Collab+Currency

Collab+Currency is a spinout investment vehicle formed by Stephen McKeon and Derek Schloss from within the Collaborative Fund platform. The two entities maintain a distinct but related history; Craig Shapiro, founder of Collaborative Fund, was involved in early Collab+Currency filings. The spinout allowed Collab+Currency to pursue a dedicated crypto and digital asset mandate separate from Collaborative Fund's broader consumer and climate-tech investments.

Rather than merely trading tokens, Collab+Currency holds some of the most historically significant NFT collections directly, including CryptoPunks, Chromie Squiggles, and Meebits. This approach embeds the firm inside the cultural layer of the market, providing insights into creator economies and community dynamics that inform its venture-stage investments in protocols and platforms.

Le Random is a research and editorial institution launched by Collab+Currency in 2022 to chronicle the generative art sector and on-chain culture. It functions as a market-intelligence unit, producing data-driven reports and thought leadership that maps the development of digital art from a niche subculture into a recognized institutional asset class. The move signals that the firm considers intellectual dominance in the generative art space a core part of its sourcing and brand advantage.

Collab+Currency participates in both early-stage equity rounds and direct token investments. The firm's disclosed positions include liquid layer-1 tokens such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Avalanche, as well as equity in or token commitments to networks like Bittensor, a decentralized machine learning protocol. This hybrid approach allows the firm to capture value across both the protocol layer and the application layer.

Operating from Eugene places Collab+Currency outside the concentrated venture scenes of San Francisco and New York, reducing signal noise and competitive bidding that characterize those markets. The firm compensates for less ambient networking with a digitally native sourcing model rooted in direct participation in NFT communities, DAO governance, and on-chain analytics, which provides its own proprietary deal flow and early access to culturally emergent projects.

Co-investors in Collab+Currency's vehicles have included entities such as LBank Labs, a digital asset investment and market-making group. These relationships provide the firm's portfolio companies with access to liquidity, exchange listings, and distribution channels, particularly in Asian markets where LBank has a strong retail and institutional presence.

Generative art, particularly the Art Blocks Curated ecosystem, represents a foundational sector bet for Collab+Currency. The firm views algorithmically generated art on-chain as a new primitive for digital ownership and creative capital. By collecting canonical works and building research infrastructure around the vertical through Le Random, Collab+Currency positions itself as an institutional authority on the economic and cultural value of generative art.