Welcome to Chain Reaction, a podcast diving into stories, backgrounds, and breaking news with the biggest names in crypto.
For this week’s episode, I interviewed Gwendolyn Regina, Chief Investment Officer at layer-1 blockchain BNB Chain. Prior to her current role, Regina worked at Facebook — or, as some now call her, Meta — building a new business unit for venture capital partnerships and startup growth. She is also the founder of a few different companies and a member of the founding team of a start-up technology investment company, Thymos Capital.
As Director of Investments, Regina vets new projects, talks to developers, and manages BNB Chain’s grant program, which selects up to 10 projects per month to help them grow on the chain.
The BNB Chain was launched in September 2020 and was originally launched by Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume.
Since then, BNB Chain has aimed to be a separate, decentralized and community-owned entity from Binance, focused on three audiences: retail markets, builders and developers, and the gateway between Web2.0 and Web3 businesses. , Regina said. “We’re here to, number one, grow the blockchain and make the pie bigger.”
Although the past year has been fragile for crypto markets, BNB’s investment strategy takes a long-term view and is mostly unaffected by day-to-day market events, Regina explained.
“Our investment thesis doesn’t change and yet it does change too,” Regina joked. “We all know blockchain and crypto are moving incredibly fast, so we’re more specific in some areas, but basically that hasn’t changed.”
Overall, through the bear market and the “mini-bulls” along the way, “we are in a phase where everyone is building,” Regina said. “And we want to enable more features on BNB Chain.”
Web3 games on BNB Chain have also seen “organic growth through robustness and cheaper fees”, but the blockchain team is now “double-dipping” into this area to encourage more players and developers to play and leaning on her chain,” Regina added. Of its 1 million daily active users, around 40% are gamers, she shared.
“Our GameFi infrastructure has always been relatively strong, but because things are changing so much, we’re really trying to find a one-stop GameFi infrastructure,” Regina said. “Going back to our investment thesis, when we look at the different themes, we always wonder what is missing now and above all […] you have to think about what will be important in six months.
For Regina and the BNB investment team, investments are “more than financial capital; that’s really a lot of incentive for growth,” among other things.
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