Multicoin Capital Hires Principal in Asia as Crypto VCs Look East

As American cryptocurrency markets remain relatively subdued, investors are turning to Asia for fresh lifeblood.

Case and point, Multicoin Capital just hired Beijing-based investor Mable Jiang, formerly of Nirvana Capital, to spearhead the venture firm's hunt for new deals in Asia.The Texas-based Mulitcoin started publishing research reports and announcements in Mandarin last summer, so Jiang will also help "Capitalize on the structurally broken information flow for secondary-market investment," the company said in a blog post shared with CoinDesk.

Multicoin is merely one of many American crypto hedge funds and venture capital firms seeking a foothold in token-hungry markets like China and Korea.

Polychain Capital increased its investment in the Chinese token project Nervos, alongside China Merchants Bank International, and sent partners to travel in Asia for a variety of meetings.

"Several firms have asked us for help in sourcing Asia partners and employees," Dragonfly Capital's Alexander Pack said in August.

"Asia leads the world in crypto users and adoption by a mile - it's not even close."

Despite reports of a Chinese regulatory crackdown, which crop up routinely but have yet to quell demand, SimilarWeb indicates more than half of the traffic for the crypto exchange Huobi comes from mainland China in addition to 35 percent of the global traffic to OKEx.

Electric Capital co-founder Avichal Garg said he helms one of the few Silicon Valley funds not looking to expand in Asia because it is "Such a different universe" that requires significant resources to address sustainably.

"You see a lot of trade volume. A lot of the pushing of boundaries is coming out of Asia, in part because the regulatory climate there is different," Garg said.

In some ways, this renewed Asia push is a continuation of a trend that started during the 2018 bear market, when BlockTower Capital became one of the first funds to shift strategies by hiring multilingual Goldman Sachs alumni Steve SeungKeun Lee.On the other hand, Jiang said this isn't a trend; it's a new way to look at stateless assets.