Joel Monegro
Joel Monegro is the co-founder and managing partner of Placeholder, a New York venture capital firm he started in 2017 with Chris Burniske to invest in decentralized networks and the companies around them. He is best known in crypto for writing "Fat Protocols" in 2016, an essay arguing that value in blockchain networks concentrates at the protocol layer rather than the application layer, which became one of the most cited frameworks of the era. Before Placeholder he spent three years at Union Square Ventures developing the firm's early blockchain thesis, and earlier still he started the Digital Economy Department at the Dominican Republic's Ministry of Industry and Commerce, where work on payments reform led him to Bitcoin. His writing and investing continue to focus on network governance, capital instrument design, and crypto infrastructure.