Adam Ludwin

Ludwin received a B.S. from the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He began his career as a consultant, first at BCG and later at IDEO, and then worked as a venture capitalist at RRE Ventures in New York City.⁠[1]

Ludwin founded Chain in 2014. About nine months earlier the company had raised seed money for a consumer-facing startup before shifting to a BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry development platform. On August 20, 2014, Chain announced a $9.5 million Series A led by Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, with participation from RRE Ventures, Thrive CapitalThrive CapitalThrive Capital is an investment firm led by chief executive Joshua Kushner that builds and invests in internet, software and technology-enabled companies, with investments including Cursor and Chai Discovery. Kushner is also chief executive of Thrive Holdings, a long-term holding company.Open the full entry, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, BoxBoxBox is an American enterprise software company founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith and others, headquartered in Redwood City, California. It provides cloud content management, file sharing, collaboration, e-signature and AI content-processing tools, and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2015 under the ticker BOX.Open the full entry Group, Barry Silbert, Homebrew, 500 Startups and Pantera CapitalPantera CapitalPantera Capital is an investment management firm focused on digital assets and the blockchain industry, founded by Dan Morehead in 2003. Its investments span corporate equity, early-stage tokens and liquid digital assets, and it manages a bitcoin fund, venture funds and multi-strategy blockchain funds.Open the full entry, among others; Khosla Ventures partner Keith RaboisKeith RaboisKeith Rabois is an investor and entrepreneur who serves as a Managing Director at Khosla Ventures and Chairman of Opendoor. He held management roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square, later worked in venture capital at Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, and co-founded Opendoor and OpenStore. His public career spans payments, professional networking, real estate transactions, e-commerce, and venture investing, and he has expressed views on team management, delegation, and vertical integration.Open the full entry joined Chain’s board. Ludwin was then also a venture partner at RRE Ventures.⁠[1][2]

He said at the time that the blockchain is “this mammoth network that is quite difficult to build on” and that “When a big bank wants to connect to the blockchain, they want an expert to help them.”⁠[2]

On November 11, 2015, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry released the a16z Podcast episode “a16z Podcast: Blockchain vs./and Bitcoin,” featuring Ludwin as founder of the enterprise blockchain platform Chain. Opening with the question “Blockchain without bitcoin?”, the episode had Ludwin describe how financial institutions were responding to the technology and asking about their own blockchain strategies.⁠[3]

The episode also covered merging finance and tech cultures, the drivers of bitcoin prices, the case for blockchain beyond bitcoin, whether private or permissioned blockchains can exist, and concepts such as “colored coins” and “sidechains.” It was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019, as “a16z Podcast | Blockchain vs/and Bitcoin.”⁠[3][4]

In September 2018 Lightyear Corporation, a payments network built on StellarStellarStellar is an open payment and asset-issuance network launched by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim in July 2014. Its native asset is the lumen (XLM). Using the Stellar Consensus Protocol's federated Byzantine agreement model, it connects financial institutions, anchors, stablecoins and cross-border payments. Soroban smart contracts were introduced in 2024.Open the full entry’s open financial protocol, acquired Chain, and the two brands combined into a new company, Interstellar, to help organizations build applications on the Stellar network; Ludwin became Interstellar’s CEO and Jed McCalebJed McCalebJed McCaleb is a programmer and serial entrepreneur, and a co-founder of Stellar and the Stellar Development Foundation. Before that he was involved with eDonkey, Mt. Gox, and Ripple; in 2014 he launched Stellar with Joyce Kim, and he later also invested in Vast and the Astera Institute.Open the full entry its CTO, while the Stellar Development Foundation remained independent. Before the merger Chain had built enterprise blockchain applications for financial organizations including VisaVisaVisa Inc. is one of the world’s leaders in digital payments, with roots going back to 1958, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.Open the full entry, Citigroup and Nasdaq and raised about $40 million from partners including Thrive Capital, Citi and Orange.⁠[5]

“At heart, we believe enterprise adoption of blockchain is synonymous with digitizing the assets issued by enterprises,” Ludwin said, adding that “Chain has worked from inside the enterprise, while Stellar has focused on the network between organizations.”⁠[5]