Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz said today it has raised $515 million for a second fund to invest in blockchain and cryptocurrency.

The venture capital firm, founded by Marc Andreessen (pictured) and Ben Horowitz in 2009, has been a prolific and highly successful VC firm since it was established in 2009. Andreessen Horowitz’s investments include Skype Inc., Appito Inc., Airbnb Inc., Lyft Inc., Stripe Inc. and Coinbase Inc., to name a few.

The new fund is focused on investing in blockchain technology. “Payment blockchains are picking up where bitcoin left off, solving for currency volatility and settlement transaction times,” Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon and Katie Huan said in a statement. “Unlike existing systems where the sender and receiver must have fee-extracting bank infrastructure in place, payment blockchains require no bank account, thereby opening up financial services to the two billion-plus unbanked worldwide.”

Interestingly, the statement from Andreessen Horowitz specifically highlighted DeFi. An abbreviation of the phrase decentralized finance, DeFi is a platform for digital assets, financial smart contracts, protocols and decentralized applications built on the Ethereum blockchain. As DeFi Pulse explains, it’s essentially financial software built on the blockchain that can be pieced together like money Legos.

The statement from the VC firm also discussed what it refers to as Web 3.”We are still early in this Web 3 build-out,” Dixon and Huan said. “High-performance programmable blockchains will make decentralized network development much more accessible. After years of R&D, we are excited that a number of next-gen programmable blockchains will begin rolling out in the near future.”

A16z, as the firm is known, was in the news earlier today after it invested in Figma Inc., an interface design platform is used by the likes of Microsoft Corp. and Twitter Inc. The VC firm led a round of $50 million into the startup on a $2 billion valuation.

The VC firm raised $300 million for its first blockchain and cryptocurrency fund, trading under the name of AH Capital Management LLC (a16z) in June 2018. A16z’s investment list is long.

Photo: jdlasica/Flickr