Blockchain Capital

Partners to crypto builders since 2013

[Blockchain Capital @bcap]

Early-stage crypto founders often go beyond building products, setting the rules for entirely new ecosystems of social and financial incentives. Over our 12 years of investing in these visionaries, we’ve learned to look for the key qualities that define what it means to be a true founder.

Read more from BCAP Partner @yuan_han_li ↓

[Yuan Han Li @yuan_han_li]

https://t.co/bo60YKytcM

[Yuan Han Li @yuan_han_li]

really excited to finally announce our lead investment in @tarecredit!

we've spent a lot of time thinking about which assets actually make sense to tokenize next, and consumer credit is one of the more interesting candidates. consumer loans are standardized enough to price at scale, but the infrastructure around them is still incredibly fragmented.

tare is trying to give every party around a loan one shared record to work from, and rebuild a lot of the expensive plumbing sitting between borrowers and lenders.

great piece from @alekslarsen and @jonah_b on why we led the round:

[Blockchain Capital @bcap]

Thrilled to back the @tarecredit team helping build a better experience for credit borrowing and lending.

[Aleks Larsen @alekslarsen]

We're backing @tarecredit because the credit system is old, expensive, and ready for an upgrade.

Credit is heavily intermediated with slow and opaque manual processes and the plumbing alone costs borrowers and investors north of $100B a year.

It's finally become possible to rebuild the entire value chain around a single source of truth, using stablecoins, smart contracts and AI.

Led by co-founders @humancapitol @lucasvo and @keerthimoudgal, Tare is the perfect team for the job. Kevin helped build one of the first onchain private credit funds at Blocktower Credit after an extensive career in credit before, Lucas co-founded Centrifuge and is a pioneer in RWAs, and Keerthi was Head of Product at JP Morgan's institutional blockchain platform Kinexys.

We're thrilled to announce that we led their seed round alongside a great group of funds and angels including leading private credit firms like Apollo and Janus Henderson and founders like @StaniKulechov of Aave.

@jonah_b and I wrote more about our thesis below.

[Aleks Larsen @alekslarsen]

We're backing @tarecredit because the credit system is old, expensive, and ready for an upgrade.

Credit is heavily intermediated with slow and opaque manual processes and the plumbing alone costs borrowers and investors north of $100B a year.

It's finally become possible to rebuild the entire value chain around a single source of truth, using stablecoins, smart contracts and AI.

Led by co-founders @humancapitol @lucasvo and @keerthimoudgal, Tare is the perfect team for the job. Kevin helped build one of the first onchain private credit funds at Blocktower Credit after an extensive career in credit before, Lucas co-founded Centrifuge and is a pioneer in RWAs, and Keerthi was Head of Product at JP Morgan's institutional blockchain platform Kinexys.

We're thrilled to announce that we led their seed round alongside a great group of funds and angels including leading private credit firms like Apollo and Janus Henderson and founders like @StaniKulechov of Aave.

@jonah_b and I wrote more about our thesis below.

[Aleks Larsen @alekslarsen]

https://t.co/Vytb8QhD8J

[Natalia 🌹 @talianotnatalie]

Build what you wish existed.

We did. @BoundlessHQ

[Spencer Bogart @CremeDeLaCrypto]

lets go make all markets programmable

[Aleks Larsen @alekslarsen]

Aave's new dashboard is very helpful https://t.co/NQlumYjxqe

More onchain orgs should do this

[Bart Stephens @pbartstephens]

Incredible partnership for @krakenfx ! Nice work @arjunsethi @DavidLRipley @jespow and the entire team 💪🏻. It has been awesome watching u grow over a decade from the @bcap seed round investment to today 🙏🏻

[Spencer Bogart @CremeDeLaCrypto]

Some dogs just know how to hunt

Quite literally in the case of TRM which is one of a very small handful of companies that actually knows how to identify, track and disrupt criminal activity. They’ve now packaged that expertise into an operating system for crimefighters to combat criminal activity at scale and that solution is resonating with the market.

But also figuratively - over the past 8 years, @estebancastano, @rahulr0609 and the TRM team have repeatedly navigated their way to bigger and better opportunities because they genuinely care about actually solving their customers problems

It’s awesome to see a company succeed consistently and repeatedly over several years but it’s even better when they hit *another* major inflection point in year 8. That made it really easy for us to back them for the third (!) time as a lead investor

[Blockchain Capital @bcap]

Huge milestone for the @trmlabs's mission to scale a safer internet. Congratulations @estebancastano and team.

[Esteban @estebancastano]

Today, we are at a crossroads.

As I write this, AI is saving lives by helping doctors identify diseases faster, and making education more accessible to people everywhere. It’s also being used to inflict harm on a global scale.

TRM’s AI-in-Crime Adoption Index found that, in 2026, criminal adoption of AI rose 40% year over year. Today’s threat actors are using AI to execute scams, cyber attacks, and other forms of digital crime at unprecedented speed and scale. In the last 90 days, we’ve also seen a growing number of incidents where AI agents themselves have gone rogue.

Business titans and religious leaders are sounding the same alarm: to realize AI’s promise, we need to protect people from its harms.

The first line of defense is prevention. Model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are building stronger guardrails, and governments are exploring rules for how AI can be safely used. We call this the prevention layer.

At TRM, we’ve spent nearly a decade fighting crime, from fraud and cybercrime to human and wildlife trafficking. That experience has taught us one thing, if nothing else: the prevention layer is essential, but never enough.

Criminals will break through. When they do, it’s critical that crimefighters can identify the harm done, find the people and machines behind it, and take action: support the victim, freeze the funds, take down the infrastructure, arrest the offender, disable the agent, dismantle the network.

The world needs a new layer of protection.

We call it the disruption layer—and it's what we're building, right now.

The operating system for crimefighters

In 2018, we founded TRM to help crimefighters map how threat actors were using cryptocurrency. We analyzed petabytes of data, mapping over a 100 types of crime. Government agencies and financial institutions worldwide now use TRM to investigate complex criminal networks and combat financial crime.

The more cases we supported, however, the more we realized: if we were going to equip crimefighters to disrupt AI-scale crime, crypto would be 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 of the story, but not the 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 story. To build a successful case, investigators must source intelligence not just from the blockchain, but also corporate records, cyber threat data, the dark web, and dozens of other domains. Today’s crimefighters need to use natural language to search across siloed domains, connect the dots and unearth buried insights, automate the rote work, and coordinate with partners across public and private sectors—all while preserving auditability and human judgment.

In short, crimefighters need an operating system for the AI era.

So we built it.

For years, we’ve been developing this OS alongside the investigators who use it. Now, we’ve just announced a new round of funding, valuing TRM at $2 billion, to propel our work—and this fall, we’ll unveil the OS publicly, for the first time.

If your organization needs to fight AI-scale crime, please reach out. We want to work with you.

[Blockchain Capital @bcap]

The sci-fi idea of "work while you sleep" seems a lot less sci-fi now

[Zile @zile_cao]

excited to open source AgentFormation

it's a template for spinning up remote, secure, and browser-accessible workspaces for coding agents in AWS CloudFormation. I've been using it daily while walking to work or before heading to bed to kick off a coding task from my phone

although we first built this over 8 months ago before claude/codex's remote-control features were released, I still find it great if you prefer TUI's over chat interfaces

disclaimer: AgentFormation is still experimental so take a second to review before using it in prod

https://t.co/jiqRvCzbHw

[Aleks Larsen @alekslarsen]

Onchain infra for tokenized deposits and other financial institution use cases is moving fast. Prividium now open source

[Blockchain Capital @bcap]

If you missed @alekslarsen's tokenization essay, it's featured in this month's Token Dispatch

[Prathik Desai | Token Dispatch 📧 @CrypticPD]

Tokenisation can globalise assets by wrapping and standardising them across diverse compliance rules and accessibility barriers.

It can do to the financial world what containerisation did to global trade.

@bcap's @alekslarsen writes about this in this week's guest essay 👇🏾

[Pete Townsend @PeteTownsendNV]

"Tokens will do to finance what the shipping container did to trade and logistics."
That's Justin Swart, Partner at @BITKRAFTVC, with me on @MNSShow, riffing on an idea from @alekslarsen at @bcap that stuck with him.

This is just one snippet from our longer riff - full episode links below. 👇

[Boundless @BoundlessHQ]

We’ve been building Boundless AI, the inference partner for AI-native startups.

Boundless helps teams run open-weight models tuned to their product, for better economics on frontier intelligence.

https://t.co/ofxr15e41l

[Blockchain Capital @bcap]

The average smartphone is 100,000 times more powerful than the Apollo 11 computer that took man into space. 57 years later, the computer is starting to run itself.

Exciting demo from our engineering researcher @zile_cao of an internal remote coding tool.

[Zile @zile_cao]

sneak peak of an internal remote coding tool some of us have been using @bcap

been collecting dust in our github the past year so I’ve been cleaning it up to share with the timeline. will open source it in the next few days once I wrap up some security runs with @v12sec

[Bart Stephens @pbartstephens]

A great post by @_kinjalbshah, GP @bcap exploring some real world tensions and advantages of trustless networks like blockchains. The novel financial services built on them, thrive with human judgment augmenting the tech.

[Sam Ragsdale @samrags_]

We're excited to release OpenInstinct

Instinct but self-hostable, open source and supports every model. You control the code, data and passwords

Deploy on Vercel and never use the internet with your fingers again

https://t.co/Vvrv8BXk2z

[Blockchain Capital @bcap]

When anyone can fork the code, what actually defends a protocol?

In her latest essay, @kinjalbshah explores DeFi's lasting moat, with lessons from JELLY, Maker, and Aave.

[Kinjal Shah @_kinjalbshah]

https://t.co/DiledwBQ7F

[Jonah @jonah_b]

I didn't appreciate the power of standards until I read "How to Hide an Empire" by Daniel Immerwahr a few years ago, where Immerwahr argues in one chapter that much of America's 20th century power came from setting the world's standards.

The reason standards were so important is that they decide who adapts to whom. Once the world's machinery is cut to your spec, everyone else eats the switching cost, and their industry grows up around your design. Standards also have a powerful way of building network effects around themselves. Every new adopter makes the standard more valuable to the next one, and once it is entrenched it stops being a constraint and becomes a base. Nobody has to relitigate the interface, so all the work moves up a layer.

The examples he gives are screw threads, which Herbert Hoover crusaded to standardize while he ran the Commerce Department, the American stop sign becoming everyone's stop sign, and US specs written into ISO so other countries had to retool their factories to match. And the clearest example is English: every additional person who speaks it makes it more worth learning, and now most of the world does business in it.

We can already see how powerful a standard can be from ERC-20. A lot of people take it for granted given that it's super simple... just a few lines of code. But ERC-20 is the primitive that made DeFi, DeFi. It made every asset on the EVM composable, which is what let DEXs, lending protocols, vaults, and everything else plug into each other. And the standard has proven general enough that dollars, treasuries, and even fund shares now travel as ERC-20s. In the bull case of crypto, the industry defines the financial standards.

@alekslarsen goes deeper below into the power of the "token" as a financial standard.