Alexander Lin

cofounder @reforge_vc

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

i'm actively deploying significant amounts of capital into the esoteric corners of finance and markets

if you're building in consensus verticals like yield products or prediction markets or "xyz but with stablecoins" with only marginal improvements, im out

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

@brezshares

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

I'm bullish Enrons in 2026 (w/o the fraud)

own the:
> asset/resource
>book to trade directional+basis
>venue to take the other side
>market: build platform, be neutral

AI + resource vol + programmable settlement sets this trade up for compute, energy, inference, risk, and more

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

@jonbma @MKhurshed08

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

I'm hiring an analyst.

Today, Reforge is 80% agentic: we built a proprietary AI stack for sourcing, diligence, market research, and ops. But the 20% is where the magic happens in vc and it's time to shift our focus here.

Role reqs: (1) high agency, (2) higher eq

DMs are open.

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

reforge q1 2026 overview

>5,054 companies/projects across private markets (fintech, ai, robotics, frontier tech) sourced through Ava
>3,051 proceeded to deeper diligence and Ava's research stack produced an in-depth memo
>202 teams received an email or DM from us; that's a 6% conversion from the prior diligence phase
>20 of those were discussed at two or more ICs
>2 investments made

tldr: Top of funnel is healthy by quantity - more teams than ever building but quality is just not there; there's a lot of noise accompanying very little signal. Makes sense given the vibe coding craze and software commoditizing. So just because we decided not to participate in superfluous twitter discourse around fundraising in crypto or have our name put on a spreadsheet does not mean we are not extremely active. To us, the investable subset of opportunities is just extremely small.

note 1: This does not include our inbound stats; that said, we execute a outbound-heavy strategy
note 2: 3,051 -> 202 includes filtering out projects that may be too out-of-scope for us (robotics, frontier tech, etc.) but if there are signals that indicate a co could be generational, we'll still include in our pipeline

reminder: Reforge is not just a "crypto vc". We are a venture capital and technology firm investing across the financial system value chain with a very broad mandate

Some insights:

Consensus is rising around core primitives but very few teams are actually solving the hard problems. the most crowded sectors are what you'd imagine and we’ve found difficult to build conviction in their long term sustainability:
- x402/agentic payments/agent commerce rails
- prediction markets: terminals, aggregators, wrappers
- stablecoins/payments/neobanks
- ai trading agents/execution wrappers

Where we felt differentiation specifically in finance/crypto:
- market-structure, risk-transfer, liquidity, and margin primitives
- credit, settlement, and post-trade infrastructure
- software-native markets with novel agent-workflow infrastructure (no wrappers!)

With Ava, we have more data than ever on early-stage private markets across multiple sectors, predominately ai and finance. If you have any questions or are curious to learn more about what we’re seeing, just let us know

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

@maybeltr

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

@kseniam0s @haleymbryant @HustleFundVC @ZealVC @daniellarcohen @2048vc @ThisIsDynamo @GaryBenerofe @nihalmehta @EniacVC me at @reforge_vc

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

max price of an ethglobal nyc vip pass should AT MOST be the price of eth

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

@wyatt_khos 🫡 🤝

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

@0xsmac https://t.co/HoAFm6k2nh

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

on my 2010 Diego Forlán run in 2026

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

imagine mike moritz telling brin and page how to optimize pagerank

[smac @0xsmac]

people suggesting what the hyperliquid core team should do with tokens is kind of funny, just let them cook

if you were them you’d have already messed it up by now

[terence @terrry]

First 500 employees at SpaceX each made at least 100M…

Now what do they do? Sell?

That's been the only option. The people who believed earliest forced to be the first ones out, at the exact time where they're most convinced.

That's why we built @techdollarhq

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

on my 2010 Diego Forlán run in 2026

[Synchronicity @SynchronicityHQ]

A trading competition has begun in Synchronicity. May the best strategists win.

If you were on the waitlist, check your email, you may have been admitted.

If you are not, join now: https://t.co/iS0PJbjKTV

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

@terrry @techdollarhq

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

people in 2026 who are "fully out of crypto" bc they think it's a scam only ever viewed this industry from a myopic, zero sum lens

better for everyone that they're no longer participants

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

in its simplest form, include criteria via steelman.md and red_team.md so that it will analyze both sides. then tell it to compare and then pick what it believes is the stronger argument

more complexity requires you and your team to create a perpetual memory/context layer where you feed it your non-patterned thinking. it will slowly learn from that over time

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

@AndrewCapasso_ @petal_network that's literally my tweet

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

execution speed in trading is structurally capped by physics

head of tech at jane street pretty much says that models alone still lose to human judgment when optimizing across different time horizons. "trading feels to me like agi-complete"

i largely agree that real edge will ultimately always come down to higher-level strategy that adapts whenever something happens in the world. think the best traders will be those who can think through those multi-outcome scenarios and actually codify them

@SynchronicityHQ coded

[Goshawk Trades @GoshawkTrades]

what happens to trading if AI keeps getting better?

Dwarkesh Patel asked Jane Street's head of technology the obvious question: if we get AGI, can't it just replace what you do?

his answer: "trading feels to me like AGI-complete."

"all of the different problems of the world end up influencing what you're doing in a trading context. trading involves figuring out what things are worth. which means making predictions about the future. and lots of different things flow into that."

in other words, to fully automate trading you'd need to fully automate understanding the entire world. every geopolitical event, every supply chain shift, every behavioral pattern, every regulatory change, it all feeds into price.

and even at a firm running tens of thousands of GPUs with sub-100-nanosecond execution: "many of your most profitable days happen when weird stuff happens and nobody knows what's going on. doing that well involves human judgment. we think humans work better than models through phase transitions."

his conclusion: "i have never been more desperate to hire more engineers and traders than i am today. everything people are doing is more valuable than it was."

so what does this mean for the rest of us?

if the most automated trading firm on earth is saying humans matter more not less. the implication is that AI doesn't shrink the opportunity in trading. it raises the bar for what each person can do. the traders who learn to use these tools will pull further ahead. the ones who don't will fall further behind.

[Alexander Lin @linfluence]

@AndrewCapasso_ algo trading runs mostly on market microstructure whereas minsky is referring to predominately macro