Crypto’s Boom & A Warren Buffett Mystery

Warren Buffett
Photo by mark peterson/Corbis
William D. Cohan
March 27, 2022

Katie Haun, the formidable former federal prosecutor turned Andreessen Horowitz crypto zealot, just raised a $1.5 billion fund to invest in early stage crypto and Web3 startups—a massive bet on a still-unproven sector (at least by most people’s standards). Web3 may be beloved by venture capitalists but it remains largely untested by consumers and regulators. But Haun’s investing and fundraising success is enough to make some crypto skeptics reconsider their opposition to the phenomenon or at least to test their theses once more. Many people are wondering whether the new games, NFTs, marketplaces and other platforms built on blockchain technology and digital tokens will become the eventual successors to the likes of Facebook and Google. Others wonder whether the narrative surrounding Web3 has shifted from optimistic to overhyped.