Crypto venture investment firm Electric Capital appointed two new general partners.
The firm — which has backed a wide range of crypto projects and companies, including dYdX, Kraken, and Bitwise — announced the promotions of Ken Deeter and Maria Shen to the role of general partners on Thursday.
Engineers by background, Shen and Deeter join Avichal Garg, a former product management director at Facebook, and Curtis Spencer, previously an engineer at Facebook, to the upper echelon of the firm.
The changes come amid a slowdown in venture capital activity in the crypto market and a broader slump in token prices.
Still, Electric is long-term bullish on the space — specifically, the role of engineers building out new use cases. The promotion reflects Electric’s focus on hiring engineering talent to lead investments in web3.
“Engineering capability and technical contributions are essential to helping founders succeed on these new open platforms,” the firm said in a statement to The Block. “VCs will need expertise in areas such as liquidity provisioning, governance, code security, designing novel token mechanisms, and more.”
Deeter previously spent the last 20 years building teams at companies like VMare and Facebook. He currently leads the firm’s liquidity provisioning and governance initiatives, while Maria invests in companies in the non-fungible token space and is the brainchild behind the firm’s annual Developer report.
In March 2022, Electric Capital closed a billion raise for a fund to invest in tokens and back crypto startups. It joined a handful of other venture firms that raised billion-dollar-plus funds, including a16z and Paradigm.