Recently, renowned blockchain venture capital firm HackVC announced the launch of a community investment round on Echo. As one of the first regulated U.S.-based crypto fund managers to debut a “community round” on the platform, HackVC hopes to use this opportunity to transform itself into a truly community-oriented VC. With trust in VCs declining in the crypto market, it appears that venture capital firms are beginning to seek transformation — aiming to move closer to the market and its participants.

Alexander Pack, the founder of HackVC, made his first crypto investment at the age of 22 while working at a fintech venture capital firm in Hong Kong. Back then, the crypto market was still in its infancy, but Pack believed it was the way of the future. He later returned to the U.S. and joined Bain Capital, where he helped lead the firm’s crypto investments. In 2018, Alexander co-founded Dragonfly Capital with Bo Feng, becoming its first managing partner. The firm has since grown into one of the largest crypto funds in Asia. In 2020, Pack left Dragonfly to launch HackVC.

From the name alone, it’s clear that HackVC has a strong focus on technology. As Pack himself puts it, HackVC is “a group of hackers investing in other hackers.” The firm’s managing partner Ed Roman founded the well-known hackathon event hack.summit(), while research partners Christopher Maree and Sean Brown come from the oracle project UMA. Maree was once a Devcon V Scholar with the Ethereum Foundation, and Brown served as a senior blockchain advisor at IBM. Naturally, HackVC’s investment philosophy emphasizes technical feasibility and scalability.

This focus has yielded strong results in recent investment rounds. HackVC was an early backer of high-potential projects like Berachain, EigenLayer, Morpho, Grass, and Soon.

Further reading: “Everyone’s Criticizing VC Coins – So How Are VCs Really Performing This Round?”

Echo: A Return to First Principles

As new forms of investment emerged — like research-driven agency rounds and influencer-led pre-sales — fundraising cycles became shorter, investor participation deeper, and success rates higher. In response, VCs are being pushed to develop better investment logic and models.

Pack’s dialogue with Echo founder Cobie reflects this shift in thinking. Cobie believes the crypto community’s growing dislike for VCs is really a reaction to an unfair system. He argues that when individuals are allowed to invest in early rounds, demand typically spikes for projects backed by high-signal VCs. This opens the door to a new kind of VC: one that is community-friendly, invites participation through public rounds or community gates, and aligns its incentives with the broader ecosystem. When the community is aligned with a project, it increases the likelihood of that project’s success.

This philosophy deeply resonates with Pack. On Twitter, he shared that he entered the crypto space over a decade ago because he believed it could democratize access to tech investing. Early in his career, he joined crowdfunding platform AngelList as its first analyst, helping it push for the 2012 CROWDFUND Act. While the act legalized equity crowdfunding, Pack felt the initiative fell short — bogged down by regulatory red tape and a Web2 investor mindset that didn’t yet value bringing their community into funding rounds.

Echo, however, offers a fundamentally different approach from traditional ICO platforms. Founded in March 2024 by crypto influencer Cobie (aka @echodotxyz), who previously led growth at Lido and co-hosted the popular UpOnly Web3 podcast, Echo is centered around a “lead investor recommendation” model. Users can act as lead investors by forming investment groups, sharing deals with members, and earning a cut from any gains.

Unlike CoinList’s model, where investors directly back projects and receive tokens in return, Echo facilitates community capital formation around token economies. Native on-chain users pool resources to invest in startups via syndicates. The flow of funds is routed through intermediate investment vehicles and may involve both token and equity stakes — making it closer to angel investing than traditional ICOs.

Since its launch, Echo has helped over 30 crypto projects raise funds, including Ethena, Morph, Usual, Hyperlane, Dawn, Monad, Initia, and MegaETH. In total, the platform has facilitated $100 million in fundraising within a year. Notably, MegaETH raised $10 million across two rounds via Echo in December 2024 — the first round ($4.2 million) sold out in 56 seconds, while the second ($5.8 million) closed in just 75 seconds.

Echo operates more like an “elite alliance” of crypto investors — targeting high-potential projects endorsed by tight-knit communities. Influential figures like The Block CEO Larry Cermak and Aave founder Marc Zeller have already launched their own Echo groups. To join, users must undergo KYC and answer specific questions. Some communities impose additional requirements to access exclusive deals. Currently, 58 community leaders have active groups on Echo.

This community-driven model uses smart contracts to manage funds, ensuring lead investors never touch user capital and giving users control over when to sell their tokens. If a lead investor performs well, they receive a percentage of the profits from their followers — incentivizing them to share quality opportunities. Though Echo’s model is elite by design and appeals to a niche user base, this filtering mechanism helps maintain project quality and attracts trust-oriented investors.

Coinbase VP of Corporate Development Shan Aggarwal and Base founder Jesse Pollak emphasized in a joint statement that “on-chain investing gives qualified investors access in ways that weren’t possible before, while giving founders a more diverse and vibrant capital base. We’re excited to expand Base’s capital pipeline and bring more participants into the next wave of innovation.”

Some industry insiders believe the relatively lax regulatory environment in the U.S. may lead to a resurgence of public token sales. Matt O’Connor, co-founder of another hot ICO platform Legion, commented: “Once ICOs regain momentum, the market may begin to shift away from the current memecoin mania.” As fewer builders create genuinely useful products, more wealth is quietly being accumulated behind the scenes.

HackVC’s Early Experiments with Community Integration

HackVC has officially launched its Echo group, opting to open access to its core project resources through a privatized, selective admission process. The firm is also rolling out a zero-performance-fee policy for the first year. In addition, HackVC requires portfolio companies to include a community funding round, and enforces a “community-first valuation” principle. This means if it’s the project’s first round, the community round must be priced lower than the concurrent institutional round. If not the first, the valuation must still come in below the latest VC entry point. This structural design ensures that the community gains a price advantage.

Although there’s still debate in the community about whether this model qualifies as a “governance token” or a true “DAO,” HackVC’s move — regardless of its outcome — has laid a foundational example for how VCs might collaborate with communities to develop future projects. The evolution of crypto fundraising is essentially a chronicle of continuous innovation in community coordination mechanisms: from Bitcoin’s proof-of-work model that ushered in fair mining, to Ethereum’s 2014 on-chain crowdfunding of $18 million, to the ICO boom of 2017, community-driven momentum has always been at the heart of it.

Following the ICO era, two distinct paths emerged. Centralized platforms like CoinList enabled projects such as Solana to raise capital at scale, albeit within certain limits. On the other hand, mechanisms like airdrops and yield farming lowered barriers to entry but often lacked strong user commitment.

Now, with compliance frameworks and on-chain infrastructure maturing, the ecosystem is entering a new phase. Echo is restructuring crowdfunding through a non-custodial syndicate model, while Legion is leveraging on-chain reputation systems to optimize investor screening. This marks the beginning of a new stage for community fundraising — one that preserves the openness of the ICO era, but enhances it with technological tools to strike a balance between efficiency and fairness. A new golden age of compliant, precision-run crypto investing may be just around the corner.

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