Olaf Carlson-Wee

Carlson-Wee grew up in Minnesota, across the river from Fargo, North Dakota; his parents are Lutheran pastors.⁠[1][2]

In 2008, in the wake of the financial crisis, Carlson-Wee entered Vassar College in New York State and majored in sociology. He recalls that the crisis made him feel the whole system was stacked against ordinary people and led him to think about who controls money. In the summer of 2011 he discovered bitcoin and bought his first coin for about $2, then wrote an undergraduate thesis of about 90 pages on bitcoin and open-source finance, while his professor considered bitcoin dead. He earned a sociology degree; Vassar lists him as a member of the class of 2012, and he also says he graduated in 2012.⁠[3][3][4][5][6][4][4][2][1][7][3]

For about a year after graduating he traveled with a tent, crashing on friends’ couches, unwilling to enter a nine-to-five system, and later worked as a lumberjack in Holden Village, a mountain community in northern Washington, cutting wood to heat the village through the winter; the village was originally a copper-mining town taken over by the Lutheran church after the mine went bankrupt.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

Carlson-Wee was Coinbase’s 30th user. He cold-emailed Coinbase’s jobs address with his thesis attached; co-founder Fred Ehrsam replied within five minutes and then arranged an in-person interview in San Francisco, where Carlson-Wee gave two presentations, on the pharmacological induction of lucid dreams and on a security-first strategy for Coinbase, solved a math problem from Ehrsam in about three minutes, and was then questioned by Brian ArmstrongBrian ArmstrongBrian Armstrong is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of the crypto asset trading platform Coinbase. He founded Coinbase in 2012, led the company to a direct listing on Nasdaq in 2021, and holds a majority of its voting power through a dual-class share structure; he also founded the scientific collaboration platform ResearchHub and co-founded the longevity research company NewLimit.Open the full entry for about an hour; after a two-week paid trial he was hired as Coinbase’s first employee.⁠[4][4][4][8][4][4][4][4][4][4]

He handled customer support alone until Coinbase reached 250,000 users, often working 12-hour days; to solve the hiring problem he posted a “Bitcoin aptitude test” on Reddit’s bitcoin forum and Bitcoin Talk, which about 250 people took, and four months later he led a distributed team of 43 covering merchant integrations, API support, anti-fraud, compliance investigations, and customer support. He then became head of risk, responsible for account security and fraud prevention, and when fraud surged in 2013 he designed a “Risk Queue” for reviewing suspected stolen-identity purchases, at one point reviewing every single purchase on the site. He worked at Coinbase for about three and a half years and was paid entirely in bitcoin, starting at $50,000; over that time the company grew from three employees to about 120, and he helped raise a total of $117 million in venture funding.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][5][5][8][7]

In the summer of 2016, Carlson-Wee left Coinbase. Seeing projects begin to raise money by issuing tokens on blockchains that represent ownership of their networks, he concluded it was better to buy protocol tokens directly than to invest in companies built on protocols, and that September he incorporated and launched Polychain Capital as CEO, a long-only, long-holding hedge fund investing in a diversified portfolio of crypto assets; at the start it was just him, with about $5 million under management, and he was also an angel investor and filmmaker. Polychain was backed by firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, and Numerai founder Richard Craib was also an investor; by January 2017 the fund had raised $8 million.⁠[4][4][4][7][5][1][4][4][4][4][6][1]

At the time he was also the managing member of Cryptographic Financial, a limited partnership in a fund operated by Numerai. In January 2017 he told WIRED that bitcoin would never become an everyday currency and that comparing it to currency was a mistake; its real value lay in enabling “programmatic finance,” in which businesses are run by software contracts on blockchains.⁠[1][6][6][6]

In July 2017, Carlson-Wee said Polychain’s assets under management had grown from about $4 million at launch to about $200 million, with limited partners including Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Founders Fund. Polychain returned 2,303% after fees in its first full year of operation; that year he appeared on the cover of Forbes under the headline “the craziest bubble ever.”⁠[5][5][9][2][2]

Polychain was an early backer and one of the largest investors in the blockchain project Tezos. Tezos creators Arthur and Kathleen Breitman fought a months-long dispute with Johann Gevers, president of the Swiss Tezos Foundation, and community members backing the founders set up an alternative T2 foundation, of which Carlson-Wee was one of seven founding members; in January 2018, community channels circulated reports that some board applicants, including him, had been turned down. In February, Gevers stepped down, the foundation’s board grew from three to seven members, and Carlson-Wee and other T2 members joined it on February 26.⁠[10][10][10][11][11][11][12][10][10][13]

In early 2018, Polychain’s assets under management passed $1 billion, and Carlson-Wee was ranked 23rd on Fortune’s The Ledger 40 Under 40 list, then serving as chief investment officer. In July he said high-quality talent was leaving tech giants such as Facebook and Google in droves to start crypto companies, and that he paid attention not to prices but to developer momentum in building new applications.⁠[2][14][14][15][15]

The crypto market then crashed, with bitcoin falling more than 80% from nearly $20,000, and Polychain’s assets under management fell 40% in 2018, less than the roughly 70% drop in the aggregate value of crypto assets over the same period. In August 2018, the Wall Street Journal published a critical profile of Polychain’s fee policies, saying it had collected $150 million on paper gains and that Carlson-Wee had cashed out $60 million, and dwelt on his bohemian background; Fortune later wrote that the article made him wary of the media.⁠[2][2][16][2][2][2][2]

In 2019, Polychain incubated the decentralized artificial intelligence network Bittensor. By April 2024, Polychain held about $200 million of the TAO token; Carlson-Wee said Bittensor uses an incentive system similar to bitcoin mining but builds open-source, public artificial intelligence, an unprecedented new use for blockchains.⁠[17][17][17]

In November 2017, Polychain asked its limited partners to consent to side pockets for hard-to-value assets such as SAFTs, and limited partner Harry Greenhouse then requested a full redemption, with the two sides disagreeing over how the redemption should be valued. After receiving his redemption payment, Greenhouse demanded to inspect the books, was refused, and sued in the Delaware Court of Chancery in March 2018; in 2019 the court found that he had made his records request only after the redemption was complete and was no longer a limited partner, ruling for Polychain, while a related arbitration was still pending.⁠[18][18][18][18][18][18][18]

In 2019, Polychain’s performance recovered, with its main fund up 53% for the year and its side pocket funds up 82%; as of November its assets under management were about $825 million, including a roughly $600 million liquid fund holding about 20 crypto assets and a separate $175 million venture fund that had made 40 investments and held traditional equity. Polychain moved to One Market Street in San Francisco and had 25 employees. Carlson-Wee preferred to describe himself as a venture capitalist rather than a hedge fund manager and argued Polychain should be judged over a venture-style horizon of about seven years; its most prominent investments included Dfinity and Polkadot, and it also pursued shorter-term returns through staking, including a $10 million investment in Celo.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

Views of Polychain were divided: an anonymous institutional investor said he was young, had seen few cycles, and charged fees that were too high; Messari founder Ryan Selkis said its marks on private assets such as Polkadot and Dfinity were likely generous. Polychain responded that a 2% management fee plus 20% of profits is typical for the industry and that private assets are marked at their initial price or later funding-round valuations, consistent with the venture industry. Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris DixonChris DixonChris Dixon is a programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, and the founder and managing partner of a16z crypto. He co-founded SiteAdvisor and Hunch, helped create Founder Collective, and later joined Andreessen Horowitz, investing in technology companies such as Coinbase. He is also the author of Read Write Own and has long written about blockchains, network ownership, the open internet, and the combination of AI and crypto.Open the full entry called him a visionary and Polychain the first fund to build a whole institution around crypto.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

In May 2021, Carlson-Wee said at the Ethereal summit that DAOs were the second big breakthrough in blockchain after digital cash, that capital coordination through DeFi yield farming and ICOs already exceeded most IPOs, and that capital managed by DAOs would soon grow from about $75 billion to $1 trillion. In April that year, Polychain managed more than $300 million, with investors including Fred Ehrsam, Sequoia Capital, and Founders Fund.⁠[19][19][19][8]

In college, Carlson-Wee came across philosopher David Pearce’s online writings on using technology to end suffering, and when Polychain launched its Strange Genius speaker series for outsider thinkers in 2018 it invited Pearce. In February 2022 the two spoke in Interview magazine about the future of finance, life-extending gene editing, and ending suffering, among other transhumanist topics; he said he had written down his dreams every morning for nine years and practiced lucid dreaming.⁠[3][3][3][3]

As of early 2022, Polychain had more than $6 billion in assets under management; it had led rounds in projects such as Solana and Ava Labs, and in October 2022 it led a $165 million Series B for Uniswap Labs at a $1.66 billion valuation. When Terra and FTX collapsed in 2022, Carlson-Wee later said Polychain avoided them because of long-standing tight controls on counterparty risk, not lending at scale, and typically not using leverage: he had been pitched by Sam Bankman-FriedSam Bankman-FriedSam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research. After FTX collapsed in November 2022, he was charged in the United States with misappropriating customer funds; in November 2023 a jury found him guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, in March 2024 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit about $11 billion, and in 2026 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected his appeal.Open the full entry many times and always passed because of the obvious and irreconcilable conflict of interest between FTX and Alameda, and Polychain had invested early in Luna but exited after it pivoted to an algorithmic stablecoin. He attributed the outcome 80% to risk management and 20% to luck.⁠[9][9][9][20][20][20][20][20][20]

In July 2023, Polychain held a first close of about $200 million for its fourth venture fund, targeting a total of nearly $400 million, while letting go three members of its research team; general partner Niraj Pant left to start his own project, and the new fund would focus on Ethereum-related projects such as Arbitrum, Scroll, and EigenLayer. Pitchbook data put the assets under management of Polychain’s three funds at about $2.6 billion.⁠[16][16][16][16][16][16]

On January 4, 2024, Carlson-Wee’s X account @zxocw was hacked, and the hacker posted links to a fake “$PCHAIN” airdrop designed to lure users to a phishing site; Polychain promptly issued a notice urging users not to engage with the account until further notice.⁠[21][21]

Carlson-Wee was a speaker at the 2025 Network State Conference and was listed among the public speakers at the conference in Singapore on October 9, 2026.⁠[22][22][22]

Polychain Capital: Official website: https://polychain.capital/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23][24]

X: Public account: https://x.com/zxocw (opens in a new window)⁠[21][25]