Former Prosecutor Katie Haun on Why She’s Still Bullish: ‘Crypto Is an Internet-Sized Opportunity’

Katie Haun is known for raising $1.5 billion for her crypto venture firm in March 2022, the largest debut fund ever launched by a solo female founding partner. She’s also known for having an unusual background for a VC. She had a decadelong career as a federal prosecutor before working for four years as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Haun’s journey from prosecutor to crypto advocate started in 2012, when she received an assignment to investigate bitcoin while working at the Department of Justice.

“The more I did some diligence and looked into it, I found that some of the myths I’d been hearing were just not true,” Haun recalled in a debate with economist Paul Krugman.

Through market ups and downs since then, Haun has maintained her conviction that blockchain technology will be part of a fundamental transformation in how value moves through the digital economy.

“The space is much broader than just cryptocurrency. What we mean when we say crypto is cryptographic proofs paired with economic incentives,” Haun told CNBC recently. “We see this as an internet-sized opportunity.”

Backing Web 3.0

Haun Ventures operates two distinct investment vehicles: a $500 million early-stage fund focused on leading pre-seed through Series A rounds, and a $1 billion “acceleration” fund targeting later-stage projects and protocols. The firm maintains a lean team of 10 people and plans to cap the head count at 15.

Its approach centers on backing both blockchain infrastructure and distributed computing developers, as well as crypto projects being built on existing protocols.

“The biggest unlock is that up until now, we’ve had the internet, and we have computing platforms, but you need a central point of authority, a gatekeeper,” Haun told Ezra Klein on his podcast in 2021. “Now all of a sudden, what blockchains allow for is the removal of an intermediary or a kind of trusted party.”

The idea is to back companies that provide the “picks and shovels” that allow for the decentralization and peer-to-peer interactions that have long been the promise of blockchain technology, and that crypto advocates cite as the foundation of a new internet era: Web 3.0.

“When we talk about Web 2, we’re talking about a phase of the internet that started with a whole lot of promise — open protocols that anyone can build on. But really, what happened is that it is companies, tech companies, that are building on top of them,” Haun told Klein. “And they’ve benefited a lot from the open source and the open nature of those open internet protocols.”

Many in the crypto industry feel that there are opportunities for the blockchain to return some of that value to individuals in terms of security, ease of use, and the possibility to build creative applications on top of decentralized protocols.

Haun’s perspective on crypto was shaped by her experience prosecuting some of the earliest cryptocurrency-related crimes. As a federal prosecutor, she created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force and led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force.

“If you want to cover your tracks and you were a good criminal, bitcoin or cryptocurrency is one of the last things you should use,” Haun explained in her Krugman debate. She pointed out that crypto transactions leave an immutable trail, “digital breadcrumbs,” that aided law enforcement in numerous prosecutions.

‘Invest in the Protocols Themselves’

Haun Ventures’ investment strategy reflects a broad vision for crypto’s potential impact. Haun stresses the potential for crypto and blockchain to create new economic and social systems in a digital environment.

In her Klein interview, Haun discussed the possibility of decentralized social platforms where users control their own data and set platform rules. Rather than simply recreating existing digital services, she envisions fundamental changes to how users interact with and benefit from digital platforms.

The firm’s investments span both consumer-facing applications and underlying protocols. “If you were inventing the internet, you might think of protocols like SMTP or HTTP. That’s the equivalent of layer one protocols today in crypto,” Haun says. “But the difference was you couldn’t invest in SMTP or HTTP. Here, we can actually invest in the protocols themselves.”

Recent investments reflect this focus. The firm backed zero-knowledge proof startup Aleo, which launched its mainnet in 2024 after years of development. It also invested in Bridge, a payments platform leveraging stablecoins for cross-border transactions. Other investments include custody provider Fireblocks and blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.

Haun acknowledges potential challenges in the space while maintaining optimism about its trajectory. “The nature of running a crypto fund is taking on risk,” she told Klein, while emphasizing the importance of maintaining perspective on market cycles. “I think it’s important not to judge the current state of innovation with the end state of innovation.”

Haun also says, “When we think of crypto, we think of something much broader than financial services. These are frontier technologies, new computing platforms.”

She compared the current state of crypto to the early internet. “We are in the dial-up days and the critics out there confuse the current state of innovation with the end state of the innovation,” Haun argued. “Why would they assume the innovation would all stop right now?

“Any technology that you could name has definite pros and cons. I think the societal benefits that I see with crypto, if it reaches its full potential, vastly outweigh some of the downsides,” Haun told Klein. “But it’s very important to have the conversation around those downsides.”