Key Takeaways
- Andreessen Horowitz is one of the most accomplished investors in the technology and cryptocurrency space.
- Despite its impressive track record, the firm has made some blunders over the years.
- Some of its worst bets include OpenBazaar, Diem, Basis, and BitClout.
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Andreessen Horowitz established itself as a crypto heavyweight by placing winning bets on industry mainstays like Uniswap, Solana, and Sky Mavis early on. The firm also launched a record-breaking $4.5 billion crypto fund in May 2022, highlighting its commitment to blockchain technology. But even Silicon Valley’s top players make investment blunders from time to time. Here are some of the top failed crypto projects Andreessen Horowitz has made bad bets on over the past few years.
Andreessen Horowitz and OpenBazaar
OpenBazaar was an early crypto project with links to Bitcoin’s dark market era. The project attempted to create a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace for goods and services, akin to an open-source version of eBay with cryptocurrency payments.
OpenBazaar was coded by Bitcoin developer Amir Taaki and a group of programmers from the startup Airbitz as part of a Toronto Bitcoin hackathon in April 2014. However, the project’s creators later abandoned it, and the code was adopted and rebranded to OpenBazaar by a new team of developers. The first version launched on April 4, 2016.
As OpenBazaar, the project attracted interest from several of crypto’s top venture capital firms. Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Digital Currency Group all backed OpenBazaar through its seed funding rounds. Andreessen Horowitz contributed to OpenBazaar’s $1 million and $3 million seed rounds as well as a later $5 million Series A raise. According to data from Crunchbase, OB1, the company developing OpenBazaar, received more than $9 million in venture capital funding throughout its life.
However, despite its early success and ample funding, OpenBazaar…
