Andreessen-Horowitz-backed 21 Inc Introduced 21.Co Lists

It's not just the financing ($116 mil from A-H, Khosla et al), one of the A16Z partners, Balaji Srinivasan is actually the CEO of this one.
A bit late getting to this (May 1) but here goes. First up, EconoTimes:

Bitcoin startup 21 introduces ’21.co lists’ to earn money online

21, a San Francisco-based bitcoin startup, has come up with a new feature ‘21.co Lists’, where individuals can join lists of people with similar skills in order to start receiving targeted, paid microtasks.

Users have to apply to one of the lists and if selected, they will receive a stream of list-specific tasks sent by businesses that can be completed to earn money or fund charities, the blog post stated. In addition to the basic concepts of joining or creating 21.co lists to make money online, the company has developed several useful features to make the process of making money from lists even easier.

“As for the “Join lists” feature, it is self-explanatory: 21.co will maximize your income by adding you to the lists that fit your skills most directly. Each new list you join or are added to is, then displayed on your profile page,” it added.

21 also announced bitcoin email platform that enables users to send surveys, tasks and requests to specific categories of people or professionals, incentivizing those actions with small bitcoin payments....MORE

Nigeria Today also has the story, putting the "microconsulting" in quotation marks:

21 Inc Launches Lists Allowing Anyone to Earn Bitcoin for ‘Microconsulting’

Possibly because one of the tasks 21.Co promotes as doable on the platform is "mass e-mailing".

For the life of me, the microconsulting sounds less like consulting and more like Amazon's 'Mechanical Turk' operation. From last December:

How Half a Million People are Being Paid Pennies to Train Amazon's Artificial Intelligence (AMZN)

This sounds like a good business to be CEO of.
Training your replacement, AI, for pennies?
Not so much.

From TechRepublic:
Inside Amazon's clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI 

Internet platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe. But, do they democratize work or exploit the disempowered?

Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding.

Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, is an online platform where people can perform small tasks for pay....MORE

Andreessen Horowitz Investee Coinbase May Buy Andreessen Horowitz Investee Earn.com (né 21.co)

Ha!
That's one way to exit.
Earn.com was not mentioned in April 4's "Crypto M&A: "Three Startups Coinbase May Have Its Eye On"" because it's such a Tesla/SolarCity-cousins-shouldn't-marry type of deal.

Yet here we are. From Axios:

Coinbase is in talks to acquire Earn.com

Digital currency exchange Coinbase is still in talks to acquire Earn.com, a paid inbox service formerly known as 21 inc., Axios has learned from multiple sources.

• No done deal yet (or maybe ever), but current discussions are at a purchase price north of $100 million (plus management earn-outs) with Coinbase insisting that Earn founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan come over as CTO.

Why it matters: As 21, the company helped raise the early profile of Bitcoin among Silicon Valley investors.

• Andreessen Horowitz has stakes in both companies, and is said to have recused itself from board-level negotiations (although former A16Z partner Srinivasan remains a "board partner" with the firm).
• Earn originally originally was developing chips and hardware for cryptocurrency mining. It has since pivoted to crypto-based messaging technology, which some believe could someday be used to accept/decline online advertising.
• If the equity value ended at around $120 million it would basically be break-even for Earn's Series C investors, given stock preferences, but earlier backers will be easily in the black because of Earn's early cryptocurrency activities.

...MORE, including a CoinDesk link we somehow missed.

We've been intrigued by the oddity that is 21.co Earn.com since the Financial Times' Izabella Kaminska pointed it out in a couple 2015 posts:

Sept. 23
21 (grams of digital coke)
56 comments
May 19 
21 Inc and the plan to kill the free internet
27 comments

And some of our prior thinking:

March 16
"Announcing Coinbase Index Fund"
Coinbase, and the things Coinbase is doing seem to be a more realistic way for Andreessen Horowitz to make money out of Bitcoin than their 21.Co. (see below)...

November 2017
So, What Has Andreessen Horowitz Crypto Investee 21.co Been Up To?

Not much.
We've been following this one for a couple years (links below) and still can't figure out how they convinced investors to pony up $121,050,000 including the whopper $116mil., 13 investor Series B lead by A16Z (CrunchBase)

That B round closed on March 10 2015 and the next day Fortune reported:
Why March 10 was a big day for bitcoin...

March 2017
Remember 21.Co, The Andreessen Horowitz Investee In Search Of A Business?
And do you remember our "Marc Andreessen is tweeting again" post last month?
Here's the rest of the story.... 

For more on Coinbase see January's:
"Coinbase Strategy Teardown: How Coinbase Grew Into The King Midas Of Crypto Doing $1B In Revenue" 
Coinbase is the Andreessen Horowitz backed cryptocurrency play that's working out.
21.co is the one that isn't.... 

Remember 21.Co, The Andreessen Horowitz Investee In Search Of A Business?

And do you remember our "Marc Andreessen is tweeting again" post last month?
Here's the rest of the story.
First up, Poynter, Feb. 27:

Marc Andreessen is still an optimist about the future of news, three years post-tweetstorm
“I think I am more convinced that consolidation needs to happen (across broadcast TV, cable TV, newspaper, magazine, radio, wire service, Internet).”

21 is a startup that initially got attention for developing hardware and software to optimize bitcoin mining. But earlier this month, it (pivoted? expanded? diversified?) into providing a sort of paid email service. (This shift was, of course, predicted by the prophets of old.) With 21, you set a price at which people can send you an email and actually get a reply. (The sender is only charged if you respond.)

Last week, Marc Andreessen announced that he was now active on the service and that for $20, you could ask him anything. (He’s donating all payments to Black Girls Code.) Andreessen is, of course, the cofounder of the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (an investor in 21, natch); back in the earlier days of the web, he was leader of the team that developed Mosaic, the first significant graphical web browser, and through Netscape the web’s early barefoot king.

As it happened, I had a question I wanted to ask Andreessen, as well as twenty bucks. About three years ago, he put forth one of his then-characteristic tweetstorms, this one about the state of the news business. Those tweets have since been deleted, but they were captured in blogpost form on the Andreessen Horowitz website — “The Future of the News Business: A Monumental Twitter Stream All in One Place.” Give it a read for yourself, but it was most notable for its outsized optimism:

I am more bullish about the future of the news industry over the next 20 years than almost anyone I know. You are going to see it grow 10X to 100X from where it is today. That is my starting point for any discussion about the future of journalism.

While there are very many things in Andreessen’s tweetstorm I’d agree with (and I think he does a good job of highlighting some of the right players leading the way), I confess I’ve always thought that there was a little too much Valley exuberance in his vision...MORE

Okay. You can use 21.co to ask Mr. Andreessen a question. What else can you do with 21.co?

From Quartz:

For $600 in bitcoin, you can spam all the partners at Andreessen Horowitz

It’s a perfect storm of Silicon Valley buzzwords: Get your hustle on by pitching Andreessen Horowitz’s big-name partners using bitcoin, and create the future of money while you’re at it.

That’s the offer from the bitcoin startup 21, founded by Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan.

Srinivasan, at one time tipped to lead the US Food and Drug Administration, wrote about the rationale for the company’s “21 Lists” feature on Medium: “Almost every business eventually involves building lists of prospects and then contacting them,” he wrote. “Enterprise sales, recruiting, and fundraising are three activities in particular that fit this description. Corporations spend huge amounts of time and money in this broad area, but the whole process is still highly inefficient.”

Enter 21, which offers users a selection of carefully selected lists, including ones populated with venture capitalists, CEOs, angel investors, and tech founders. Each person on the lists has a verified account on 21, and they’ve opted to receive emails—and can send them, also.

Here are a selection of 21’s prices per list:

• Andreessen Horowitz partners: $600 for 32 partners and top execs, like its head of marketing
• CEOs: $1,000 for 77 CEOs, mainly at biotech, bitcoin, and blockchain companies
• VCs: $1,100 for 39 VCs, including man of the moment Jeremy Liew, who invested in Snapchat early

Users can email everyone on a list for one price, and they only pay if they get a response. Those receiving money can choose to keep the bitcoins or automatically donate them to one of three charities....MORE

I blame FT Alphaville's Izabella Kaminska for introducing* me to 21.co, scrambling what remained of my brains and thus, indirectly, for my calling Larry Summers names in this 2015 post.

As Far As Whores Go, Larry Summers Seems To Have Become.... 

...the Whore of Babble-on.

Seriously, what does this crap even mean:

“The 21 chip adds a whole new dimension to bitcoin’s potential utility. At first we will be struck by the presence of a technology like embedded mining; eventually we may be struck by its absence...."

Long time readers may remember Larry from such hit posts as:

• Frontline's "The Warning": Now Taking Prop Bets on When Obama Fires Larry Summers' Ass
• The Essential Larry Summers: How He and Alan Greenspan Laid the Groundwork for the Financial Crisis and Larry Lost $1.8 Billion for Harvard 
• Breaking: "Summers Expected to Leave White House After Election" (and some thoughts on arrogance)
• Economists for Firing Larry Summers Changing Name to "Economic Policy Advice for President Obama"
• Larry Summers and Treasury Policy: Don't Never, Ever Trust Whitey

Mr. Summers has joined Andreessen-Horowitz's Balaji Srinivasan at overfunded ($116 mil) bitcoin startup 21 Inc.
You can read a lot about Mr. Srinivasan in "The Silicon Valley Secessionist Clarifies His Batshit Insane Plan" or, for just a soupçon, we have on offer, "Climateer Line of the Day: Uh Oh Andreessen Edition": 

...Bitcoins are like “tulips you can send anywhere in the world in arbitrary quantities”.

-Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan

Mr.Srinivasan may not be aware that, since ca. 1637 or so, tulips have not had the best connotation in the world of finance...

*Anyhoo, here's Izabella on 21 Inc. in 2015:
Sept. 23
21 (grams of digital coke)
56 comments
May 19 
21 Inc and the plan to kill the free internet
27 comments

"Announcing Coinbase Index Fund"

Coinbase, and the things Coinbase is doing seem to be a more realistic way for Andreessen Horowitz to make money out of Bitcoin than their 21.Co. (see below)

From Coinbase:

We’re excited to announce Coinbase Index Fund.

Coinbase Index Fund will give investors exposure to all digital assets listed on Coinbase’s exchange, GDAX, weighted by market capitalization. If a new asset is listed on the exchange, it will be automatically added to the fund.

Index funds have changed the way that many people think about investing. By providing diversified exposure to a broad range of assets, index funds enable investors to track the performance of an entire asset class, rather than having to select individual assets. We’re excited to give our customers the ability to invest in the potential of blockchain-based digital assets as a whole.

At this stage, investing in Coinbase Index Fund will only be available to US-resident, accredited investors. We’re working on launching more funds which are available to all investors and cover a broader range of digital assets.

Sign up today for updates and early access to Coinbase Index Fund.

Today, we’re also introducing Coinbase Index.

Coinbase Index is a measure of the financial performance of all assets listed on GDAX, weighted by their market capitalization....MORE

HT The Hill:
Coinbase bitcoin exchange launches cryptocurrency index fund

Speaking of hills, on August 25, 1987 Fidelity ran a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal.

For our younger readers, back in the day full page ads were much less common that they are today and made quite a visual impact on the viewer thereof.
This ad in particular was even more impressive as it consisted almost entirely of a mountain chart of the previous five years of stock market gains, and was very similar in appearance to the one above, soaring from bottom left to top right.

The ad was also memorable because it was printed on the same day the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit its then all-time high, 2722.
52 days later, October 16, 1987, the DJIA had declined 476 points (17.5%).
The following trading day, Monday the 19th the Dow dropped 508 points (22.6%).
The total top-to-bottom flush was 36.1% from the day the perfectly timed mountain chart appeared.

That's what I think of when I see mountain charts, probably not the connotation the marketeers are looking to elicit.

Still, Coinbase seems a much better bet than 21.co which has changed its name to Earn.com and plans to launch tokens (without an ICO) but who knows?
Here's Coinsquare on the 21.Co rebranding:
Earn.com Allows Users to Earn Digital Currency Filling Out Surveys

Unfortunately, whenever I think of 21.Co I think of its CEO—and A16Z partner—and a couple of our posts:

...You can read a lot about Mr. Srinivasan in "The Silicon Valley Secessionist Clarifies His Batshit Insane Plan" or, for just a soupçon, we have on offer, "Climateer Line of the Day: Uh Oh Andreessen Edition":

...Bitcoins are like “tulips you can send anywhere in the world in arbitrary quantities”.

-Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan, CEO 21 Inc.

Mr.Srinivasan may not be aware that, since ca. 1637 or so, tulips have not had the best connotation in the world of finance....

Again, probably not the connotation the marketeers are looking for.
The Secession Plan and the Tulip quote were last seen in November's "So, What Has Andreessen Horowitz Crypto Investee 21.co Been Up To?".

For more on A16Z see also December 2017's: "Here’s How Andreessen Horowitz & Union Square Ventures Are Betting On Blockchain"

Ahead of the Big Indaba Mining Conference: Bill Gates-Backed "AI-Powered Miner Says It Found Huge Copper Deposit in Zambia"

The way KoBold is presenting itself to the media, and thus to investors, is sorta strange.

In the case of this copper deposit they didn't so much discover it as buy into it. It's not a greenfield find. If interested see after the jump.

From Bloomberg, February 5:

• KoBold Metals is backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Equinor
• Company uses AI to search for metals key to energy transition

KoBold Metals, a mining startup that uses artificial intelligence to explore for materials key to the green-energy transition, said it’s discovered a huge copper deposit in Zambia.

San Francisco Bay Area-based KoBold, whose shareholders include Breakthrough Energy Ventures – backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos – as well as T. Rowe Price Group Inc., Bond Capital, Andreesen Horowitz and Equinor ASA, has been drilling at its Zambian permit for a little over a year. Mingomba is shaping up to be “extraordinary,” according to KoBold President Josh Goldman.

He compares its potential to that of the Kakula mine, developed by Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. and China’s Zijin Mining Group Co. just across the border in Democratic Republic of Congo. That mine produced almost 400,000 tons of copper last year.

“The story with Mingomba is that it’s like Kakula in both the size and the grade” Goldman said in an interview before the mining Indaba conference in Cape Town. “It’s going to be one of the highest grade, large underground mines.”

While the company is targeting its first output early next decade, it still needs to publish an updated resource estimate and complete feasibility studies that will inform the decision on whether to build a facility that Goldman estimates could cost $2 billion. KoBold is using its AI technology to process drilling data and optimize exploration for copper and cobalt at Mingomba.

Focused on projected long-term shortages of materials like cobalt, nickel and lithium, KoBold isn’t worrying about the low prices currently wreaking havoc with some battery metal projects around the world....

....MUCH MORE

Here's the conference: "Mining Indaba | 5-8 February 2024 | CTICC, Cape Town, SA".

Some of the links in January 2's "Ha! Alaska Energy Metals sells exploration data to Bezos/Gates/Andreessen-Backed KoBold Metals": 

....The need for both training data and data for analysis is one of the reasons we noted what seems to be a quiet Andreessen move: go into Create-a-corp mode. In Kobold's case it was to buy into an existing copper mine. June 2023:

Andreessen/Bezos/Gates-Backed Kobold Metals Raises Another $200 Million At Unicorn Valuation
....Additionally, CrunchBase News goes on to say this round will go toward the existing Zambian copper mine that KoBold is buying into. As discussed in our June 17 post the company had announced they were buying into the copper deposit using a portion of the earlier $192.5 million round. However, all money is fungible [except, note to Jon Corzine: Don't co-mingle the client funds] so who knows where it is directed and when.

....In what looks like an acknowledgement (without public acknowledgement) of  the failure-to-date of the technique to find metals, the company took a bunch of their loot and invested in a previously discovered copper-cobalt resource. From Reuters, December 14, 2022:

Billionaire-backed KoBold Metals to invest in Zambia copper mine

California-based exploration firm KoBold Metals, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify battery metal deposits, is investing $150 million to develop a copper mine in Zambia, the company announced at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C.... 

This is a variation on a trick Mr. Andreessen used to save something, anything, from an an overfunded ($116 million) crypto sinkhole a16z portfolio company:

Andreessen Horowitz Investee Coinbase May Buy Andreessen Horowitz Investee Earn.com (né 21.co)
Ha!
That's one way to exit.
Earn.com was not mentioned in April 4's "Crypto M&A: "Three Startups Coinbase May Have Its Eye On"" because it's such a Tesla/SolarCity-cousins-shouldn't-marry type of deal.
Yet here we are....

When Coinbase came public, the limited partner investors (and Mr. Andreessen) in 21.co were able to salvage their investment, even though 21.co added nothing, zilch, nada to Coinbase. And 21.co was never heard from again.

Here's an early post on Kobold:

May 2019
Bezos, Andreessen and Gates Looking For Cobalt In Canada

Not them personally, can you imagine? Tramping around northern Saskatchewan?

Jeff: Bill, does this rock look blue to you?
Bill: I can't see it, let me get my glasses.
Marc: Guys, have I told you all the things I've wanted to tweet since I quit Twitter?
Jeff and Bill: Oh Gawd

No, it's a company they're invested in....

I'm sure KoBold is using AI to sort through information but I just can't shake the feeling you get from the quote ascribed* to Mark Twain says about mines:

 "a hole in the ground owned by a liar."

*"This quote was attributed to Mark Twain in The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond (Farrar & Rinehart, 1935), p. 97. Although Hammond knew Twain personally, there is no other authentic record that Mark Twain made this statement" source
Which also has this tidbit:

...and so he came on the stage with me and introduced me in this way. He said:
"I don't know anything about this man, anyway. I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail; and the other is, I don't know why."
- Speech, 1908

If interested Quote Investigator also looked at the line: "A Gold Mine Is a Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top"

So, What Has Andreessen Horowitz Crypto Investee 21.co Been Up To?

Not much.
We've been following this one for a couple years (links below) and still can't figure out how they convinced investors to pony up $121,050,000 including the whopper $116mil., 13 investor Series B lead by A16Z (CrunchBase)

That B round closed on March 10 2015 and the next day Fortune reported:
Why March 10 was a big day for bitcoin

If January 4, on which the second-largest bitcoin exchange BitStamp was hacked to the tune of $5 million, was bitcoin’s “Bloody Sunday,” you could call March 10 its Fat Tuesday....

...On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a secretive bitcoin startup called 21 has quietly raised $116 million in venture capital, from prominent firms including Andreessen Horowitz, RSE Ventures, and Khosla Ventures. That’s already more than any bitcoin startup has raised to date, including Coinbase, which has raised $105 million from investors including the New York Stock Exchange, and in January launched a much-anticipated licensed bitcoin exchange.

And all that capital has been raised by a company that still hasn’t announced publicly what it even does, or will do. CEO Matthew Pauker told the Journal merely that has company aims to “drive mainstream adoption of bitcoin,” which, of course, is a hope that almost all bitcoin startups have.

Consider this: In May 2013, when Coinbase raised $5 million in venture funding, it was then the largest-ever investment in a bitcoin startup. (And this was before the November 2013 all-time price peak.) When Coinbase announced a Series B round of $25 million at the end of 2013, it bested its previous high. For a company practically in stealth mode to have now raised $116 million shows obvious, sustained growth in VC faith in the technology....

.... On Tuesday it happened: for the first time since January the bitcoin price touched $300—or a few cents shy of it, depending on which price index you favor. (Bitfinex had the price hitting $300 at 11 a.m. ET and peaking at $303.96, while Coindesk had the peak at $300.94, and Winkdex didn’t list it above $298.)

The FT's Izabella Kaminska brought this abomination to our attention a month after the above and I couldn't resist some snark. Some months further along, in September of '15, more snark, this time directed at one of their consultants :

As Far As Whores Go, Larry Summers Seems To Have Become.... 
...the Whore of Babble-on.

Seriously, what does this crap even mean:

“The 21 chip adds a whole new dimension to bitcoin’s potential utility. At first we will be struck by the presence of a technology like embedded mining; eventually we may be struck by its absence...."

...Mr. Summers has joined Andreessen-Horowitz's Balaji Srinivasan at overfunded ($116 mil) bitcoin startup 21 Inc.

You can read a lot about Mr. Srinivasan in "The Silicon Valley Secessionist Clarifies His Batshit Insane Plan" or, for just a soupçon, we have on offer, "Climateer Line of the Day: Uh Oh Andreessen Edition":

...Bitcoins are like “tulips you can send anywhere in the world in arbitrary quantities”.

-Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan

Mr.Srinivasan may not be aware that, since ca. 1637 or so, tulips have not had the best connotation in the world of finance....

Anyhoo, here's the latest, from Coinspeaker, Oct. 31

21 Inc Rebrands Its Social Network Into Earn.com, Plans to Launch Tokens without an ICO 
21 Inc rebranded its social network into Earn.com. 21 Inc is a bitcoin startup, based in Silicon Valley, California.

Primary 21 Inc was aimed to provide its users mining chips that can be integrated into any device with access to Internet. The startup changed direction of its operation step by step, and rebranding showed that cryptocurrency could be used in social network.

Moreover, the main advantage and peculiarity of Earn.com is opportunity for users to earn money online. It can considered as “practical application of blockchain technology”.

According to the company’s blog post, “the idea behind Earn.com is that we’ve built a positive-sum social network, where every notification is an opportunity to earn money. This is quite different from existing social networks, where notifications are often distracting or even downright negative.”

Earn.com includes two types of accounts: users and senders. In order to become a user, it is necessary to create a public profile or to join lists in order to receive paid messages, or to “use an autoresponder to get people outside your network to pay for email replies”.

Earn.com ensures that senders can mail mass messages, and reply is more likely as recipients receive paid messages. “Empirically, we find that Earn.com senders get response rates >30% within 24 hours for $1 incentives, and >70% within 24 hours given $10 incentives.”

Today, only Bitcoin can be earned in Earn.com. However, Earn.com team states that they will create opportunity to earn any digital currency, beginning with a new token without an ICO.

The first step for such rebranding was made by 21 Inc in the beginning of 2017. 21 Inc. announced the 21 profile, a spam-proof replacement for a public email address and a simple way to monetize the internet presence....MORE

I've wondered if the investors ever kiddingly teased Mr. Andreessen about the fact that at today's $7463.75 quote for Bitcoin, the $116 mil., had it been put into the actual crypto at the $300 it hit Mar. 10, 2015, would be valued at $2.88 Billion.

Or maybe not so kiddingly?
Who knows, prediction is hard.
Snark is easy.

Previously:
March 2017
Remember 21.Co, The Andreessen Horowitz Investee In Search Of A Business?

...For $600 in bitcoin, you can spam all the partners at Andreessen Horowitz

It’s a perfect storm of Silicon Valley buzzwords: Get your hustle on by pitching Andreessen Horowitz’s big-name partners using bitcoin, and create the future of money while you’re at it.

That’s the offer from the bitcoin startup 21, founded by Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan....

May 2017
Andreessen-Horowitz-backed 21 Inc Introduced 21.Co Lists

And a couple from Ms. Kaminska back in 2015:
 Sept. 23
21 (grams of digital coke)
56 comments

May 19 
21 Inc and the plan to kill the free internet
27 comments

There Is An Odd Whiff Of WeWork About The Coinbase Offering Documents

note: not necessarily the company but definitely the docs.

One of the stranger chapters in cryptocurrency history was a company called 21.co that Andreessen Horowitz and others backed to the tune of $116 million, fiat.

The pitch was they had a Raspberry Pi powered $400 Bitcoin mining rig (Raspberry Pi !?) that would mine away in the background as you went about your daily internet routine.

$116 million.

When that turned out to be not much of an idea the company pivoted to offering the opportunity to earn micro-micro-payments in Bitcoin for doing tasks, sort of a AMZN Mechanical Turk meets the crypto-bros.

When that didn't really take off the company pivoted once again, this time to:

"21 also announced bitcoin email platform that enables users to send surveys, tasks and requests to specific categories of people or professionals, incentivizing those actions with small bitcoin payments"

That wasn't successful so 21.co, which by now had become Earn.com, left the earning-crypto  completely by mining model and became a platform you could use to email questions to various people at a price set by the questionee.

For example, you could ask Marc Andreesen a question for twenty bucks.

Or for $600 in bitcoin, you can spam all the partners at Andreessen Horowitz

Here are a selection of 21’s prices per list:

• Andreessen Horowitz partners: $600 for 32 partners and top execs, like its head of marketing
• CEOs: $1,000 for 77 CEOs, mainly at biotech, bitcoin, and blockchain companies
• VCs: $1,100 for 39 VCs, including man of the moment Jeremy Liew, who invested in Snapchat early

Even Nigeria Today put scare quotes into their headline. 

Here's Reddit's "RIP 21.co (End Of Life Notification: Bitcoin Computer, CLI and Marketplace)"

When it became apparent that idea was not going to return the $116 mil. within the lifetimes of any of the GP or limited partners' grandchildren, Andreessen Horowitz did what any venture capitalist would do to bail-out the investors: 

Andreessen Horowitz Investee Coinbase May Buy Andreessen Horowitz Investee Earn.com (né 21.co)

Ha!
That's one way to exit.
Earn.com was not mentioned in April 4's "Crypto M&A: "Three Startups Coinbase May Have Its Eye On"" because it's such a Tesla/SolarCity-cousins-shouldn't-marry type of deal.

Yet here we are....

So, the deed was done which brings patient reader and I to the CoinBase direct listing documents which, in their 208 pages of verbiage and 50 pages of financials includes:

...Other Transactions

In March 2018, we entered into a series of agreements to acquire Earn Holdings, LLC. In connection with such acquisition, as prior equity holders of Earn, entities affiliated with Andreessen Horowitz, a holder

180

---

of more than 5% of our capital stock and where Mr. Andreessen and Ms. Haun, members of our board of directors, are general partners, were entitled to receive up to $6.7 million in cash.

And

Other Issuances

In April 2018, the registrant issued an aggregate of 240,000 shares of its Class B common stock to an accredited investor in connection with its acquisition of two wholly-owned subsidiaries of Earn Holdings, LLC.

That's it. Not a lot of disclosure for a company that had raised $116 million, one of the advantages for Coinbase of a direct listing.

When you combine that with this from the Coinbase blog:

Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

which reminded me of a Mafia brokerage firm back in the '90's that had no head office and two branch offices. This confused the state and NASD regulators and bought the mobsters enough time to vanish.

And finally, The Coinbase CEO's letter via Business Insider:

...You can expect volatility in our financials, given the price cycles of the cryptocurrency industry. This doesn't faze us, because we've always taken a long-term perspective on crypto adoption. We may earn a profit when revenues are high, and we may Lose money when revenues are Low, but our goal is to roughly operate the company at break even, smoothed out over time, for the time being....

While not quite as Cloud-Cukoo-Land as Adam Neumann, breakeven as the corporate goal is not what you want to hear from the CEO. Compare/contrast WeWork, November 2017:

WeWork:“Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue."

Roger that, energy and spirituality. Over.

We have no interest in new issues but love checking the docs for insight into businesses, industries and zeitgeist.

As Far As Whores Go, Larry Summers Seems To Have Become....

...the Whore of Babble-on.

Seriously, what does this crap even mean:

“The 21 chip adds a whole new dimension to bitcoin’s potential utility. At first we will be struck by the presence of a technology like embedded mining; eventually we may be struck by its absence...."

Long time readers may remember Larry from such hit posts as:

• Frontline's "The Warning": Now Taking Prop Bets on When Obama Fires Larry Summers' Ass
• The Essential Larry Summers: How He and Alan Greenspan Laid the Groundwork for the Financial Crisis and Larry Lost $1.8 Billion for Harvard 
• Breaking: "Summers Expected to Leave White House After Election" (and some thoughts on arrogance)
• Economists for Firing Larry Summers Changing Name to "Economic Policy Advice for President Obama"
• Larry Summers and Treasury Policy: Don't Never, Ever Trust Whitey

Mr. Summers has joined Andreessen-Horowitz's Balaji Srinivasan at overfunded ($116 mil) bitcoin startup 21 Inc.
You can read a lot about Mr. Srinivasan in "The Silicon Valley Secessionist Clarifies His Batshit Insane Plan" or, for just a soupçon, we have on offer, "Climateer Line of the Day: Uh Oh Andreessen Edition": 

...Bitcoins are like “tulips you can send anywhere in the world in arbitrary quantities”.

-Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan

Mr.Srinivasan may not be aware that, since ca. 1637 or so, tulips have not had the best connotation in the world of finance.... 

Oh, yeah, the trigger for this rant, from FT Alphaville:

21 (grams of digital coke)

In movie parlance, 21 grammes is said to be the weight of the soul. 

Keep this in mind as we explore 21 Inc’s big product reveal this week — a $399.99Raspberry Pi that’s also a “bitcoin computer” — which, according to endorsements from Larry Summers (he of secular stagnation fame), Marc Andreessen and others, could be as big as the internet if not a solution to world peace.

The 21 Bitcoin Computer, from 21.co, built atop a platform originally aimed at promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools, supposedly allows you to mine bitcoins in the background while doing regular computing stuff. 

Yet the sum of bitcoins earns is so small that 21 doesn’t even pretend that you can cover the original upfront price of the device, let alone make a profit. You’re paying for the right to waste electricity servicing the bitcoin network in return for a bitcoin shaving that earns you some sort of ‘node’* stake in the system. 

Vitalik Buterin at Ethereum has crunched the numbers and he points out:
So you’re paying $399 upfront and getting $0.105 per day or $38.3 per year, and this is before taking into account network difficulty increases, the upcoming block halving (yay, your profit goes down to $0.03 per day!) and, of course, the near-100% likelihood that you won’t be able to keep that device on absolutely all of the time. I seriously hope they have multiple mining chips inside of their device and forgot to mention it; otherwise you can outcompete this offering pretty easily by just preloading a raspberry pi with $200 of your favorite cryptotokens. 

You can read more about how the 21 device is fundamentally loss making on 21.co (yes, a Colombian domain). There you will also find useful information about how the value of bitcoin isn’t really underpinned by shameless rent seeking but — who’d have thought — productivity and output. Usefully, 21.co also offer the community these pearls of wisdom about how economics work:

For those now thinking Larry Summers + Miners + Pointless Wasted Energy + Productivity illusion must equal = THE BIGGEST KEYNESIAN COALMINE EXPERIMENT OF ALL TIME… Who knows. Maybe. It’s certainly more convenient than staging a faux alien invasion.

...MORE

Ha! Alaska Energy Metals sells exploration data to Bezos/Gates/Andreessen-Backed KoBold Metals

We've been keeping tabs on Kobold for years. As mentioned in the intro to a non-mining post on AI, June 2023's "Experts expect major companies are developing chatbots trained on internal data for company use." (META)":

This is one of the reasons for our long-standing dubiosity re: Andreessen/Bezos/Gates-backed  KoBold Metals. What are they training the AI on? The people who have the mining information to run the machine learning programs are the mining companies and that information is as closely guarded as the gold in Fort Knox. 

BHP has been an investor in KoBold for the last two years and they may be giving up some data to train the 'puters but what you want is all the mining knowledge in the universe so you get those serendipitous connections that wouldn't occur to a human being and that they don't yet have....

The headline story from Global Mining Review, November 30:

Alaska Energy Metals Corporation has announced the partial sale of its previously purchased exploration data to a subsidiary of KoBold Metals Company, an exploration and mining company out of Silicon Valley known for its innovative use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in mineral exploration.

The data pertains to KoBold’s Skolai Project, which runs adjacent to AEMC’s Nikolai Nickel Project in the Interior Alaska region.

Alaska Energy Metals Corporation President and CEO commented: “We are pleased to recover some of our costs from the large exploration data set we bought earlier this year. KoBold owns claims that neighbour our Nikolai Nickel Project and I am confident they will put the data to good use. With it, it should accelerate their exploration efforts. We wish KoBold success in their search for magmatic nickel-copper sulfide deposits on their claims. Any discovery success in this emerging nickel district will benefit Alaska Energy Metals and Alaska generally.”

Earlier this year, Alaska Energy Metals acquired an extensive data package produced by prior explorers of the district, some of which now pertains to claims held by KoBold. AEMC has sold the relevant data to KoBold for US$175 000. The data has been clipped approximately to the boundaries of KoBold’s Skolai claim block and includes:

• Rock sample assay results (>1000 samples).
• Soil sample assay results (>2300 samples).
• Stream sediment samples assay results (>250 samples).
• Drill core assay results and core logs (13 drill holes).
• ZTEM and VTEM airborne geophysical surveys.
• Geological maps.

....MORE

GMR home

The need for both training data and data for analysis is one of the reasons we noted what seems to be a quiet Andreessen move: go into Create-a-corp mode. In Kobold's case it was to buy into an existing copper mine. June 2023:

Andreessen/Bezos/Gates-Backed Kobold Metals Raises Another $200 Million At Unicorn Valuation
....Additionally, CrunchBase News goes on to say this round will go toward the existing Zambian copper mine that KoBold is buying into. As discussed in our June 17 post the company had announced they were buying into the copper deposit using a portion of the earlier $192.5 million round. However, all money is fungible [except, note to Jon Corzine: Don't co-mingle the client funds] so who knows where it is directed and when.

....In what looks like an acknowledgement (without public acknowledgement) of  the failure-to-date of the technique to find metals, the company took a bunch of their loot and invested in a previously discovered copper-cobalt resource. From Reuters, December 14, 2022:

Billionaire-backed KoBold Metals to invest in Zambia copper mine

California-based exploration firm KoBold Metals, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify battery metal deposits, is investing $150 million to develop a copper mine in Zambia, the company announced at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C.... 

This is a variation on a trick Mr. Andreessen used to save something, anything, from an an overfunded ($116 million) crypto sinkhole a16z portfolio company:

Andreessen Horowitz Investee Coinbase May Buy Andreessen Horowitz Investee Earn.com (né 21.co)
Ha!
That's one way to exit.
Earn.com was not mentioned in April 4's "Crypto M&A: "Three Startups Coinbase May Have Its Eye On"" because it's such a Tesla/SolarCity-cousins-shouldn't-marry type of deal.
Yet here we are....

When Coinbase came public, the limited partner investors (and Mr. Andreessen) in 21.co were able to salvage their investment, even though 21.co added nothing, zilch, nada to Coinbase. And 21.co was never heard from again.

Here's an early post on Kobold:

May 2019
Bezos, Andreessen and Gates Looking For Cobalt In Canada

Not them personally, can you imagine? Tramping around northern Saskatchewan?

Jeff: Bill, does this rock look blue to you?
Bill: I can't see it, let me get my glasses.
Marc: Guys, have I told you all the things I've wanted to tweet since I quit Twitter?
Jeff and Bill: Oh Gawd

No, it's a company they're invested in....

More On The Andreessen/Bezos/Gates Backed Company Using AI To Search For Cobalt

In yesterday's "Cobalt Blue" post I made a reference to the company, KoBold Metals without explaining further. Here's the rest of the story from the brainiacs at IEEE Spectrum. For what it's worth, we've been dubious. So far (five years) machine learning doesn't seem to add muh more than incremental advantage to minerals prospecting.

April 29, 2023:

This AI Hunts for Hidden Hoards of Battery Metals
KoBold Metals’ technology maps likely deposits of minerals for EV batteries

In June 2022, six Boeing 737s—fully loaded with tents, food, satellite Internet equipment, drones, geophysical survey gear, drilling equipment, and a team of experienced geologists—flew to a remote airstrip in northern Quebec. The geologists were hunting for major deposits of the minerals needed to power a clean-energy future. Given the mix of cutting-edge scientific computing and old-school bravado, it was as though they were channeling Alan Turing and Indiana Jones simultaneously.

Our startup, KoBold Metals, acquired an 800-square-kilometer mineral claim in the region based in part on predictions from our artificial intelligence systems. According to the AI, there was good reason to believe we’d find valuable deposits of nickel and cobalt buried below the surface. Summer snowmelts in this near-arctic region created a brief window to bring in a small village’s worth of equipment and personnel to test our predictions.

We cofounded KoBold in 2018 with backing from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Our goal is to develop ways to discover major new deposits of vital metals needed for electric vehicle (EV) batteries—for which there is an enormous and growing need.

We’re trying to transform mineral exploration from a manual, judgment-guided, trial-and-error process into a data-driven and scalable science. It’s the mother of all needle-in-a-haystack problems: Find the significant minable deposits of cobalt, copper, lithium, and nickel resting anywhere from 100 to 2,000 meters deep in the Earth’s surface. 

The world needs a lot more metal

Preventing the most catastrophic impacts of climate change requires achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which includes, among many other things, replacing all fossil-fuel-powered light cars and trucks with electric vehicles. That, in turn, will require manufacturing billions of EV batteries. Even today’s demand for the metals outstrips supply—as evidenced by nickel prices doubling and lithium prices quintupling over the last year. To realize a global transition to electric vehicles, we’ll need to discover and mine an additional US $15 trillion worth of cobalt, copper, lithium, and nickel by midcentury. (We’re currently on target to mine about $3.6 trillion worth of these metals by 2050).

World leaders are well aware of the need. In the United States, for example, President Biden invoked the Cold War–era Defense Production Act in March 2022 to use presidential powers it grants to encourage domestic production of the minerals required in EV batteries. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in August 2022, included billions of dollars to subsidize the development and operation of metals mines, both in the United States and globally.

Investors are aware of the supply challenge as well. In February 2022, KoBold raised $192.5 million in Series B financing, which has gone toward securing more than 50 exploration sites in Australia, Canada, Greenland, sub-Saharan Africa, and the United States. We plan to use AI to streamline the largely scattershot process of discovering new ore deposits. Once they’re discovered, we plan to partner with mining companies for the actual mining operations and advise them on efficient extraction, again using our AI tools....

....MUCH MORE

In what looks like an acknowledgement (without public acknowledgement) of  the failure-to-date of the technique to find metals, the company took a bunch of their loot and invested in a previously discovered copper-cobalt resource. From Reuters, December 14, 2022:

Billionaire-backed KoBold Metals to invest in Zambia copper mine

California-based exploration firm KoBold Metals, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify battery metal deposits, is investing $150 million to develop a copper mine in Zambia, the company announced at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C.... 

This is a variation on a trick Mr. Andreessen used to save something, anything, from an an overfunded ($116 million) crypto sinkhole a16z portfolio company:

Andreessen Horowitz Investee Coinbase May Buy Andreessen Horowitz Investee Earn.com (né 21.co)
Ha!
That's one way to exit.
Earn.com was not mentioned in April 4's "Crypto M&A: "Three Startups Coinbase May Have Its Eye On"" because it's such a Tesla/SolarCity-cousins-shouldn't-marry type of deal.
Yet here we are....

When Coinbase came public, the limited partner investors (and Mr. Andreessen) in 21.co were able to salvage their investment, even though 21.co added nothing, zilch, nada to Coinbase. And 21.co was never heard from again.

We've been tracking KoBold since just after it was formed. Here's a March 2022 post:

"Mining firm backed by Bezos and Gates to begin Greenland drilling"
We'll see if KoBold is everything it is touted to be or just hype....

*****

....One of the reasons for the dubiosity is the fact the company has been talking about doing something for years. Here's a post from March 2019:

Cobalt: Bill Gates, Bezos, Dalio Are On the Hunt for New Underground Supply

And May 2019
Bezos, Andreessen and Gates Looking For Cobalt In Canada

Not them personally, can you imagine? Tramping around northern Saskatchewan?

Jeff: Bill, does this rock look blue to you?
Bill: I can't see it, let me get my glasses.
Marc: Guys, have I told you all the things I've wanted to tweet since I quit Twitter?
Jeff and Bill: Oh Gawd

No, it's a company they're invested in....

On the other hand the company has shown the political wherewithal to get a concession when others were shut out by the indigenous government. 

Anti-Mining Opposition Party Wins Greenland Election
China smiles.

And November 2021:
"Greenland bans uranium mining, blocking vast rare earths project"
The ban seems to be aimed at just the radioactive stuff so shouldn't shut down Bill Gates' exploration for cobalt.*

Cryptocurrency start-up Coinbase valued at $8 billion despite bitcoin's plunge

From CNBC, Oct. 30:

• Coinbase just raised $300 million in a Series E round, bringing its valuation to $8 billion.
• The start-up plans to use those funds to "accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies and digital assets," Coinbase President and COO Asiff Hirji says.
• Coinbase is often seen as a poster child for the industry, and its allure among top venture capitalists has been touted as a positive sign for the future of cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin's value has dropped drastically this year, but the value of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is skyrocketing in the opposite direction.

The San Francisco-based company on Tuesday announced a $300 million fundraising round that puts Coinbase's new valuation at $8 billion and makes it one of the most highly valued in the United States. The deal marks a massive increase from its previous valuation, which had been $1.6 billion as of August 2017.

The Series E round was led by Tiger Global Management, with participants including Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator Continuity, Wellington Management and Polychain.

Coinbase plans to use the funds to "accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies and digital assets," Coinbase President and Chief Operating Officer Asiff Hirji said in a statement.

The company, the best known U.S. cryptocurrency trading platform, is seen as a poster child for the fledgling industry. Its allure among top venture capitalists has been touted as a positive sign for the future of cryptocurrencies.

Coinbase, which landed at the No. 10 spot on the 2018 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, was certainly in the right place at the right time when bitcoin skyrocketed more than 1,300 percent last year to nearly $20,000.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have lost more than 65 percent of their value since, as retail interest wanes. But Coinbase has plowed money back into a master plan to cater to institutional investors. This year, it launched a suite of offerings for professional investors. One of them, Coinbase Custody, received regulatory approval last week from the New York Department of Financial Services.

It recently partnered with fellow cryptocurrency unicorn Circle to support a U.S. dollar-backed cryptocurrency known as a "stable coin."...MORE

Previously:

SEC documents detail scores of fraud allegations against Andreessen-backed Coinbase 
People are complaining to the SEC?
That is not what you want ahead on your IPO.

"Coinbase Strategy Teardown: How Coinbase Grew Into The King Midas Of Crypto Doing 
$1B In Revenue"
Coinbase is the Andreessen Horowitz backed cryptocurrency play that's working out.
21.co is the one that isn't....

"Announcing Coinbase Index Fund"
Coinbase, and the things Coinbase is doing seem to be a more realistic way for Andreessen Horowitz to make money out of Bitcoin than their 21.Co. (see below)...

Andreessen Horowitz Investee Coinbase May Buy Andreessen Horowitz Investee Earn.com (né 21.co)
Ha!
That's one way to exit.
Earn.com was not mentioned in April 4's "Crypto M&A: "Three Startups Coinbase May Have Its Eye On"" because it's such a Tesla/SolarCity-cousins-shouldn't-marry type of deal.
Yet here we are....

And many more but that's such a nice progression we''ll stop here. Use the 'search blog' box if interested. 

"On July 19, 2025, China killed the silicon wafer. And with it, ASML’s monopoly, TSMC’s moat, and every American chip sanction"

This gentleman, William Huo, seems a bit too cocksure that China will leave the West in the dust but he points out some interesting recent advances.

First up, the tweet pinned at the top of his X feed: 

I’ve come to see my tweets not as commentary but as a running chronicle of history. Each one marks a watershed moment in China’s push to reclaim its rightful place in the global order.https://t.co/gU1oNuInCx

— William Huo (@wmhuo168) June 14, 2025

And the beginning of his thread:

On July 19, 2025, China killed the silicon wafer. And with it, ASML’s monopoly, TSMC’s moat, and every American chip sanction. You just didn’t hear the explosion. Time to break it down. (1/21)https://t.co/v2fFYwXEWW

— William Huo (@wmhuo168) July 20, 2025

Because we (Climateer Investing and yours truly) are not on X (or any of the competing platforms) we are dependent on others to call upon Threadreader to unroll anything over one tweet. Here goes: 

On July 19, 2025, China killed the silicon wafer. And with it, ASML’s monopoly, TSMC’s moat, and every American chip sanction. You just didn’t hear the explosion. Time to break it down. (1/21)

Stable InSe transistors with high-field effect mobility for reliable nerve signal sensing - npj 2D Materials and Applications  

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41699-019-0110-x?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Part I: The Atomic Truth

Most people think the chip war is about geopolitics. It’s not. It’s about atomic ratios. And China just mastered a law of nature the West still struggles to pronounce: stoichiometry.

 (2/21) 

Stoichiometry is the a priori rulebook for matter. Not a lab trick. Not engineering. It’s the logic atoms obey when forming compounds. You get the ratios right or the structure collapses. Period. (3/21) 

Silicon is forgiving. You can tweak and etch and polish. Add more doping. Fix things post-growth. That’s why the entire Western chip industry is addicted to photolithography and brute-force scaling. (4/21) 

Indium selenide (InSe) is not forgiving. It’s a 2D compound. One atom thick. One indium per selenium. Anything less than perfect stoichiometry? You get garbage. Defects. No chip. No circuit. (5/21) 

That’s what makes China’s breakthrough historic. Their scientists didn’t invent InSe. They cracked how to grow it perfectly. At scale. With atomic self-correction. No ASML needed. No permission slip. 

(6/21)  

Their method vaporizes indium, condenses it into a liquid layer, and grows InSe by balancing the atomic ratio in real time. The process self-regulates the stoichiometry. That’s the key. 

(7/21) 

They didn’t stop at flakes. They built 5 cm wafers. They etched transistor arrays. They proved it works on a chip, not just under an electron microscope. It’s fabrication-grade. 

(8/21)

 

This isn’t a lab paper. It’s the exit wound from the silicon era. The stoichiometric bottleneck is gone. The rest is just assembly. 

(9/21) 

 

Part II: After Silicon

InSe outperforms silicon in every category that matters:
• 5–10x higher electron mobility
• Atomic thickness
• Tunable bandgap
• Lower power leakage
• Faster switching (10/21) ....

....MUCH MORE

Though not directly related, this July 17 article at IEEE Spectrum may also be of interest:

2D Transistors Could Come Sooner Than Expected
CDimension thinks it can cut the 10-year timeline in half