In recent days we have been asked several times over whether the current pandemic crisis is a good or bad one in terms of equity investing in Fintech and Blockchain businesses. This is a complicated question to answer in the short term, but we think it is easier to answer if you take a longer term view.

Here are our thoughts for the 3 to 5 year timeframe:

1. Acceleration into the Future. The underlying adoption curves of the future digital economy (The Fifth Era) that we are transitioning to just steepened sharply as the world had no choice but to embrace virtual work, education, play and so on. Silicon Angle has a very good article by Paul Gillin that summarizes the broad strokes of this acceleration, and we encourage you to read it here. Across the Blockchain Coinvestors combined portfolio, the impact on companies is clearly not all positive, however, we are seeing record traffic, revenue, trading volume and so on being reported by fintech companies focused on digital payments, wallets, exchanges, and so on (admittedly this anecdotal information).

2. Public Market Response. The public markets have reflected this sentiment as investors have bid up the potential digital beneficiaries, and bid down the old world players. In the financial services arena, we are seeing public market investors beginning to discriminate between who they believe will benefit from the transition to a fully digital world and those who will…