Our investing so far and what we’re excited about.

Two years ago, at 1kx, we started to expand our focus into consumer investing.

While infrastructure investing was our core bread and butter, it was evident that the infrastructure stack was maturing, and the path to mass market viable products was only growing clearer.

Our investing so far…

Since then, we’ve made 30+ investments, 13 of which we led, across all categories of consumer, including: virtual worlds, games, creator, community coordination, social, payments and IP. Here is a short overview of our consumer portfolio to date:

What’s next?

While we approach consumer investing with a fairly open mind, we’re actively looking to invest and collaborate with founders operating in the following areas:

Social & Attention economy

As the number of onchain apps, content, and creators grow, we believe that the need for shared social spaces has never been stronger for end users. We’re especially excited about the following ideas:

1. Activity feeds that surface targeted content for end users based on their onchain holdings or connected social graphs. We’re excited about the onchain activity feed becoming an emergent discovery layer for content, creators, and social. The number of non-financially collected nfts are only growing and we believe that this an exciting but under highlighted opportunity.

2. Apps that create new social games around collecting and owning as a core game loop for both cryptonatives with existing onchain content and for mass market audiences and their respective offchain content. We believe digital property rights enable new social expressiveness regardless of the end audience. Super excited about teams building photo sharing, tokenization and collecting especially.

Creator platforms, tools and marketplaces

We’re still incredibly excited by how NFTs and digital property rights are able to empower creators to monetize and build stronger communities, particularly:

1. Vertical creator platforms and marketplaces that focus on onboarding and building a community for new categories of creators onchain. We’ve been a big fan of how SuperRare/KnownOrigin (Art), Artblocks/fxhash (generative art), Sound/Catalog (music) as well as thematic platforms (Metalabel) have pioneered adoption for their respective categories.

2. Dynamic NFT infrastructure that enables deeper more meaningful end holder experiences and turns onchain assets into recurring channels of attention as opposed to the current meta – read our research on dynamic nfts.

3. Generalized tools and infrastructure that help creators get stuff done better onchain such as products that better help manage the issuance of onchain assets, their communities, their royalties, and more. We’re excited about NFT storefronts, mint engines, community coordination tools, capital formation as well as any creator tools that allow for more multiplayer collaboration between each other – read our thesis on multiplayer creation.

IP & composable storytelling

We believe that there’s still a lot of white space in how we can use onchain primitives to create new IP and tell better stories. We think a lot about the design space around:

1. Community owned IP that closely involves community members in the earliest process of creation. While the initial wave of generation 1 cryptonative IP have mostly failed to live up to expectations, we believe that the next meta is being built as we speak – you can read our thesis on minimum viable IP.

2. Platforms and creator tools that allow for easier composable content creations on top of existing IP that already exists as nfts. We’re excited about IP that already has end user and community resonance as starting points for new content.

Virtual worlds and NPCs

We’re excited about spatial and 3D as new mediums for how end consumers will interact with ownership-based virtual experiences, especially:

1. Spatial 3D worlds that are highly interoperable (infrastructure for GLB/GLTF, VRMs, wallet indexing) where content creators are able to seamlessly create regardless of technical skill. Many projects in this area to date have focused too much on scarce land models that limit creator participation - we would like to see projects that remove this barrier to entry while building novel experiences or game loops that bootstrap initial attention. We take a lot of inspiration from Jin and M3.

2. Interactable NPCs and AI agents that leverage digital property rights to create deeper relationships between virtual beings and end users – read our thesis on virtual beings.

Autonomous Worlds & Onchain games

We’re incredibly excited about bringing net new worlds and onchain powered experiences that would otherwise not be possible:

1. Onchain games that financializes player outcomes for traditionally non-financial casual game loops. We’re big fans of projects such as Words3.

2. Worlds that are focused on establishing themselves as developer or creator platforms from day 0 as a playground for permissionless extendability – you can read our thinking on autonomous worlds + check out our community compilation.

Other areas of interest and research:

1. Mass market consumer experiences and goods (we find inspiration from Kiki’s work with women’s beauty and Pudgy Penguin’s toy launch)

2. Luxury goods and consumer experiences (we get excited with work such as Trame’s work with translating generative art into physicals)

Working with us

Through digital property rights enabled by blockchains, we believe that crypto provides a new opportunity to re-think and re-imagine what the consumer internet experiences look like. Today, we have never been this excited about consumer and believe the future is bright with white space for experimentation and opportunity.

We are excited to continue deepening our focus on consumer investing.

If you’re building something exciting, don’t be afraid to reach out!!

Consumer 🤝 1kx