The well-known Silicon Valley venture fund Andreessen Horowitz announced it launched a $2.2 billion crypto fund. The previous crypto fund of Andreessen Horowitz was also launched during a downturn in the crypto market.

Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm founded by Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, announced the launch of a multi-billion dollar fund to invest in cryptocurrencies that they believe will have the same impact on the world as the Internet. The new crypto fund will be used to participate in blockchain and crypto startups.

“The size of this fund speaks to the size of the opportunity before us: crypto is not only the future of finance but, as with the internet in the early days, is poised to transform all aspects of our lives,” Kathryn Haun and Chris Dixon, partners who run Andreessen’s cryptocurrency group, said in a blog post.

Haun and Dixon acknowledged the high volatility of this asset class, but stressed that “prices may fluctuate but innovation continues to increase through each cycle.”

“We believe that the next wave of computing innovation will be driven by crypto,” the partners wrote, adding that they’re “radically optimistic about crypto’s potential.”

The first crypto fund of Andreessen Horowitz was launched three years ago during the so-called crypto winter. Then the value of bitcoin fell by about 80% from the highs of 2017.

The venture capital firm gained worldwide prominence for its successful early investments in technology companies such as Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, and Pinterest. Andreessen Horowitz also became one of the early investors in the US-based crypto exchange Coinbase in 2013. In April 2021, Coinbase successfully completed a direct listing on the Nasdaq.

One of the managers of the fund's crypto division, Haun, at one time helped to assemble the first working group of the US Department of Justice on cryptocurrency and took part in one of the most high-profile cryptocurrency investigations in the world, Silk Road.