Founded in 2017 by Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain, Multicoin Capital has established itself as one of the most influential crypto funds in the market. Its legend is built around a single bet: the Solana blockchain. But behind the success story lies a tale of an obsession with performance, a spectacular false start, and a rare ability to double down when everyone else is panicking. Discover the story of Multicoin Capital.
Two young graduates far removed from Silicon Valley norms
Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain met at New York University, where they studied finance from 2008 to 2012. Their entry into the world of finance thus coincided with a time when Wall Street suddenly ceased to be a stable prospect: Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, triggering a systemic shockwave.
Very quickly, their curiosity drew them just as much toward tech as toward Wall Street: they followed the rise of the first major mobile apps, then moved to Austin, Texas, and each launched a startup—Pristine (Google Glass for healthcare) for Samani, and ePatientFinder (connecting patients with clinical trials) for Jain.
Samani and Jain later recounted raising millions for these startups—a crucial milestone in their journey, both for learning how to win over investors and for surviving the reality of products that were too far ahead of their time.
But the path to Multicoin Capital and investment didn’t happen overnight. Their entrepreneurial experience instilled in them one key conviction: capital doesn’t just reward ideas—it rewards distribution and, above all, execution. It was precisely this perspective that they would apply to blockchain technology a few years later.
Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain
Building a Fund by First Establishing Credibility
Multicoin Capital didn’t start out as one of the most prolific crypto funds. The duo describes their journey as initially opportunistic, then increasingly structured: their first Bitcoin purchases as early as 2013, a more serious dive into Ethereum in 2016, followed by profit-taking and arbitrage in 2017. In other words: before becoming “VCs,” they learned about crypto as a market, with its cycles, narratives, and biases.
This is where the transition from entrepreneurship to pure investment made sense for them: after experiencing fundraising from the founders’ perspective, they wanted to apply the reverse approach—but with a twist specific to crypto.
Multicoin Capital takes a hybrid approach: seeking returns on protocols whose tokens can become liquid faster than unlisted stocks—“venture capital economics with public market liquidity,” according to the phrase found in the fund’s public communications.
The fund announced its first closing on August 1, 2017, and since they have neither a pedigree nor an established network in the original crypto circles, they compensate with what they do have: their investment thesis.
Their credibility is thus built through in-depth and highly technical analyses (tokenomics, consensus design, trade-offs between architectures), intended as much to convince the community as to signal to the market that they aren’t just riding the momentum.
First wake-up call: EOS and the mirage of “Ethereum killers”
Multicoin’s defining obsession at the time can be summed up in one word: execution. Their intuition was simple: if a blockchain wants to support mass adoption, it must be fast, scalable, and “usable.”
In April 2018, Multicoin published a highly favorable report on EOS, touting a blockchain focused on high scalability and an excellent user experience. The context was red-hot: EOS raised $4 billion through its ICO, and the idea that a serious competitor to Ethereum had emerged took hold within the crypto community.
Except that the EOS story quickly turned into a cautionary tale: contested governance, perceived centralization, broken promises… The kind of disillusionment that can permanently damage a young fund like Multicoin Capital, still seeking to establish its legitimacy.
And yet, it is precisely after this failure that their trajectory becomes interesting: they do not abandon the thesis of a high-performance blockchain and continue to seek a truly credible execution.
Solana: When the Thesis Is Finally Validated
Multicoin Capital claims to have invested in the Solana blockchain since the seed round (May 2018), well before the mainnet launch (March 2020). This detail matters: they didn’t discover Solana when the blockchain was all the rage; they got involved very early on with a network that was still largely theoretical.
In July 2019, Solana announced that it had closed a $20 million Series A round led by Multicoin Capital. At this stage, the project put forward a simple yet ambitious promise: to achieve Layer 2-level performance directly on the main layer, notably through Proof of History.
This is where the narrative shifts, because for Multicoin Capital, participating in the seed round was not an end in itself—it was just the starting point. Today, Solana has become one of the leading blockchains on the market (DeFi, NFTs, payments, memecoins, etc.).
Multicoin Capital’s thesis—namely, a very fast blockchain capable of supporting large-scale use cases—is no longer just a hypothesis: it has been realized on an industrial scale with Solana.
What about the returns Multicoin Capital has realized on this investment?
The exact figure for Multicoin Capital’s gains on Solana is not public, for one simple reason: a fund may have invested at multiple price points (seed, Series A, secondary purchases), be subject to vesting periods or lock-ups, and, most importantly, sell in tranches. However, we can estimate the order of magnitude of the theoretical multiple realized by the fund.
Legal proceedings filed by a former Solana investor, as reported by Blockworks, indicate that during the seed sale, future rights to SOL were valued at $0.04 per unit.
Given such an entry point, even without knowing the exact exit price (and even if part of the holdings was sold well before the peak of $293), it’s clear why Solana has become the textbook case associated with Multicoin Capital: the gap between a price of a few cents and an asset that, at certain market moments, traded at several hundred dollars, is measured in the thousands (on paper).
Historical price data available on market aggregators allows us to observe these extremes, without necessarily revealing the fund’s actual performance.
The Fall of FTX: Loss of Credibility, Then a Rebound
The 2021–2022 period, however, serves as a stark reminder of a harsh reality: in the crypto ecosystem, even the best investment theses can be distorted by market structure. When the FTX platform collapsed, the shockwave hit Solana head-on—and Multicoin Capital along with it.
According to a letter to investors reported by CoinDesk, Multicoin Capital stated at the time that approximately 10% of its total assets were locked on FTX. That same year, due to heavy exposure to FTT, SRM, and SOL, the fund recorded a loss of 91.4%, according to market sources citing its communications.
The interesting part is what happened next: instead of withdrawing from the market for good, Multicoin Capital maintained a “post-crisis” outlook in which the Solana ecosystem could survive the loss of its main industry backer.
And the crypto market, buoyed by the 2023 rebound, has proven them right. Indeed, The Block reports that the fund has posted an exceptional year-over-year performance of +537% and a cumulative gain of +9,281% since 2017.
2025: The “Solana Treasury Company,” or the Institutionalization of the Bet
In September 2025, Multicoin Capital announced that it had co-led, alongside Jump Crypto and Galaxy, a $1.65 billion capital raise for Forward Industries to launch a treasury strategy focused on the SOL cryptocurrency.
The idea is to apply, using Solana’s SOL, a model popularized by Strategy with Bitcoin, by bridging the gap between traditional markets (access to capital) and on-chain returns (staking/network participation).
However, this type of investment vehicle remains intrinsically linked to market cycles: it can amplify both gains and losses, and exposes investors to leverage, refinancing, and volatility in the underlying asset.
What Multicoin (Really) Tells Us About Crypto Venture Capital
The story of Multicoin Capital isn’t just about a good call on the Solana blockchain. It’s a reminder that crypto amplifies everything. Convictions turn into roller coasters, mistakes aren’t paid for in reputation points but in years of drawdown, and the line between fundamental thesis and market structure can collapse in a week.
Multicoin built its brand on a simple idea: if crypto is to support mass adoption, then execution performance isn’t a luxury. Solana brought this thesis to life. FTX nearly destroyed it.
And the 2023–2025 period shows that Samani and Jain aren’t content with merely having survived: they’re now trying to scale their bet, with investment vehicles that borrow from Wall Street’s playbook.
Thus, Multicoin Capital has earned a unique place in crypto history by accepting a level of volatility that most funds cannot tolerate. Time will tell whether the Solana Treasury Company is the ultimate act of rationalization or yet another risk in a market that punishes overconfidence.
