DBA has a name that sounds like paperwork and an investment strategy that reads like participation. The letters stand for “doing business as,” the legal phrase printed on forms when one entity operates under another name. Michael Jordan and Jon Charbonneau borrowed it for their New York crypto firm because they wanted to behave as if they were inside the companies and protocols they backed - owners in both the literal and the useful sense.
That promise is easy to make in venture capital, where nearly every fund offers founders some version of “more than money.” DBA makes the claim testable. Its partners say they lead every investment directly. Its website is heavy with long technical essays on rollups, Bitcoin scaling, Ethereum economics, stablecoin privacy, market flows and token design. Some are attached plainly to portfolio positions. A founder can read the firm's thinking before taking the meeting; a limited partner can see the kind of questions behind the portfolio; critics get enough detail to disagree.
A small fund with a long clock
DBA was founded in 2023, when the crypto market was still processing a cascade of failures. Jordan later described its beginnings as the “Bear Market Homework Club,” a modest phrase for a useful instinct: when prices and attention fall, serious people have more room to compare notes. The firm raised a $50 million first fund that year. In February 2026, it announced a $62 million Fund II.
Both vehicles are 10-year closed-end funds, but DBA does not confine itself to the neat private-company sequence of seed, Series A and exit. It invests across private and public markets, in companies and protocols, and across stages. The emphasis is on leading early rounds while retaining the ability to follow an asset after it becomes liquid. That structure fits crypto, where a network can issue a tradable token before its organization resembles a mature company and where governance, market structure and software architecture are tangled together.
The firm's customers sit on both sides of the fund. Limited partners buy access to a concentrated crypto strategy. Founders and protocol teams receive long-duration capital plus the attention of the general partners. DBA has not published its management fee, carried interest, valuation or revenue, so the mechanics beyond the familiar venture model remain private. Its public case rests less on scale than on who does the work.
“The partners you meet are the partners you’ll work with for the next decade.”DBA, announcing Fund II
The portfolio is an argument
DBA describes the future of finance as an internet-native marketplace: global, instant and open around the clock. Its named investments give that broad sentence edges. DoubleZero and Monad address base-layer and network infrastructure. Alpen Labs is building Strata, an execution layer intended to make Bitcoin more programmable without discarding the security properties that give Bitcoin value. Payy combines a self-custodial stablecoin wallet with purpose-built private payment rails. MetaDAO experiments with market-based capital formation. Public databases also connect DBA to Eclipse, Astria, FastLane Labs, Stride and prediction-market startup Melee.
Where DBA spends its attention
The common problem is that crypto's promise often arrives without dependable plumbing. Bitcoin is valuable but deliberately difficult to program. Stablecoins travel globally but expose activity on transparent ledgers. Decentralized markets run continuously but can be confusing to value and govern. Token launches can open access to capital while producing incentives that look stranger the closer one examines them. DBA funds teams trying to close those gaps, then writes about the tradeoffs rather than smoothing them away.
Its January 2025 Bitcoin L2 thesis is a useful specimen. Charbonneau argued that Bitcoin's leading execution layer would have a larger job than an Ethereum scaling network because Bitcoin's base layer lacks general-purpose programmability. The essay then named Alpen Labs as DBA's bet and spent far more time on bridge security, proofs and market structure than on the investment announcement. In September, his essay on digital cash disclosed the Payy investment while examining why ordinary users and institutions may reject financial rails that publish their activity by default.
Research as a product
Charbonneau supplies much of the firm's visible technical voice. Before DBA, he led research on Layer 1 networks, Layer 2 systems and maximal extractable value at Delphi Digital; before crypto, he worked in structured credit at Deutsche Bank. He also co-hosts the Uncommon Core 2.0 podcast. Jordan brings the investing history. As co-head of investments at Galaxy Digital from 2017 through 2022, he led bets including Fireblocks, Tagomi, Bison Trails and CipherTrace. Coinbase later acquired Tagomi and Bison Trails; Mastercard acquired CipherTrace.
The standard service pitch
A broad platform promises recruiting, introductions, communications and follow-on capital across a large portfolio.
DBA's narrower pitch
Two partners make concentrated bets, stay close to the work and use domain research as a form of support and selection.
This combination places DBA between several familiar categories. It competes with specialist crypto funds such as Paradigm, Dragonfly, Placeholder, Multicoin, Variant and Framework, as well as the larger a16z crypto platform. Yet it also resembles a research shop and a liquid digital-asset investor. The hybrid is not automatically an advantage. Concentration magnifies mistakes; public theses can age badly in public; investing in liquid assets alongside private deals demands clear conflict controls and valuation discipline.
It also changes what “help” can mean. A generalist fund might find a chief financial officer or arrange a customer introduction. A protocol investor can be useful one layer lower, where the questions concern validator incentives, bridge assumptions, token supply or the route from a private network to a public market. DBA's writing indicates that this is the layer it wants to occupy. The work may help a team pressure-test a design, clarify the economic story for new participants or explain an unfamiliar system to a skeptical market.
That niche has boundaries. Published expertise does not prove investment returns, and a sharp thesis cannot repair weak execution. Crypto infrastructure is also crowded with technically elegant products searching for durable demand. DBA's Fund II announcement tries to connect the machinery to visible behavior: stablecoins moving trillions of dollars, decentralized exchanges becoming serious trading venues, token-launch platforms opening capital formation and prediction markets crossing into media and politics. The investable claim is not that every blockchain will matter. It is that a few crypto rails will become ordinary financial infrastructure, and that knowing which few requires unusually close study.
Still, the public work creates a compact distribution loop. Research demonstrates competence, draws the right technical audience and helps founders self-select. Portfolio access sharpens the next research question. A strong essay circulates longer than a launch announcement and gives a small firm a voice larger than its headcount. The lesson is portable beyond venture capital: expertise becomes more useful when outsiders can inspect it.
“We don’t need an opinion on everything.”DBA's concentration principle
What founders can actually use
For a crypto founder, DBA is most relevant when the hard part of the pitch is architectural or economic, not simply distribution. A team designing a bridge, rollup, market, stablecoin network or token system needs an investor capable of interrogating security assumptions and incentives. DBA's work suggests that it will challenge terminology, model value flows and think beyond the fundraising round. The published proposal to reduce Hyperliquid's stated HYPE supply by 45 percent is a particularly direct example: it attempted to make protocol economics more legible without changing existing holders' relative ownership.
The firm is less obviously suited to founders who want a giant operating platform, a generalist consumer investor or a passive name on the cap table. Its stated model depends on depth and direct partner attention. Those qualities do not scale infinitely. Fund II is only modestly larger than Fund I, which may be the point: more capital, but not so much that the strategy must become an index.
DBA's culture comes through in small lines. Jordan's official biography clarifies that he has “literally nothing to do with the famous basketball player.” Charbonneau's essays use jokes, caveats and occasional blunt disagreement without losing the technical thread. The tone is not decorative. In an industry given to grand claims, a little dry humor makes the skepticism easier to trust.
A bet on the rails beneath the story
The market position is now clean enough to state. DBA is a small, New York-based crypto investment partnership for builders and backers who believe the next financial system will be assembled from internet-native rails. Its products are two venture funds and the direct research work around them. Its business is earning returns on concentrated equity and token positions. Its differentiation is a tight loop between technical writing, partner-led selection and long-duration ownership.
None of that removes crypto's volatility, governance hazards or habit of turning tidy models into untidy markets. It does make DBA easier to evaluate than a fund whose edge lives only in a pitch deck. The firm is putting the homework on the table. The next decade will grade it.