Evan Fisher

founder @portalventures | previously: @insightpartners, @goldmansachs | not financial advice

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

I’m incredibly proud to announce the launch of our oversubscribed $75M @PortalVentures Fund 2. We exclusively lead crypto pre-seeds with the first check in. Across our two funds we’ve now raised $115M.

~~~

Crypto is an industry that requires real conviction. Prior to launching Portal, I was an investor at Insight Partners. Insight was founded in 1995 to back software founders in what was, at the time, a cottage industry. Since then, they’ve raised $90B+ and had 50+ IPOs across the portfolio.

Leaving that seat was not an easy decision, but I saw a similar opportunity. Build a firm that is purpose-built to back the emerging protocol economy.

~~~

When launching Fund 1, I was fortunate to have a great investor base for support and mentorship. Our investors include Midas list investors, decacorn founders, and Managing Partners of large funds across asset classes like @djparekh of Insight Partners, @KyleSamani of Multicoin, and Henry Kravis of KKR. There are so many people that helped me get here, but I’ll never forget Deven, Jeff, Ian, Nikhil, and David from Insight for being my first-ever investors and supporters.

~~~

Launching in early 2022 presented a slew of challenges. While crypto rallied to ATHs and mentions of the supercycle peaked, we grounded ourselves in the age-old Buffett quote “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

As the year went on, exuberance evaporated with the crash of Luna and FTX. Fear filled the markets, it was go-time. We wired for one of our most exciting early lead investments within weeks of the FTX crash. From Q4 2022 through all of 2023, we were aggressive. As some told us to pivot to AI or ‘slow our deployment,’ we ran faster… We grounded in our conviction and ran into what looked like a burning market. It was the right decision.

~~~

When we started raising for Fund 2 earlier this year, BTC was still ~40% down from its ATH and many still questioned the viability of the industry. We’re super thankful to the teams at Accolade, Theta, and CrossLayer for betting big on us early on. An investor base that can see through the cycles lets us focus on what we love…

... And there are really two things that I love most about what we’re doing at Portal:

1. Backing founders with high conviction on day zero builds special relationships:

We’re the first believers. Building in a volatile, emerging industry is a highly personal experience. It’s incredibly rewarding to see founders grow from an individual with an idea, to the leader of a category-creating product with a large team and scaled business. We’re on the rollercoaster with our founders. We take the late-night calls. We can relate when it feels like the world is ending. And we certainly celebrate the wins.

2. Crypto is a new asset class:

New asset classes create new types of investment firms. There is no age-old playbook on being a world-class crypto investor, just as there was no PE playbook in the ‘80s or venture software playbook in the ‘90s. We get to think from first principles and help write the rules on investing in an industry that will create tens of trillions of dollars of market cap. Opportunities like this don’t come along often.

~~~

With our new $75M Fund 2, we’re excited to double down on what we do best: leading first-check investments into category-creating protocol businesses.

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@capital_jn https://t.co/SC8oAog5vA

[Grok @grok]

If Vest scales its perps exchange + funded accounts (static DD, up to 95% splits, instant options, NQ/ES/crypto/stocks), it mainly pressures traditional futures prop firms like Topstep, Apex, MyFundedFutures and Tradeify, plus other perps props.

Competitors whose models lean on high failure rates, trailing DD, consistency rules or fee-driven revenue have the strongest incentive to criticize its ToS, liquidity or sustainability.

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@perpv2 Hey @grok if Vest is successful, which firms does it disrupt? Which people and firms are incentivized to bash on Vest?

[Catrina @dotcuriouscat]

Against all odds’ encapsulates what @VestExchange is about.

They say you need a massive marketing budget to win the attention economy. Vest did it with no ads, no token incentives, and no shortcuts.

It is incredibly inspiring to witness this journey as an investor: just five years of relentless execution and an unwavering belief that the best product can sell itself.

A belated but massive congratulations to @VestExchange, and shoutout to fellow co-investors @coinbase @SeliniCapital @Auros_global @ambergroup_io @thirdeye_fund @Gold_Mansack and many more!

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@FinnMurphy12

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@endowment_eddie Those in crypto as well. 2.5 cycles the last 5 years

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

Most people still don’t understand just how seriously the big institutions are taking blockchain

[Chris Yin @chriseyin]

Incredibly excited to work with Fidelity, the 3rd largest asset manager in the world with ~$7 Trillion AUM and ~$19 Trillion AUC, to bring their assets to the onchain world

Hear @teddyP_xyz speak with Cynthia, Fidelity's Head of Digital Assets, talk about our work together and the future of onchain asset management.

Still just the beginning, much more to come!

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

Offline will power swarms of fleets across the world

Pumped to have Draper join the good fight!

[Offline Protocol @OfflineProtocol]

Every machine waits for a signal. When it breaks, everything goes blind.

We started Offline Protocol by keeping people connected when networks failed. Today, that same technology runs on hundreds of thousands of devices worldwide.

Now we're taking it further: resilient coordination for physical systems. Machines, people and AI agents that keep working together over whatever path remains.

Where we are today:
→ 350,000+ devices across 140+ countries
→ Nearly 20,000 new accounts in August alone
→ 11,500+ local networks active this month
→ 60,000+ SDK downloads
→ 440,000+ location proofs received in the last 30 days
→ Zero paid acquisition

Earlier this year, we closed a new round led by @DraperVC to turn our consumer scale into a rapidly growing enterprise business.

Over the past month, we've begun working with partners including a global wind-energy manufacturer, an agricultural IoT provider, a fleet telematics platform, a physical AI operating system, and a data streaming platform, alongside teams in aerospace and satellite systems, embedded silicon and consumer wearables. Our pipeline also spans maritime and industrial monitoring, equipment custody, secure device identity, airline catering and restaurant operations.

Wherever machines operate, Offline Protocol coordinates.

Learn more at https://t.co/otJPfxCwrs

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

I've never seen a company grow as fast as Vest is

Not to mention the founder replies to every DM to collect feature requests!

[Justin @perpv2]

Hey everyone! Thank so much for giving us feedback the past week. We are heads down building a product that traders love!

Things in the works

1. Copy trading
2. Larger account sizes. $50k first, then $100k, then more.
3. Fully customizable plans
4. Drag and droppable TP/SLs

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

Proud to be a day 1 backer! We wired the first check just a few weeks after FTX collapsed. DeFi was controversial at the time. The tides have certainly turned :)

[Concrete @ConcreteXYZ]

CT.

September 30th.

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@perpv2 Congrats to all involved!

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@perpv2 Haters gonna hate

[Justin @perpv2]

Hey everyone,

First, I'm honestly blown away by everything that's been happening lately. We can't thank our traders and supporters enough, truly. My team and I have been working on Vest for almost five years now. We are traders ourselves who started Vest because we thought we could build the product we all wanted to use ourselves. We spent years doing open-source research for the betterment of the industry (https://t.co/XEVvJIPVP3), often with no one watching. We pivoted dozens of times. We were told over and over again that what we were doing wouldn't work, that it was impossible, that we should give up, sell, walk away. We faced rejection, after rejection, after rejection. There were days it felt like no one believed in this but us. So to see all of that work, all of those late nights and hard calls, finally turn into something traders actually love and use every day is extremely humbling. It means more to us than I can put into words. Truly, thank you.

Second, I want to address the allegations of wash trading head on head-on, because they come from a HUGE misunderstanding of how our product is different from other perp DEXs. We're not just another perps dex, but also a funded account platform. In fact the large majority of our traders use funded accounts. When they do, they can get up to $25k accounts for as little as $210. They can then open positions of up to $1.25M notional on some markets like ES and NQ. These accounts have a daily loss and drawdown limit, so most traders trade shorter-horizon and flip positions often. If they pass their evaluation phase, their trades are in “live” mode and get shown in the A-book where they trade against other traders and market participants. Because of the nature of the high implicit leverage and max drawdowns, that usually leads to high volume and low OI behavior on the live market.

This is now accurately displayed on ALL OFFICIAL Vest platforms. We’ve gone through a few iterations of the front end to move away from combined 24H volume. Previously, if you hovered over the volume number on Vest, you can see the breakdown of eval and live volume. To make it even more obvious, we now explicitly display both at all times. In our API’s we now very clearly separate and document our eval and live volume. If anyone has feedback on how to make this clearer, our team is always here to listen.

Part of the confusion is what is shown on official Vest platforms and what is not. We cannot control what third party aggregators use to display us. Some of them are also using information from an old outdated exchange that we are deprecating. We also cannot control if they decide to put us in the same comparison with other perp DEXs where the product offering is fundamentally different. I also take some blame for not reaching out to all aggregators beforehand and making sure that everything is up to date, but there are hundreds of aggregators out there, and I hope you’ll excuse me on this front.

It is our belief that the perpetual future is the best asset class for retail traders to trade with. It has been our goal, and vision, to onboard the rest of the world - the futures traders, the CFD traders, the options traders and more - onto this form factor that we believe is ultimately better for them. We believe that funded accounts are the best way to learn and trade with this new form factor because it lowers the barrier to entry.

We have been extremely blessed beyond belief to achieve this mission. If you search up vestexchange on twitter, we have thousands of traders from traditional finance that have never traded perps, receiving payouts and expressing really positive feedback on our platform. Many of the feedback is that “we are too good to be true” because our rules are so trader friendly. I will continue to answer all feedback and hopefully continue to help explain anything people are uncertain about.

Like all other platforms and exchanges, affiliates receive a commission on referrals. Some partners also have content creation and partnership deals, but these are few and far between and we ask all of our affiliates to disclose when posting. Candidly, we also don’t really want to burden our balance sheet with 5 or 6 figure retainer deals because that value should be passed onto traders in any way we can.

For those who haven’t tried out Vest. I would love to onboard you! For those who are FUDDing Vest (mostly competitors), I would ALSO love to onboard you and for you to see why we’ve achieved such fast growth! It is our goal to build the best platform for retail traders, and I am glad that our product is putting pressure for innovation in this space.

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@domaprotocol @solana @Loopscale Going to need to buy evan.human once launched!

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@kankanivishal Excited for you, so much opportunity to explore and build!

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@FinnMurphy12 @ProjectCETI when are we diving with whales to ask them philosophy questions now that we can speak with them?

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@alexiskold Have to add Accelerando!

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@AKlokus @matthew_pines @alexwg @Breakthrough Appreciate you sir🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@arian_ghashghai Lots of 'crypto people' genuinely found an early + misunderstood technology. They will continue to find early + misunderstood technologies.

[Evan Fisher @evanbfish]

@Melt_Dem Sorry to hear that. @JuliaLipton wrote a really great piece on the playbook she wish she had for this.

https://t.co/RYgQIIFP3z