“Bringing more investors into the cap table means more relationships to manage, but that’s ultimately what we needed. We needed to have investors throughout the regions where we’re growing the fastest.”
The company originated within high-profile Silicon Valley online marketplace AngelList, which at the time was best known for linking start-up founders with potential investors. It does a similar thing for those issuing new crypto tokens, by linking them with investors, and has helped blue-chip projects such as filecoin and solana find capital.
Its big funding round includes investors from Asia, Europe and the Middle East, with Accomplice VC and Agman Partners co-leading the round, alongside venture capitalist and MIT fintech professor Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Taavet+Sten, Metaplant, Alphemy Capital, Continue Capital, CMT Digital, DFG Capital Management, Fenbushi Capital, GoldenTree Asset Management and Metaplanet.
“When a firm is raising money, either through [an initial coin offering] or traditional equity [initial public offering], they need a trusted adviser to bring them to market,” Mr Rhodes-Kropf said.
“With equities, there is Goldman; in ICOs there is CoinList.”
While he is not well known in Australia, Mr Jenkin has been working in senior technology roles in big-name companies for more than 20 years.
They say that software is eating the world, but we’re seeing decentralised software eat software.
— Graham Jenkin, CoinList.
A civil-turned-software engineer, he held plum jobs at Bank of America, then Google and, while at AngelList, was responsible for amendments to US laws that protect investors participating in both equity crowdfunding and token sales through the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act).
It was an example of his political leanings from the 1990s showing through.
Mr Jenkin was instrumental behind the scenes at the Australian Democrats, building a sophisticated online presence for the party at a time when others in Canberra viewed the internet as an afterthought. His views on protecting crypto investors hark back to those times.
“There used to be this slogan of the Australian Democrats, ‘Keep the bastards honest’,” Mr Jenkin said.
“That’s not to say centralised institutions are bastards, but the way we build distributed software has elements of radical transparency, which is a pretty good thing in some areas of our societies.”
Mr Jenkin said his association with the Australian Democrats ended abruptly with Ms Kernot’s defection, which left him feeling angry and adrift.
“I became so disillusioned after she did that, it really threw me for a loop,” Mr Jenkin said. “So I just packed up and went to the Mecca for computer scientists.”
Mecca was Silicon Valley in the throes of the dotcom bubble, where he picked up work as a design lead at Bank of America, then spent four years at Google, before snatching up a role as one of the first employees at AngelList.
Mr Jenkin said he likens the current crypto scene to the explosive mania of the dotcom bubble.
“A lot of people that didn’t have any discernible skills seemed to be doing really well; it does feel a bit like that now sometimes,” he said.
Need for regulation
He was first introduced to bitcoin while working with AngelList co-founder and chief executive Naval Ravikant and its chief technology officer, Joshua Slayton.
Mr Jenkin said Mr Slayton was “drawn to fringe movements” such as the “cypherpunks” behind bitcoin and the dark web marketplace Silk Road, where he witnessed people buying things online with “this weird internet money”.
He said he was initially suspicious about the legitimacy of bitcoin enabling people to buy all manner of things outside the traditional financial system.
“I was trying to understand how the hell he was doing it, I was sure someone was going to track him down,” Mr Jenkin said.
But bitcoin, and its underlying decentralised technology, was just one of hundreds of new applications coming through the AngelList doors, and it was not until 2015 when ethereum, the smart-contract-enabled blockchain, had its ICO that Mr Jenkin saw his opportunity.
“These ICOs were really interesting mechanisms for raising capital,” he said.
“We’d been obsessed with the democratisation of investing and fundraising for years, and this was a more pure form of crowdfunding because we’re talking about thousands of people holding these liquid tokens that represent some stake in the success of the enterprise, as opposed to just a couple of hundred investors.”
Just as crowdfunding portals had needed to comply with federal securities law and protect investors from scam projects, Mr Jenkin said he could see that token-based crowdfunding would need to operate within a similar regulatory environment.
However, the frenzied activity of the ICO boom jumped ahead of any regulations.
Stories of hundreds of millions of dollars disappearing through scam ICOs and anonymous people raising eye-watering sums with next to no development plan, dominated headlines, before the bubble burst spectacularly in 2018.
“It was hard for us, the volume of deals was lower, and we were raising much smaller rounds after the crash,” Mr Jenkin said.
“But it also washed out so much of the noise, and because we had this reputation for doing things above board and with a focus on compliance, it made finding quality projects much easier.”
Since then, CoinList’s growth has exploded alongside the growing adoption of blockchain-based technologies and the proliferation of DeFi, or decentralised finance, which is replacing traditional banking mechanisms with blockchain software.
CoinList now has four lines of business. In addition to token sales, it now handles trading, lending and staking, which is seeing rapid uptake in markets such as Turkey, Venezuela, Russia, Japan and Britain.
Jenkin expects CoinList to keep evolving alongside the decentralisation theme with its expansion plans targeting every continent, and can see “decentralised social” as the next industry vertical in the pipeline.
“That’s probably the next wave, decentralising crypto projects on social platforms Discord and Telegram,” he said.
“They say that software is eating the world, but we’re seeing decentralised software eat software because it can run indefinitely. We’ve got ringside seats to this.”
