The Inquisitive VC: Soona Amhaz , General Partner at Volt Capital

Soona Amhaz graduated as an engineer from the University of Michigan School of Engineering, where bitcoin was a major topic of discussion at college was bitcoin. “A lot of our conversation was about whether or not the government would allow it to happen,” Amhaz told Brave New Coin.

After graduating, Amhaz joined an early-stage startup called Alation. Alation was creating a machine learning data catalog to help people find, understand, and trust data across their organizations. When Amhaz joined, the company had just raised a US$9M Series A round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, General Catalyst, Bloomberg Beta, and others.

Amhaz said that she joined as the 20th hire and, over the years, the company experienced tremendous growth. Amhaz became the resident crypto expert and would help people set up their crypto wallets, teach them about interesting projects that were going on, and guide them on who to follow in terms of industry leaders in the space.

According to Amhaz, at that point, people largely got their news from Reddit, Coindesk, and Twitter. "I wanted to bring together a community that felt vibrant and high quality, and that people could trust,” she said.

This led to Amhaz co-founding Token Daily in 2017. Token Daily was launched as a community platform. The Token Daily newsletter quickly gained 16k readers, and published research on market trends and tech developments.

As a result of Token Daily’s activity, projects started reaching out to Amhaz before they launched. “Before they started raising they’d ask for feedback in terms of product strategy, helping source talent from our community, and they’d ask for help with distribution via the newsletter,” she said.

This led to the realization that since she was seeing great companies very early, it would make sense to invest in the founders and companies that Amhaz wanted to see “shape the future of crypto.”

After investing personally for a few years, Amhaz and her team went on to launch Volt Capital in 2019, with the goal of scaling their investing efforts with institutional capital. The engineer turned VC stated that “it’s been an efficient way to invest in high-quality founders, support them with bigger cheques, and help them build relationships with larger funds downstream.”

Volt Capitals latest publicly announced investment is Magic. A seamless way to access applications both in and outside of crypto. Magic’s SDK allows developers to design login experiences that are similar to Medium and Slack – across desktop and mobile – without building them from scratch. For authentication, Magic leverages blockchain key pairs. It allows users to securely log in across devices without relying on incumbents like Google or Facebook.

Magic, previously known as Fortmatic, raised US$4M in a seed round led by Placeholder, other participants in the round include Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital, SV Angel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Naval Ravikant and other angel investors.

Amhaz said, “I’ve been especially delighted to see Magic scale to products outside of crypto. To me that is one test of crypto’s success: is it integrated so well into an experience that, to the user, it’s invisible.”

Amhaz and Volt Capital are one of the founding members of the Chicago DeFi Alliance (CDA) alongside Jump Capital (which powers Robinhood’s crypto trades), Cumberland DRW, and CMT Digital.

According to Amhaz, “The firms we work with on CDA are incredibly excited about stablecoins, as many in the crypto space are beginning to call it, ‘crypto dollars.’ They strongly believe that stablecoins are going to become the new rails around how money will move around the world. They increasingly believe the FX market will be based on stablecoins.”

The current global pandemic may affect this fundamental change in traditional markets. Amhaz authored Inflationary vs. Deflationary Shocks, which explains why a pandemic is generally classified as a deflationary shock.

“The premise of the argument is that the subsequent inflation that results from a deflationary period is what will ultimately help Bitcoin’s value prop within the US.,” Amhaz explains. “Look at places external to the US, look at the weakest sovereign borrowers, what are they turning to when they lose their currency’s peg to the dollar? It could very well be Bitcoin, or they could be looking to stablecoins, but I do think that in the short term this is going to meaningfully impact the future of crypto.”