Before there was a fund, there was a phone call. Michael Swensson, whose career included Goldman Sachs and Bridgewater Associates, wanted to talk with Nathan Montone about inflation hedges, digital gold and cryptocurrency. Their conversations continued for about a year. Eventually, Montone asked him to become a co-founder. An inquiry about money had become a proposal to build an investment firm.
Montone remembered watching Swensson grow increasingly interested in Bitcoin's possibilities. The partnership became M31 Capital, launched in January 2020. Its premise brought together two kinds of experience that do not automatically sit comfortably at the same table: early participation in crypto and the operating discipline of established finance. One partner knew the emerging networks. The other knew what an institution would need before entrusting money to them.
“We talked for about a year before I pitched him on coming on as a co-founder.”
Nathan Montone, on recruiting Michael Swensson
There is something refreshingly unhurried about that beginning. A year of conversation is a considerable courtship in a business fond of announcing the future by Tuesday. It also introduces the question that follows Montone through his subsequent work: how do you turn an unusual conviction into something other people can examine, participate in and put to use?
A reader with an investment problem
Montone's public guest biography describes an education in financial economics and English literature at Columbia University, followed by credentials from Harvard Business School's HBX program. It lists earlier director-level work at HSBC, GBIC and Block72. Those are different professional languages: banking, venture investment and helping blockchain projects develop. His later writing moves between them, with economics on one page and an argument about history on the next.
The Columbia combination is particularly apt for someone whose public work spends so much time on explanations. Economics asks about incentives and allocation. Literature asks how an account is constructed and what its language persuades us to believe. Neither subject supplies an investment answer by itself. Together, they make an interesting preparation for a career in which a convincing story and a useful model can look deceptively alike.
On his Wellfound profile, Montone names The Sovereign Individual as the most useful business-related book he has read. That small answer is more revealing than a shelf of fashionable management titles. It places a book about technology and changing power arrangements alongside his professional identity. The attraction is consistent with the questions that recur in his essays: who controls a system, what gives them that control, and what happens when a new technology changes the arrangement?
Before the fund, the conversation was already public
In December 2018, the World Digital Assets Summit in San Francisco listed Montone, then associated with Block72, as moderator for discussions on Europe, security tokens and financial products. The program placed him in conversations with people working on investment, regulation and blockchain infrastructure. The subjects were practical ones. How would assets be issued? How would different regions approach them? What would financial products built around this technology look like?
His name also appears among the authors of the May 2019 Standard Tokenization Protocol white paper, alongside Mike Chen and Richard Lee. The document proposed a blockchain-based platform for digital asset issuance with compliance restrictions incorporated into its token design. A related STP white paper identifies Montone as a co-founder. Here was a concrete version of the problem that would follow him into fund management: how to connect a new technical mechanism to an existing financial world.
That record gives the career a useful texture. Montone was participating in the industry's discussions and in the writing of a proposed protocol before M31 existed. The eventual firm emerged from that work rather than arriving as an abstract enthusiasm for a fashionable asset class. Protocol design, public discussion and investment would remain neighboring activities.
The ownership argument gets a fund
By October 2022, Montone was setting out a broader internet argument. In his essay announcing M31's Web3 Opportunity Fund, he described successive versions of the web through the things users could do: read, write and, eventually, own. His concern was that the internet's growth had carried it away from its earlier commitments to open protocols, privacy and peer-to-peer communication. Blockchain networks, he argued, could make those properties part of the system's design.
He named Helium, Filecoin, Render and Fluence among M31's early Web3 investments. The strategy he described involved supporting protocols both through their networks and through work outside them. It is an approach that makes the investor a participant. A protocol needs people who use it and help it function; the investment case depends partly on that participation becoming useful enough for others to join.
The Web3 Opportunity Fund's announced commitments were 50% of its planned cap.
The launch announcement made the financial structure specific. M31 reported $50 million in commitments toward a $100 million cap. The fund would invest in liquid tokens and selected private equity opportunities, with an initial focus on decentralized infrastructure and user-owned applications. It offered liquidity after a 12-month lockup. Those details matter because the ambitions of a technology and the terms of an investment are separate questions, and both need answers.
Helium offered an unusually tangible illustration of M31's involvement. The firm said it had operated many of the network's first hotspots around the world, as well as investing early. In a field that can disappear into diagrams, a working hotspot supplies a welcome object. Someone must put the equipment somewhere. Someone must keep it running. The ownership argument, however expansive, still has to meet the demands of a physical network.
The future still needs a custodian
In December 2022, M31 selected Anchorage Digital Bank to custody the Web3 Opportunity Fund. Its portfolio at the time included Ethereum Name Service, Arweave, Cosmos and Helium. The custody arrangement supported participation in protocol governance, connecting the safekeeping of assets with the firm's preference for involvement in the networks it backed. Swensson described that involvement as demanding substantial resources.
This is the less glamorous part of a technology story, which is often where the plot becomes convincing. An investment thesis can describe a decentralized future in vivid terms. An operating institution must also decide where assets are held and how participation works. The original Montone-Swensson partnership makes sense at this junction: its two bodies of experience meet in the ordinary obligations that accompany an extraordinary sounding proposal.
A Circle customer account describes another early operational challenge: moving traditional investor dollars into digital assets securely and efficiently. M31 used Circle's infrastructure in that process. The detail brings Montone's career back to earth. Even a firm interested in reworking the architecture of finance has to handle the passage from an investor's conventional money to the networks it wants to support. The entrance must work before anyone can explore the building.
When the networks meet the machines
Montone's November 2023 essay Web3 x AI extended the ownership argument to artificial intelligence. He argued for AI built on decentralized, open and user-owned infrastructure, and discussed distributed computing, data privacy and payments between automated agents. These were proposals about how AI should develop, carrying the same preoccupation with control that animated his account of the internet.
The connection gives his change of subject continuity. A reader arriving for Bitcoin finds a discussion of computing resources; a reader arriving for AI finds questions about who supplies those resources and who captures their value. Montone treats the architecture underneath a product as an investment subject in its own right. The application may get the attention. His argument asks the reader to consider the arrangements that make the application possible.
In April 2025, M31 Ventures announced that it had led a pre-seed investment in Sentigen, a company developing AI systems for building and operating businesses. The announcement described David Attermann's involvement as an advisor and a plan to connect Sentigen with companies in M31's infrastructure portfolio. This was the firm's AI-and-blockchain thesis moving toward an application: a tool intended to help an individual turn an idea into a functioning business. The stated ambition remained an ambition; the investment gave it a particular company and development plan.
An argument that can lose
By 2026, Montone's writing had widened its lens again. The M31 Thesis presented technological change as a sequence of breakthroughs that alter who has power. It placed the investor's task near the beginning of those changes, before broad agreement forms. Its focus on founders with the capacity to adapt and take unfamiliar strategic action helps explain why the person building a technology matters so much in his investment account.
In May's The Hidden Grammar of History, he drew together readings on money, technology, power and civilizational change. James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, David Hackett Fischer, René Girard and George Gilder appear in the discussion. His conclusions are his interpretation of those works. What the essay establishes about Montone is the breadth of the reading he brings to investing, and his willingness to put the resulting argument in public where readers can disagree with it.
There is an accompanying discipline. His March 2026 research framework prescribes four feedback loops: forming a thesis, monitoring it, investigating errors and improving the method. Researchers must record their initial beliefs and identify evidence that would change them. The procedure gives doubt a scheduled place in the work. A theory can be ambitious and still owe an account of how it would fail.
“The goal is not to be right.”
Nathan Montone, M31 research framework
That sentence is a useful companion to the expansive history. Being early supplies no automatic proof of being correct. Montone's stated method asks for a record that survives the excitement of the original prediction. It also supplies a rather good antidote to professional certainty: write down what you think before the outcome gives you an opportunity to remember it more conveniently.
His public role now includes frontier science as well as finance. Deep Tech Week's speaker profile lists him for an April 2026 event on spacetime metric engineering and quantum vacuum technologies, and describes M31's Heretical Science Speaker Series. These are areas of inquiry in his public program, rather than proof that the proposed technologies will work. They show how far his curiosity has traveled from the original conversation about digital gold.
The through line is a question about possibility followed by a question about practice. Can an unfamiliar technology change an established arrangement? Who will build it? How will it operate? What evidence would make the investor reconsider? Montone's story begins with someone picking up the phone to ask about a different kind of money. The work since then has been to give such questions an organization, an investment structure and, increasingly, a method for answering back.