Katie Haun spent a decade as a federal prosecutor investigating cryptocurrency-related crimes before becoming one of the industry’s most influential investors. Now, as founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, she’s positioning herself at the intersection of regulation and innovation in a shifting crypto market that many expect to gain positive regulatory momentum and more mainstream acceptance in the coming years.  In 2013, while working at the Department of Justice, Haun led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force. But those experiences, rather than souring her on cryptocurrency, revealed the technology’s potential. She created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force and began seeing beyond the criminal applications that initially drew law enforcement’s attention.  “I didn’t choose the assignment,” Haun told Fortune of her initial foray into crypto investigations. “However, I did choose to stay in the space.”  Investing in a Bear Market  That choice led her to Andreessen Horowitz in 2018, where she became the firm’s first female general partner and co-led three crypto funds totaling billions in investments. In 2022, she departed to launch Haun Ventures and raised $1.5 billion, making it the largest crypto fund ever raised by a solo female venture capitalist.  The timing might have seemed unfortunate. The crypto market soon faced multiple crises, including the collapses of Terra and FTX.  “Time will tell,” she said in a recent fireside chat. “Where we sit right now, it seems that it was a very good time to launch a fund. The majority of our deployment has been during the depths of the bear market.”  Under her leadership, Haun Ventures has made investments focusing on infrastructure projects and financial applications. The firm maintains two vehicles: a $500 million early-stage fund and a larger acceleration fund.  Diogo Mónica recently joined as a general partner, bringing two decades of experience in distributed systems and security, complementing Haun’s regulatory background.   Haun’s Vision for Web3  Patience is a key component of Haun’s broader vision for Web3’s future. She sees the technology as a fundamental infrastructure that will reshape how people interact with the internet and their data, focusing on projects that can return control to users while operating within clear regulatory frameworks. It’s a vision informed by her unique experience on both sides of the regulatory divide, and one she’s betting will shape the future of the internet.  “Web3 is a software-driven innovation that has a built-in financial system,” she wrote in a blog post on her long-term outlook. “Tokens enable developers and users to contribute to open-source protocols and participate in the economic upside of doing so, leading to strong developer communities. That’s been a positive relative to how software has been developed, monetized, and governed in the past.”  Privacy remains a central concern in Haun’s vision for Web3’s future. Despite her prosecutorial background — or perhaps because of it — she advocates strongly for financial privacy protections.   “The amount of information that society, governments, and big businesses can now collect is really frightening,” she noted. She pointed to the dramatic increase in electronic payments, from roughly two per household monthly in 1979 to multiple daily transactions now, each generating trackable data.  Indeed, Haun Ventures recently backed Aleo, a zero-knowledge-proof cryptography project years in development.   “For too long, we’ve gotten too lazy because there haven’t been great technological solutions to privacy,” she said at the fireside chat. “People say they like privacy, they really care more about convenience. But for the first time, we’re starting to see more and more technologies come out that offer a chance for privacy.”  The stablecoin sector particularly excites Haun. She explained that stablecoins now rank as the 18th largest holder of U.S. Treasurys, positioned to surpass Germany — remarkable for a technology under a decade old.   The Political and Regulatory Outlook  The regulatory landscape continues to shape Web3’s development in the U.S. Haun maintains an optimistic outlook, pointing to growing bipartisan support for thoughtful crypto regulation. The growing prominence of crypto as a political issue — from presidential campaigns to congressional races — has been a strong signal of mainstream acceptance. While a groundswell of robust crypto support from the incoming Republican administration has perhaps been the most visible signal, Haun also pointed out shifting attitudes among Democratic leaders, including House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters, declaring crypto “inevitable.”  “This used to be a pre-political issue. I think we can get back to it being a pre-political issue,” Haun said, noting that even progressive Democrats like Ritchie Torres have challenged Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman who has been critical of crypto, and who is expected to be replaced by a crypto-friendly chair under the Donald Trump administration in January 2025.  Haun is careful to distinguish between the speculative aspects of crypto that generate headlines and the underlying technological innovation that continues quietly advancing. She sees much of the market turbulence of the past five years as separate from the fundamental value proposition of Web3 technologies.  “The lesson for policymakers should be that pushing innovation offshore is bad,” she wrote following the very public collapse of FTX that began in 2022. “We need trusted and well-regulated centralized entities to survive and thrive and we also need decentralized Web3 protocols to flourish and provide a path to a fully decentralized web.”  Haun’s vision for Web3 extends beyond immediate market conditions to fundamental questions about data ownership, privacy, and financial accessibility. She sees the current regulatory environment and periods of market volatility as natural steps in the technology’s maturation, maintaining that thoughtful regulation can support rather than stifle innovation.  “We will see negative headlines about ‘crypto’ for some time. But it’s important to remember that these headlines are all about the speculating/trading part of web3,” she wrote. “The much more important underlying software innovation continues unabated. And that is what we remain so excited about and will continue to fund and champion.”  The post Katie Haun on How Web3 and Balanced Crypto Regulation Can Return Control to Users  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.