We were so happy to be a part of this from the earliest stages!
A truly historic summit! The calibre of attendees and speakers was unmatched.
Held at Microsoft's Soho offices in NYC, over 600 people registered and attended, with a 300 capacity!
This is truly a revolution happening before our eyes and it's a combination of humbling, exciting, and validating all rolled into one!
disagree, crypto is just going through a maturation phase
stablecoins, perps, & tokenization as themes will continue to proliferate throughout the global economy, and there will be many successful crypto startups that do well
hyperliquid is just the first of many startups that has done a great job of illustrating how open blockchains & tokenization of a business can be a dominant combination
current issues with sentiment around crypto are due to the largest coins not doing well, BTC went from $0.01 to $100k per coin in less than two decades, it very successfully achieved it's goal of maintaining value against the dollar as USD continuously lost its value, present day problems with the ponzification of bitcoin due to saylor's shenanigans is a temporary thing, i dont think you see btc trend aggressively again until that situation is resolved, also quantum concerns are real, those two things along with exit liquidity from institutions were strong reasons for BTC OGs to derisk into excess liquidity as we've seen examples of with that large galaxy otc sale they facilitated ($9B sale in 2025 for one entity), there are many individuals like that who are up infinite
but bitcoin underperforming for a few years after outperforming every other asset on earth for over a decade does not mean crypto is dead, thats silly
ethereum also is suffering for its own individual reasons, i feel like ive talked about this enough on here but yes its been outcompeted by new entrants & has not done a good job of making eth a great asset to hold, every L1 is struggling on the demand side because historically the story around these tokens was future growth & not real revenues, but now that hyperliquid has demonstrably shown that you can connect a business directly to the L1 token the previous L1s are struggling bc they dont capture enough revenues from the apps that use their infra, eth has it even worse bc it also outsources execution activity to rollups
but this also does not mean there cannot be more successful crypto startups
there is a very clear trend of regulation improving for crypto in general, which will make it much easier for entrepreneurs to build businesses that use crypto, it is also clear that existing tech companies are acknowledging the advantages of using blockchains as we've seen with robinhood, stripe/tempo, & others
AI has taken a lot of the mindshare away from crypto as tech stocks have been much better trades since the bottom in 2022, id say it would be extremely foolish to not be splitting time between stocks & crypto as a trader, before it made sense to be overexposed to crypto if you were willing to take on the risk as it was a new industry that experienced supernormal returns as it became more mainstream
three underdiscussed tailwinds for crypto as AI models become exponentially better over the next few years
1) open source AI will become a lot more competitive with closed source AI
2) it will become more easier for smaller teams to build successful startups using software
3) stablecoins & blockchains are much better rails for AI agents to transact on
combination of these trends means that it's likely that you see more crypto experimentation w/ tokens not less, especially as regulatory environment improves *and* retail speculation becomes a megatrend
I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A.
12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going.
I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital.
You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious.
It's a dance.
And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious.
If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird.
No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there.
It is weird.
I love New York. lol just randomly ran into to @hosseeb from @dragonfly_xyz on the subway on my way to the airport back to Toronto.
He was headed to do a segment for the @therollupco podcast.
We had a brief talk about Agentic Finance, @kuvilabs and Toronto being an original hot bed of crypto activity.
Great guy and he was very chill and cool to talk to!
Hope to run into him again - maybe on our cap table 🙏👌🏻😅.
@Samwise_Ganji Fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt, decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future, and the incumbents will fight it to the death.
@thadley0@kuvilabs@NYSE@Vault__Summit lol - alas I had a morning run and that was my fatal mistake!
They were at capacity and even sponsors weren’t getting in!