We believed this not because the world needs a thousand crypto "currencies" in the narrow sense, but because blockchain technology would enable all manner of new digital experimentation, financial and otherwise. Bitcoin inspired a Crypto-Cambrian Explosion; a transformative species from which entire kingdoms of new technological life arise.

Three years on and our assumption appears increasingly validated. The market cap of digital assets has surpassed $50 billion (up from about $5 billion when ShapeShift launched). Perhaps the world is starting to realize that value can be natively digital, like all other forms of human information. Indeed, the digitization of value will be one of the 21st century's most transformative themes.

Thus we believe blockchains and the tokens upon them will continue to flourish, through bubbles, through busts, through controversy, calamity, struggle, insight, and brilliance. ShapeShift's purpose was, and remains, to enable humans and machines to move between these chains and tokens with as little energy expended, and as much risk avoided, as possible; to connect these new forms, and by extension, the people and lives attached to them, without friction.