Moonrock Capital

Moonrock Capital is a Blockchain Advisory and Investment Firm, incubating and accelerating early stage startups since 2019.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

The Pokémon market is up +60% in just the last 3 months, with one record sale after another hitting mainstream media.

Meanwhile, $CARDS is sitting at -50% from its ATH, also roughly 3 months ago.

Combine this market tailwind with some massive catalysts coming in Q4.

Major repricing is on the way.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

Look at this beautiful 1st edition Charizard and let this sink in:

Whatever the winning bid ends up being, the buyer pays an additional 20% fee on top of it to the platform.

At the current bid, that's $170,879. It'll likely end up being more than $200,000.

Why would you burn 6-figures like this, when you could just use @Collector_Crypt or @Beezie instead?

This is one of those rare crypto rails use cases where we'll look back in a few years and just laugh at how absurd things used to be. Same way we'll laugh at not having instant settlement for overseas payments, or markets that close on weekends.

It's time to stop extracting collectors and start giving them the experience they deserve.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

TLDR: regulatory clarity gud

We're slowly but surely getting to a point where founders' excuses for having a token but not treating it like equity won't count anymore.

I think the next few years will show a clear trend: incredible capital influx into "investable" tokens, those attractive businesses that also make their token accrue 100% of it and do proper investor relations.

The rest won't catch a bid, go sideways or slowly bleed to zero.

Ownership supercycle just started.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

Unpopular opinion:

Former DePINs might be some of the most undervalued AI plays right now.

Yes, DePIN had a lot of issues, and hence a very underwhelming token performance. The negative association is definitely understandable.

But what most people don't realize is that thanks to those token incentives, most of these projects are now sitting on incredible data pools. Exactly the kind of data pools the biggest frontier AI labs have insatiable demand for, since data is their single biggest bottleneck in winning the most important tech race humanity has ever seen.

Just to name a few:

@silencioNetwork - $SLC
@OVRtheReality - $OVR
@NATIXNetwork - $NATIX
@grass - $GRASS

And probably a bunch of exciting ones I don't even have on my radar yet (if so, please DM).

I know in fact that these are already working with leading AI labs or well-known big tech companies as actual paying clients, generating serious offchain revenue. More than most of your favorite shitcoins do. And if you do your research, you'll understand that it takes time for that offchain revenue to accrue, but there's strong commitment to route it back to their tokens.

I know it's hard, but instead of chasing memecoins or bidding the same 5 hyped onchain businesses everyone already knows, I can only strongly recommend digging deeper here.

Generational opportunities to be found in DePIN, or whatever you might want to call it nowadays.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

Just finished accumulating a bigger solana:KMNo3nJsBXfcpJTVhZcXLW7RmTwTt4GVFE7suUBo9sS position on the open market.

Very bullish on the overall trend of tokenized equities, and I genuinely believe the supply here grows another 100x from here, led by @solana.

I've been thinking a lot about how to best position for this. I'm a big fan of what Backpack, Securitize and co are doing, but I'm still hesitant on the business model and monetizability of the issuers, especially at these valuations.

Much more interesting to me are the businesses and protocols actually built on top of that layer, the ones that benefit massively from this secular trend.

DEXs are the obvious play here, but what has excited me far more is @kamino.

I'm usually not overly excited about lending businesses, but they made the move into tokenized equity lending early and have been dominating market share ever since. As I expect this market to grow orders of magnitude from here, there's a realistic path for Kamino to massively expand their business in a positive-sum way, and a real shot at rivaling Morpho. Especially since I expect tokenized equities to keep being led by Solana, which Kamino has already proven it can dominate.

Beyond that, the recent hire of @WeiszM is massive, and in my opinion still overlooked. If you want to dominate the upcoming institutional adoption and the influx of trillions in capital as an onchain financial business, you need someone at the top who not only speaks the TradFi language, but has the background and network to actually get the right things moving and open the right doors.

Let's see how this evolves, but definitely one of the more interestingly positioned DeFi protocols right ahead of a massive DeFi supercycle.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

hope one or the other listened to me a month ago or at least had a proper look at what @peaq was cooking

beautiful chart that meets even more beautiful fundamentals

a fun few months ahead for ethereum:0x1eef208926667594e5136e89d0e9dd6907959197 and onchain robotics

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

In 2024, the US government was running an all-out witch hunt against all crypto companies, trying to regulate them out of existence.

Today, that same government is weighing a plan to actively promote US dollar stablecoins around the world, treating them as a strategic tool to defend the dollar's reserve status.

from public enemy to financial infrastructure of national importance, in less than 2 years

most people can't even comprehend how far we have come, and how much further we will go.

[Moonrock Capital @MoonrockCapital]

@sjdedic @Collector_Crypt hey @GWR get in here

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

This is absolute insanity. onchain TCGs are heating up again, and like never before, as it’s also the marketplaces that are picking up traction in a big way.

First @Collector_Crypt broke the onchain record with a $600k Charizard sale.
Then they immediately topped it, with a $64k Lugia sale and yet another record Charizard sale at $825k.

and now let this sink in:

Just a few hours later, @Beezie didn't just break the onchain record, but the world record.

$1M for a 1st edition Charizard from 1999.

Everything fully transparent onchain, ridiculously low fees, and settled instantly without needing to trust a middleman.

Congrats to the chad seller @dcfgod.

I want you to realize that this has always been the bull case for these platforms. the gachas were just the gamified way to attract collectors, and now they're realizing how vastly superior these marketplaces are to eBay, Goldin and co.

Soon there will be billions settled on these marketplaces.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

nonsense is dead.

long live onchain businesses.

welcome to the new era, the last and biggest one to date.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

Currently rebalancing our liquid book and adding 1-2 positions to be perfectly positioned for what's ahead.

People really don't get how many incredibly exciting onchain businesses are out there right now, still overlooked and massively undervalued.

Never thought my biggest problem would be having too many exciting options on my radar. Spoiled for choice instead of scraping the barrel.

There's truly a golden age ahead for those being positioned today instead of waiting for it to be obvious.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

People are freaking out over the Grass announcement, realizing that revenue can also be offchain and still be real.

Realizing that some of what we called "DePINs" a few years ago are now actually some of the most interesting data startups out there, working with leading frontier AI labs.

Realizing that not all token founders are scammers, and that if you do the right diligence, you can actually find heavily overlooked tokens trading at ridiculous multiples to their business, while being in hypergrowth and accruing 100% of that value.

$GRASS is up 20% on this announcement, and nothing has even changed. Just people waking up, thanks to great investor communication and transparency.

This is exactly why I'm so excited about $SLC and @silencioNetwork. They literally check every single box above, except that given their low FDV, the ratio is even much better, and people are even less aware.

Who knows for how long that will still be true.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

Fiat onchain.

Equities onchain.

Commodities onchain.

yeah I mean even freaking Pokemon cards, watches, comics, luxury goods and dinosaur skeletons onchain.

has it ever been more obvious that bringing the entire financial system and every asset class onchain is about to become reality?

incredible to see the vision we've been fighting for for almost a decade now playing out in real time, going nowhere but up and to the right in full hypergrowth mode.

and yet, we're still so early.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

Pretty excited to see Beezie bringing luxury as a new asset class to collectible capital markets on Solana, together with The Luxury Closet as a trusted distribution partner already serving millions of users across 80+ countries.

I think most people still don't understand how much this new pie has left to grow, both vertically and horizontally, before we even see the beginnings of real competition among the top onchain collectible platforms.

100x growth ahead of us.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

onchain robotics is waking up.

a trillion dollar market trading below a billion dollar market cap.

one of the few 100x opportunities left in crypto.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

Tokenized equities today are exactly where stablecoins were in 2019.

the first pmf is here. bringing equities onchain is just as obvious, simple, yet genius as bringing dollars onchain was back then. we've already seen the first growth spurt push us to the first few billion in onchain supply.

but zoom out and it's painfully obvious we're still incredibly early. an easy 100x in growth still ahead over the next few years.

here's where it gets interesting though:

stablecoin growth was slower, because we spent years operating in a completely different environment. one that mocked crypto, treated it with deep skepticism, and forced us to fight regulatory headwinds the whole way. one of the biggest catalysts, the GENIUS Act, only came last year, many years after the first pmf, and accelerated stablecoin significantly.

tokenized equities are positioned completely differently.

there's already massive institutional interest and adoption, and tokenized equities are an obvious, compelling fit for exactly that crowd. and just days ago the SEC issued its Innovation Exemption, explicitly allowing tokenized stocks to trade onchain, actively pushing this development forward instead of fighting it.

so I think tokenized equities are equally obvious with equally asymmetric upside as stablecoins in 2019. except this time it's going to move much, much faster.

one of the biggest opportunities forming in this space right now.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

robotics is quietly heating back up. more and more people are looking at the sector again, and you can feel it pulling attention back into the whole market.

at the same time, here's the 2 year chart of the leading crypto x robotics play @peaq.

and this is happening just as they drop one big announcement after another, onboarding millions of real machines and robots onto Solana at scale, with many more to come, while every single one directly increases demand for $PEAQ.

what do you do?

[Moonrock Capital @MoonrockCapital]

@sjdedic eBay vs Collector soon

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

Wondering why not more people are talking about this, so I think you either missed it or don't realize how huge it is:

a shadowless PSA 10 1st edition Charizard sold onchain yesterday for $600k (!!).

the fees were literally $0.

now compare that to the Charizard sold in the Logan Paul x Goldin auction:

the winning bid was $770,000. the final price was $954,800.

that's a stunning 24% in fees, and as a cherry on top, you get settlement that's slow af, complicated KYC, annoying physical logistics, and horrendous customs taxes on top of it.

annoying for the seller, annoying for the buyer, only good for the extractive middleman.

whether you're a fan of Gachas or not, one thing you can't deny: these marketplaces are orders of magnitude better when built onchain. and I'm amazed to see it already happening as we speak.

decacorn potential here.

[Simon Dedic @sjdedic]

This is incredible, and I want you to actually stop and appreciate it for a second.

Less than 2 years ago we still had a deeply anti-crypto SEC, led by Gary Gensler. And honestly, "anti-crypto SEC" doesn't even begin to describe it. It was an arbitrary witch hunt on our entire industry, one they seemed determined to destroy for whatever reasons they could find.

But some of the most exceptional founders, like @brian_armstrong, @haydenzadams and others, chose not to just bend the knee. They fought for what was right, they fought for our industry to stay.

and hell yes did we stay.

Fast forward to today. We didn't just avert the danger and prove to the world that we're more than token rugpulls and useless whitepaper ICOs. We now have some of the most scalable and profitable businesses and use cases onchain, and the world is watching, being impressed.

At the same time, the most powerful institutions of the most powerful country in the world are now proactively embracing our industry, as this is what institutions want. What was harassed just 2 years ago is today being legalized, and actively encouraged, because they finally understood that if you want to keep your capital markets competitive, they have to be digitized.

and there's no better way to do that than with crypto rails.

so proud and grateful for everyone who fought for this and never let our industry go. today marks a historical milestone in disrupting the entire financial world, and I think the impact of this is beyond what most can imagine, as it unfolds over the coming months.

we made it.