Investing in Bastion
Web3 users want either useful or engaging applications and generally care little about the underlying infrastructure, but the former can’t exist without the latter. The interplay between delightful consumer applications and robust infrastructure has been a core topic of conversation in web3 circles for many years.
In the first ten years of web3 development, it has been extremely difficult for a developer or business to build exceptional user experiences. Security and usability have often ended up on opposite ends of the tradeoff spectrum, and high gas fees, slow blockchain finality times, and challenges around user education have persisted. We’ve long believed that this wouldn’t always need to be the case and that, eventually great teams would build superior products by abstracting away this complexity.
This scale of problem can’t be tackled by just anyone. Nassim Eddequiouaq and Riyaz Faizullabhoy have a long, successful history of working closely together – they’ve been at it for over seven years.
Nass and Riyaz first worked together at Docker, which has since become a developer favorite for accelerating the time to launch consistent, secure, and reliable applications.
They later moved to Anchorage Digital, where, as founding engineers, they worked to build the hardware-backed private key storage platform that would eventually become the technology underpinning the first federally chartered crypto bank. Sometime later, they designed and spearheaded wallet infrastructure and custody at Meta’s cryptocurrency wallet, Novi.
Most recently, Nass and Riyaz worked with us as CTO and CISO at a16z crypto, where we got to work closely with them. When they told us about their ambitions for Bastion, the decision to invest was easy.
Launching today, Bastion helps companies seamlessly integrate web3 infrastructure into enterprise technologies through a compliant, white-label platform. The Bastion platform focuses on three core pillars: ownership & monetization of digital goods, smart transaction routing, and customer analytics.
We believe in Nass and Riyaz’s vision of making web3 safe and accessible for companies in every industry and are extremely excited to support them in making it a reality.
Welcome, Bastion!
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