Arca’s David Nage on the impact of regulatory review on VC investing in web3 – TechCrunch

The regulatory environment surrounding crypto is evolving in the US as the SEC takes aim at major players in the web3 world, promising to shake up business as usual with aggressive action.

This week on Chain Reaction, we sat down with David Nage. Nage is a director at Arca and oversees their seed fund with a primary focus on blockchain and digital assets. On the podcast this week, we dug into a host of crypto topics impacting the web3 venture capital world, including struggles with the blockchain gaming industry and renewed regulatory fervor from the SEC following this report. week of an investigation into Coinbase.

You can listen to the full interview below.

In our conversation, Nage noted that the recent downturn has already provided many lessons for players in the space, but notes that some of the biggest blowouts have had a disproportionate impact on retail investors. “I wish we as a society didn’t have to learn by failure, but it seems we really do learn by failure and that’s how we grow and thrive,” Nage says.

Nage says that while regulatory agencies push for investigations, many venture capitalists simply hope they can provide more guidelines and pathways for startups to operate within legal boundaries while seizing native opportunities to cryptography. It’s a lack of guidance that has caused many enterprise-backed startups to wait and see before dropping their own token, Nage tells us.

“Many of these founders understand that a token could provide obvious utility for the distribution and decentralization of corporate authority and could provide many positive economic incentives to those who participate, but without regulatory clarity they are pushing this. in an indefinite term,” says Nage. “So I think having that clarity could be really helpful for the thousands of founders looking to innovate in the space.”

While Nage complains about the changing regulatory landscape, he also notes that things have still moved faster than he anticipated. “Think [back] in the crypto winter of 2018, senators would develop some policies regarding digital assets [today] is just a leap forward and your mind just blows, it’s amazing.

You can find out more about Nage’s interview by listening to our latest episode. Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple, Spotify, or your alternative podcast platform of choice to follow us every week.