should be an update of a new version. When you are early, someone has to do it. Most of the time, it's not the founders because they have other things to do, like building or coding."

Fischer invests with an engineering mind, but he doesn't want to get involved if one of the projects he backs fails. Wormhole, a cross-chain bridge, was recently hacked and lost $320 million. When this happened, Jump Crypto stepped in to backstop it.

Fischer says that Jump Crypto's backing of wormhole made sense because it was a project in their own ecosystem, but venture capital firms are different.

Fischer said, "We don't want to save projects because I think it sets a bad example." "Both the founders and the VCs need to be responsible to make sure that hackers don't cause problems."

"Once you save them, what do they have to lose?" he asked.

Even though cross chain bridges have security problems, Fischer is putting a lot of money into them and oracles.

"We think that cross chain bridges are where it's at right now," said Fischer, who recently put money into a cross chain bridge company called Axelar.

The work-to-earn trend

As STEPN (GMT) takes off, he's also keeping a close eye on the move-to-earn and work-to-earn trends.

Players earn cryptocurrency by walking, running, or jogging in STEPN, a Web 3.0 game. According to CoinMarketCap, the currency has grown 900 percent since its inception in March, from $0.15 on March 9 to $1.44 on Monday. Fischer, on the other hand, is skeptical of the business strategy.

"I met with someone who used STEPN, and they informed me that walking one mile cost them $500," Fischer said. "However, STEPN has a different economic strategy; it's basically just that when you do anything, you get tokens, but there's no advantage to you doing this task."

Instead, Fischer looks to other market participants such as Helium, a decentralized wireless internet network where people work but the output is valuable to someone else. He cites two companies that are doing so:

1) Hivemapper

Hivemapper pays individuals to collect map data using a dashcam and in return receives HONEY tokens. The company aims to create a community owned map network where individuals will buy map credits using HONEY to then access the dataset.

2) RealityMaps

RealityMaps is a 360-degree imagery dataset platform on the solana network.

Individuals submit high quality photos of urban areas and in return receive RealityCoin for their work once verified by the network.

Enterprise companies then use RealityCoin to access and pay for RealityMap data.

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