Today, we’re introducing Hansa. We are a new founder-first firm that invests, incubates and accelerates web3 networks & protocols on Arweave. We were one of the first investors back in 2018, and we’re doubling down again.
The Hanseatic League was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe in the 1200’s. The League was essential to the promotion of more open commerce & civilisation that maintains its legacy today. We see ourselves as a similar collective of individuals that invest in smart people solving hard problems in novel ways. Our future may look like a collection of like-minded individuals building a new city in the sky. We’re on the lookout for co-investors, builders, and interesting people to apply that want to help further our mission together.
To begin, we’re starting with $13mm to invest alongside Arweave.org as the sole LP. We’re investing in the most impactful projects on Arweave, and investing at the pre-seed & seed stages in order to provide them with the commercial resources they need to succeed from the earliest stages.
At its core we aim to achieve three key goals at Hansa:
Unlike most funds where partners contribute 1% of the total capital, Hansa maintains a significant portion of personal capital in the fund to ensure we have skin in the game and have the right incentives alongside founders for the long-term. This means we choose the rules on how we invest, which maximises the success of projects over the long-term because compounding returns matter. We see this as the best way to solve the problems identified above.
Bitcoin ushered in the era of the non-sovereign store of value. Unfortunately, its consensus mechanism is a non-productive asset. Ethereum was next, which unlocked a new set of abilities by adding smart contracts. It’s great for decentralised finance. However, not all technology is created equal.
That’s why we’ve chosen to invest and build on Arweave - a protocol unlocking a new storage-based consensus paradigm. An open, permanent data lake that unlocks the free flow of information, anywhere. By decoupling storage and computation, Arweave unlocks the next era of novel open applications via a productive & persistent storage-based consensus mechanism at its base layer. On-chain, scalable storage with guaranteed persistence. Anything else is a stopgap solution. Finally, projects on Arweave are rewriting the flow of information with democratic values.
We’re extremely interested in the key inputs needed to make Arweave’s permaweb work as intended, and those needed for open societies to flourish via free markets. Building on Arweave unlocks new abilities for applications on the web.
Some things that we’re interested in: the pursuit of truth on social media via prediction markets, open societies, objective functions that measure quality & maximise impact, new digital cities/states, bridging real world assets on-chain, novel forms of governance , non-fungible intelligence, machine ethics, autonomous agents, humans-as-endpoint-API’s, new recommendation engines based on smart queries, and new applications that utilise multi-hop queries on an open & permissionless global data lake of the world’s information.
We expect that the web will be a collaborative engine. New advances in language models and the creation of an open, global & composable data lake will advance it beyond the basic Q&A function it is today.
We are most excited about Arweave’s ability to unleash the power of free thought on markets for information. Without free thought we lose our ability to think imaginatively as a society. It’s what gives us the ability to discern the source of truth through empirical information from the falsehoods pushed onto us. Within the past decade alone we’ve witnessed the death & destruction caused by misinformation disseminated by the media to grab attention & sell clicks. The further forward we go towards 1984, the slower civilisation will advance. It’s time for new, democratic information flows to create a more open and equal society.
Everyday is day one.
We’re on the lookout for co-investors, builders, and interesting people to apply that want to help further our mission together.
We expect that the web will be a collaborative engine.
