| | November 20188Forget Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and focus on blockchain and digital assetsBy Andrew Romans is a General Partner at VC funds7BC.VC and Rubicon Venture CapitalI was a founder of a tech telecom VoIP startup in the mid 1990s that raised over $100m in VC funding, went into a NASDAQ IPO and then experienced the 2001 dot-com telecom meltdown. When the Internet came along in 1993 it totally energized me and years later I cofounded Rubicon Venture Capital which has enjoyed consistent top decile returns as an early stage VC fund based in Silicon Valley and New York City. A few years ago, I became infected with the blockchain bug which was a bit like the second coming of the Internet but this time appeared to have a much more noble purpose. Blockchain technology would make it impossible to lie, steal or make human accounting and payment errors. The crypto market took off in 2016 and 2017 and then had a fantastic crash in January of 2018 and the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) market somewhat crashed and stalled. Despite what I viewed as a noble purpose many entrepreneurs just saw the blockchain and more specifically the ICO as a way of raising funding for pre-seed otherwise unfundable projects and startups. What we then witnessed was a sea of startups raise capital in a wave of crowdfunding2.0 that not only raised capital quickly from unsophisticated retail investors much like crowdfunding1.0, but this time they listed almost immediately on cryptocurrency exchanges providing unforeseen rapid liquidity. Then in January 2018 and until now most of these tokens have been devalued to their accurate price which is near zero ­ not a great time to start a digital asset hedge fund.What we have seen now is a return to professional venture capital investing in this new emerging sector with old school levels of due diligence. Despite me seeing blockchain technology as a way of making business, government and society more honest, I see enormous confusion and lack of education which prompted me to write this article. The word cryptocurrency and things like Bitcoin have very much confused a lot of people about the transformational watershed shift that is actually happening here. The first time many folks hear of Bitcoin their first thought is, "Hmm, this sounds like it is ideal for drug dealers and terrorists to instantly move capital from one location to another globally without any government or bank paying attention." Our first thoughts when we heard of Bitcoin was for nefarious uses and the word currency in cryptocurrency led most of us to think the purpose of this stuff was to be a proxy for USD, Euros, Sterling, Yen, etc., which it is not. I also think the word "crypt" scares people like some Andrew Romans OPINION
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