I applaud the general idea: Have Jupiter DAO do some VC investments.
Why not?
Jupiter has the leverage to make deals (and hey: FTX’s Anthropic stake was worth 1.4B by the time the bankruptcy proceedings were in full flight).
But the deal makes not a lot of sense. Not at this stage in the game.
Why would Huma, with a solid fintech pedigree outside of crypto (though EarnIn is currently coming under fire for alleged predatory lending), give such a steep discount to Jupiter DAO over actual VCs?
I know there’s the crypto angle but surely doing commerical deals with Jupiter is money better spent? A few memes and threads doesn’t seem like good value for a payments provider that actually needs serious ground game in emerging markets to get traction (see: Tron’s dominance in stable coin payments in LATAM and Asia).
Secondly the PayFi Stack seems crazy complicated. 6 layers. Built on Solana, Stellar (remember Stellar from back in the day? Only just launched smart contracts recently…) and Circle (if you count CCTP as a kinda blockchain) it seems like it’s been designed to collect grants rather than make payments easier.
My suspicion is this is a high valuation for Huma at this stage. A lot of existing payments projects have had a lot of trouble raising more money of late. If you’ve been slogging away at crypto for payments then you’ve faced a heap of competition for not much business. Stellar and XRP are entire blockchains devoted to essentially just payments.
Bitcoin was supposed to be only for payments.
The aforementioned Tron is where most payments are being made and that business has proved to be very difficult to shift off Tron because it’s more than tech alone keeping it there.
Payments is PMF for crypto but it’s not the size of business most predicted it would be by now. Instead trading has proved to be multiples the size and value of payments and novel use cases around asset issuance have proved to be breakout hits. Stepn, Axie, and NFTs last cycle; Pump, Hyperliquid and memecoins this cycle.
If Jupiter DAO is going to propose VC style investments (and to be clear: I think this is a good idea to seek out these) then it has been to be something that is early, novel (and novel in idea and/or implementation), and linked to high growth potential.
And there’s been a heap of good questions asked by others here (shout out particularly to @ihateoranges for their contributions) that haven’t been addressed.
It’s going to be NO for me on this one.