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 ↓
Institutions have long faced a trade-off between the security of qualified custody and access to onchain rewards.
BitGo and @ConcreteXYZ are partnering to change that, piloting an institutional onchain offering where digital assets stay in qualified custody through BitGo Bank & Trust while clients access Concrete-operated vault strategies.
The result is a regulated foundation for treasury operators and asset managers seeking to make balance sheet capital more productive.
Read the full PR: https://t.co/osu6qhadYC
Where do RWAs go onchain?
Only 10% so far is deployed in DeFi protocols, while more than 6x that amount sits idle in wallets. DeFi is going to grow by finding productive homes for the tsunami of tokenized assets coming onchain.
Starting a neobank is now incredibly cheap. With crypto rails, most of the stack comes out of the box for free. That makes CAC the dominant cost driver, and the whole business becomes a game of acquiring customers for less than they’re worth. The way to keep CAC low is to specialize. Teams often start by focusing on a narrow segment, like farmers in one region, young people in high-inflation economies, or expats in Asia, and build features and marketing tailored precisely to them. The result is great for consumers: they get financial experiences designed for exactly who they are.
Over the past month, builders from around the world came together to explore what becomes possible on the real human network.
Together, we've built 100 projects across 25 countries and brought 17 builders to Seoul for a week. And we’re not done yet.
Thank you to every founder, hacker, mentor, judge, partner, and supporter who made World Build 3 possible!
With bots accounting for more than half of all internet traffic, face-value tickets have become increasingly hard to come by. Excited to see @worldnetwork prioritize real fans ahead of automated resellers!
Thirty Seconds to Mars has already reserved human-only tickets for their 2027 tour.
Concert Kit is open to any artist who wants to reserve their tickets for real, verified fans.
Learn more: https://t.co/J80Jjqvq7Y
If agents are the next group of users, who captures the value they generate?
Here @jonah_b explores how existing playbooks might change when the end-user becomes software.
the first decade of tokenization was really about getting off of 0 and building a new distribution channel for the same products
in the next decade, companies will leverage the custody, reconciliation and settlement properties of blockchains to create better products
Over the past month, builders went from ideas to prototypes to products.
Now comes the next phase: shipping to millions of users.
Stay tuned, we’ll start sharing what these teams are building soon 👀
All the new stablecoin issuers are fighting over who can give up their economics fastest for distribution in developed markets, while Tether continues banking the unbanked with the best profit margin by far.
Why? In developed markets the product is yield; In EM, it's dollars.
LATEST: @Polymarket partners with @Nasdaq Private Market to launch prediction markets tied to private company milestones including valuations and IPO timing, opening a $5T private market previously reserved for institutional investors.
The chains institutional capital finds most attractive aren't necessarily where the best apps live today.
In this piece @cremedelacrypto explores the two-layer capital structure taking shape onchain, and why how it resolves is one of the most interesting dynamics to watch.
The internet gave us standards for information and communication.
The next phase is building standards for money and identity.
@jerallaire on why AI and blockchain based financial infrastructure are accelerating the need for internet native identity systems.
40 years ago, US equities settled T+5. Digitization slowly brought it to T+1, improving capital efficiency at each step.
Tokenization is the final boss of the long-term settlement-cycle compression.
T+0 is becoming the default and onchain prime services will close inefficiencies until capital finds its terminal velocity.
In 1995, email looked like the internet's big use case. Then came search, social, cloud, SaaS, and other categories worth trillions today.
Crypto is in a similar moment. @CremeDeLaCrypto analyses net-new categories in programmable assets and future directions we haven't seen yet.
For the entire history of crypto, the three biggest pools of capital in the world ($19T in bank deposits, $38T in treasuries, $100T in equities) were walled off from the onchain economy
In the last 12-18 months, all three got direct pipelines. And some of the institutions that were standing in the way are now the ones leaning in to build those pipelines
New post on what just changed and why it matters
When we originally invested in Bluesky, part of the thesis was that users were increasingly gravitating toward smaller, more intimate communities:
- Less posting on Instagram feeds, more private stories
- Less broadcasting on Snap stories, more private DMs
Bluesky gave users the ability to create these more intimate social experiences by curating their own feeds and communities.
What we didn’t fully anticipate was the rise of AI tools. Now, anyone can build software, and we’re starting to see a new wave of AI-generated social apps designed specifically for small groups of friends and family.
It’s been incredibly cool to watch this emerge across the Bluesky ecosystem, which now has hundreds of apps built on the platform. Excited to see the developer ecosystem continue to grow.