Just raised $1 billion for a fund focused on the future of finance, some crypto in a market that's cooled on crypto. So tell me, what are you and your LPs seeing that maybe others aren't?
Well, so first of all, the world looks really different four years later than when we raised our first fund, and it even looks very different from a year ago. And I think what we're doing with this new billion dollars is we're planning to back founders building what we're calling the new economy, the future of finance, and certainly digital assets are a part of that. And I see really only three structural shifts going on, and this is what we're following.
So the first structural shift is new financial infrastructure, the plumbing if you will, for the new innovation economy. And that's 24/7 and it's global. And then the second structural shift is new assets, things like stablecoins that were just beginning. Now we're seeing tokenization of securities, of stocks and bonds and other instruments. And of course that leads to new markets. We can talk about things like prediction markets or perpetual futures markets.
And then the third structural shift that we're paying a lot of attention to is what I'll call the agentic finance piece of it. And this is quite simply, what does a world look like when you're building financial services and products for an end user that's not a human, but it's a computer or an agent. So that's where we're planning to put this new billion dollars to work. But of course, there's a lot of uncertainty in markets, not just in digital asset markets, but in all markets. And so like we did with the first fund, and I think this served us well, we're paying a lot of attention to pacing, to the volatility and to the cycles.
You talked about how agents need their own financial rules, but can you actually explain this to me? If an AI is booking my travel or registering my kid for camp, why can't it just use a credit card?
Yeah, well, Stripe is a great example because if you look at what Stripe's doing, they're also integrating these products and services. And the calls to action have talked a lot about finance, and one of the examples is if you have an agent that is doing things on behalf of a human, they're going to need to subscribe to services, subscriptions, software, things like this. And right now the model we have is built for humans doing search. That's the ad model. But that's all going to change when you think about agents doing things. And agents will need to transact with each other. And to your question about why can't they just use a credit card, because that's what most people ask, it's all about instant settlement. It's about finality. It's about global, and chargebacks. We think that they're not going to be using the financial rails of the past, but rather the financial rules of the future.
So I always love talking about your history and sort of how you got here, given that you were a federal agent who prosecuted people who were stealing bitcoin during the Silk Road investigation, what was the moment you realized that that technology that you were investigating was something that you wanted to back? How did your DOJ colleagues feel about that?
Well, actually, let me take you back because that was at the tail end of my prosecutorial career. I spent over a decade with the feds, and I started my career actually on the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., and I was doing national security. And then when I moved to DOJ, I was doing national security cases. I was doing kind of cartels, violent crime, organized crime. And then I spent time in D.C. at DOJ headquarters, where I was learning how the agency process worked and how the different branches of government interact together, how legislation gets passed. And then I moved out to San Francisco in 2009, still with the Justice Department, and I was doing murders. I was doing hostage taking, cartel cases. You mentioned crypto cases, money laundering, you name it, I prosecuted it. And I think in many ways I was really... and that was for a decade. And now I've been almost a decade in venture capital and in technology.
And one of the things is I started my career in venture capital as the consummate outsider. And what I realized was that some of the experience and training I had was really deeply relevant to technology. You mentioned crypto. One of the things I realized early on is this is a really powerful, powerful technology in terms of like digital breadcrumbs. And this is something we're talking about with AI, the provenance of things, traceability of things, privacy, identity, all of these technologies are really important tools. And they can be used by bad actors and they can be used by good actors. And the technology itself is neutral. And I think it's really important, by the way, that the bad uses of those technologies are prosecuted and are investigated.
And in some ways, I realized early on, and you mentioned that case involving some of the corrupt agents investigating the Silk Road, we never would have been able to solve that case had they been using traditional methods of finance, bank wires, for example. It was that permanent distributed ledger, that was immutable, that allowed us to solve that case. And I realized that's a really powerful tool. And so again, fast forward, here we are ten years later and the technology has expanded rapidly. But I think that background and learning the walk the halls knowledge, not just in places like D.C., but also just the different branches of government and globally, the art of persuasion, these are important things that we bring to our founders now at Haun Ventures.
For years, crypto promised to reinvent payments, and no one really used it to buy anything. Suddenly, now stablecoins are having a moment. Did we finally find the killer app for this? Is it just moving money around?
Well, moving money around is, of course, trillions of dollars of opportunity. And so I think that's one piece of it. People use the word crypto, but it actually stands for cryptography. And I've been talking about stablecoins since 2017. And they were just getting started in 2017 and 2018. And you're right that now they've found product market fit. I mean, we had one of our portfolio companies acquired by Visa this year. They acquired Bridge for almost $2 billion in cash. Another of our early stage bets, Bridge, was acquired by Stripe for just over $1 billion. And I think what you're seeing is large traditional financial institutions like Mastercard, we've seen Visa, make moves announcing yesterday in the stablecoin space, you're seeing that this is really mainstream.
And the consumer for stablecoins is not necessarily in the United States. Consumer use of stablecoins is mostly in high inflation economies. However, the users of stablecoins here in the United States are businesses and enterprises because they like, especially ones that do business globally, it's frictionless. It didn't used to be, but it is now. And that's just part and parcel of how technology changes.
You spent many years trying to convince regulators in Washington on this new technology. Now there's been a vibe shift in Washington towards crypto. What do you make of that? And is there anything that you're worried about getting wrong now that crypto is suddenly welcome?
Well, sure. We have to be worried about getting things wrong with any new technology. I mean, I don't think digital assets are the future of finance as an exception. I think we've been talking about that with AI today. You've been talking with a lot of folks about that, with bio, with plenty of other things. Look, I think that folks are really focused in this moment in D.C. on, okay, well, now there's a Republican in the White House and the Republicans control Senate and the House. And yet what this brings me back to is bipartisan still always matters, because, of course, the name of the game for the digital assets industry right now is getting this Clarity Act passed. And even with the Republicans controlling the House, Senate and the White House, they need the Democrats to pass the Clarity Act. And this is something we've been telling our founders and we've always done as a fund, is you have to work with both sides. Absolutely. And you have to futureproof your technology. We're not trying to prove it for four years, trying to do it for the long haul over decades. So I think that's very important. And that's a really important lesson that we've always been aware of. And I think, again, I've been aware of having spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C. Things change really quickly.
