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woah
What does 21 do?
pault
It's been speculated that they are developing a consumer-oriented hardware bitcoin wallet/node.
woah
This would indeed be very lucrative, as it is the missing component for adoption, IMO. I wonder why it's taken them 3 years though.
pault
Hardware is hard; crypto is hard. Most people seem to think the Trezor's usability leaves a lot to be desired.
Mahn
According to CrunchBase [1]:

> 21 Inc is a Bitcoin mining pool. It is working on specially designed chips that will drive new equipment specifically aimed at doing this more efficiently

Though I guess that description is outdated now. Go figure. Perhaps they are randomly pivoting bitcoin stuff until something sticks?

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6

thesausageking
His dual roles brings up up an interesting question:

If you're founder of a Bitcoin startup that's doing well and has its pick of investors, do you pitch a16z, knowing that the founder of what could be your largest competitor is a partner there ?

nostrademons
I thought that a16z doesn't invest in multiple companies that are competitors. The reason they gave for not investing in companies that were likely to pivot was the Burbn => Instagram pivot, which put one of their investments (Instagram) into competition with another (PicPlz) [1].

This makes me really wonder what's up with 21, though, because a16z has already funded a major Bitcoin startup (Coinbase [2]), and did so after Balaji claims to have founded Instagram. Does that mean that 21 has no intention to become a Bitcoin payment processor or exchange?

[1] http://www.bhorowitz.com/instagram

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinbase

Mithaldu
> We just took the wraps off 21

Yet when going to that website it has literally no description of itself and demands your email address.

I can see this going two ways:

1. He's honest and 21 is just another way of harvesting email addresses.

2. He's dishonest and hasn't taken the wraps off anything.