June 2026 – Venture capitalist Jesse Walden, founder of crypto-focused firm Variant, has raised $222 million for Variant 4, a new fund dedicated to investing in companies at the earliest possible stage. Walden, who began his career at Andreessen Horowitz before launching Variant in 2020, believes the era of “crypto investor” as a standalone category is coming to an end.
Walden told Fortune that within four years, being a crypto investor will be like being an “Internet investor” — a label that no longer exists as a distinct category. Despite this, he continues to back crypto themes while broadening Variant’s thesis to reflect the fast-changing world of AI.
Variant’s original thesis centered on blockchain’s promise to decentralize ownership of the online world, reducing reliance on platforms like Google and Facebook. While the vision of “Web 3” never fully materialized, Walden points to successes in decentralized finance, citing Uniswap and Morpho as examples of how decentralization validated the intellectual premise of autonomy.
Walden defines autonomy as any application that enables greater agency for users. This includes permissionless finance and crypto, but also extends to agentic AI applications. He argues that lessons from crypto — particularly the need for rigorous legal and security foundations — will be vital in the AI era, where companies must design systems resilient to both hostile governments and hackers.
He also sees parallels between Web 3 ideals and the rise of AI agents. As AI becomes central to how companies interact with customers and partners, Walden believes it will be harder for dominant platforms to restrict access to data, since agents could simply migrate to more open alternatives.
Reflecting on crypto’s trajectory, Walden says the technology was often misunderstood: “Crypto is plumbing. We’ve run a lot of experiments where crypto really wanted to be seen as the product. Where we ended up is crypto is this rail that enables lots of products, and that growth story is just getting started.”
Variant 4 represents both continuity and evolution — staying true to crypto’s decentralization roots while embracing AI-driven autonomy as the next frontier.
