We're excited to announce the Draper Dragon @OrionFund, an Ecosystem Fund focused on scaling Cardano-native and Cardano-integrated companies.
Three pillars of ecosystem growth will activate to derisk, scale, and grow the space:
- Direct Investments, led by Draper Dragon, intended to back builders driving measurable growth across Bitcoin DeFi, RWA, institutional DeFi, payments, privacy, and more.
- Venture Studio, our in-house team incubating and accelerating Cardano projects with product development, technical integration, and go-to-market support.
- Startup Acceleration & Talent Pipeline, powered by @draper_u, building and mentoring a new generation of Cardano founders through hands-on residency and accelerator programs. Together, we aim to create a measurable impact on Cardano's adoption and drive institutional growth within the ecosystem.
We are excited to lead the next chapter of @Cardano
Early-stage bets here look very different when a platform with Binance's reach starts tokenizing Wall Street.
Read more in @DecryptMedia by @vizwrites ๐ https://t.co/JM6Lo1rU9O
For years, putting public markets on-chain sat in the "someday" pile. We've now gone from a hypothetical thesis to real infrastructure.
Binance just opened access to 7,000 US stocks for millions of non-US users, with tokenized bStocks on the way. That's what the shift looks like in practice. ๐งต
https://t.co/31p0Xbdjng
My day-to-day is spent with cross-border founders building where DeFi meets institutional capital, and from that vantage point, one thing is clear: this is no longer theoretical.
The convergence of TradFi and on-chain rails is in production.
A tokenized equity that actually holds together stops being a screen position. It becomes collateral: something you can borrow against and plug into credit markets that never close.
The founders working on settlement infra, compliant token issuance, and cross-border liquidity are working on the right problems.
This sits squarely in the BTCFi thesis we've been building: Bitcoin needs yield, Bitcoin needs privacy, Bitcoin needs institutional-grade execution, and it needs all of it natively, without asking holders to leave the asset.
More: https://t.co/goY1hoiIwM & @lxdev_@januszg_
Bitcoin's biggest unsolved problem is the fact that every position, every transfer, every counterparty is visible by default. And institutions are finally feeling it.
Roughly $250B of BTC sits on institutional balance sheets right now, all of it visible on a public ledger. Over $20T flows through public blockchains and exchanges every year, similarly transparent. 1/5
LX is building a non-custodial ZK encryption layer for Bitcoin: encrypted vaults, a privacy-preserving execution layer, and an institutional SDK so exchanges, custodians, and trading desks can integrate native BTC privacy.
Flagship: an OTC dark pool for BTC/USD. 4/5
The most transformative crypto use cases won't make headlines until they've already won.
Everyone chases NFTs, memecoins, consumer apps. Meanwhile, the real shift is happening in the plumbing of global finance.
@business reports that blockchain-based tokenization is now being used, every day, to process hundreds of billions of dollars of real repo transactions at big financial firms like @JPMorgan. Real collateral, real cash, real settlement, moving on-chain.
The $13 trillion repo market isn't glamorous, but it's also not optional. It keeps the entire financial system liquid. At @DraperDragon, we've believed for years that the killer apps for Web3 wouldn't come from crypto-native culture. They'd come from solving problems finance has lived with for decades. Slow settlement, fragmented collateral, cross-border friction. The infrastructure was broken long before blockchain existed.
Tokenization needs to be useful, not exciting. And repo is proving it can be both. The builders working on real-world asset infrastructure right now are doing some of the most important work in the space (it's why we backed teams like @opentrade_io and @centrifuge). Unglamorous to some, but that is exactly where the opportunity lies.
Good read by @annairrera: https://t.co/S4zgkSs0gC
UTXO builders, this one's for you ๐
Cardano ๐ค Bitcoin Vegas
Come hear @TimDraper speak live and connect with founders, investors, miners, and institutions building the future of UTXO infrastructure.
Join us today at 11AM EST for Demo Day of Batch 3 from @BTCFiNetwork.
Meet the next wave of builders shaping the future of Bitcoin through DeFi, infrastructure, payments, and beyond.
See you there.
https://t.co/jcmnfn3kg6
I can see all viewpoints on this, but speaking from personal experience attending the Cardano Summit in Berlin there is real value in these events and did help enable our initiatives within Orion.
I met with Mastercard EU, Super Teams Berlin, and many other enterprises that wouldnโt have been in the same room otherwise. I also connected with other fundraising sources within the ecosystem and identified pain points where we could assist.
Every ecosystem has its flagship, and the Cardano Summit is Cardanoโs. Local communities/institutions in those regions need a moment to come together which brings visibility overall to the space.
Over the past few days we have been absorbing all of the feedback regarding the Cardano Summit 2026 & Token2049 treasury proposal. Thank you to all those that have provided constructive criticism and thoughtful questions.
As many have pointed out, the proposal for 2026 is bigger, bolder and consequently more expensive than for 2025. This shift was much debated but ultimately won out because we want to send a message: No matter the circumstances, Cardano is open for business.
We view this as an anti-cyclical investment to support the Cardano vision that the community voted for last year. But we knew this would raise differing opinions in this market. And if the DReps decide against it, we will refocus our efforts and push on.
But we must be clear that there will be no modified Cardano Summit proposal. There simply isn't time on the calendar to reengineer an event of this size.
For the more detail oriented, we have collated a set of answers to the most common questions here: https://t.co/2lus3In0HK
Seeing so many posts about VCs not deploying..
@DraperDragon / @OrionFund are actively deploying and ready to meet with founders.
If youโre building and looking to raise, reach out!
Especially since the Orion Fund kickoff will happen this week during @ParisBlockWeek ๐