The Blackstone Alum Betting That Wall Street Runs on Blockchain Next
Alex Marinier left private equity to write the earliest checks into blockchain finance. Six years and one Polymarket later, New Form Capital is raising again - and the institutions it once worked for are finally listening.
In 2019, blockchain finance was a phrase you either believed in or laughed at. Alex Marinier believed in it enough to walk away from a career most people spend decades trying to build. He had underwritten secondary transactions at Blackstone and led DCM Ventures into its first crypto bets. Then he left to do one narrow, unfashionable thing: write the earliest possible checks into the companies trying to rebuild financial markets on blockchain rails. That firm is New Form Capital, and its timing looks a lot better in 2026 than it did the day it opened.
New Form Capital is a New York early-stage venture firm with a single, unhedged thesis - that the plumbing of Wall Street is moving on-chain, and that the returns go to whoever backs the builders first. The firm operates almost entirely at pre-seed and seed, where more than nine in ten of its first checks land. It has made 30-plus investments, reports more than $100 million in assets under management, and points all of it at one sector: blockchain-based financial infrastructure.
The thesisBridging the old with the new
The firm's own language is unusually plain for venture capital. Its mission is "advancing the economic networks of the future." Its tagline is "bridging the old with the new." Strip away the polish and the bet is specific: blockchain reduces the inefficiencies baked into legacy capital markets - settlement, clearing, custody, credit - and in doing so it creates entirely new markets that did not exist before. New Form backs the teams building at that seam, where blockchain technology, financial services, and data overlap.
What sets the approach apart from a typical crypto fund is the lens. Where many early crypto investors compete on technical firepower - protocol design, cryptography, engineering pedigree - New Form comes at it from the trading floor. The partners are the people the startups are trying to sell into: ex-Blackstone, ex-Goldman Sachs, ex-Morgan Stanley, ex-Maker Foundation. That perspective shapes what the firm funds and how it helps once the check clears.
The edgeAn LP list that doubles as a sales team
New Form's most distinctive asset is not a proprietary deal-flow algorithm or a giant fund. It is the composition of its limited partners. The firm's backers include quant trading shops and fund-of-funds professionals - exactly the institutional buyers its portfolio companies eventually need. So the value-add is less about writing code and more about business development: connecting a pre-seed founder with the desks and allocators who could become their first serious customers or counterparties.
For a company selling infrastructure into finance, that introduction is worth more than most product advice. It is also a neat expression of the "bridging" idea. The firm literally routes traditional-finance relationships toward the startups trying to modernize them. Marinier has been blunt about how much of venture comes down to positioning rather than genius: "In venture, everything is timing."
Where the portfolio concentrates (by sector)
The portfolioPolymarket, Compound, and a map of where crypto grew up
The clearest way to read New Form's thesis is through its bets. The firm was an early backer of Polymarket, the prediction-market platform that reached unicorn status and has since drawn reported valuations ranging into the billions. It is a seed investor in Compound, one of the foundational lending protocols in decentralized finance. Its portfolio also includes ZBD and a spread of other blockchain-finance companies across those 30-plus investments.
The co-investors tell you where the firm sits. New Form went into Structure, a tokenized-securities trading platform, alongside Polychain Capital, and into Spectral.Finance, a DeFi credit underwriter, alongside Galaxy Digital. Those are not fringe names. They are the funds that anchor serious crypto rounds, and New Form shows up next to them at the earliest stages.
The peopleA partnership built out of institutions
New Form is a lean shop - around eleven people - but the bench is deliberately assembled. Marinier runs it as founder and general partner. Around him sit operators with unusually specific résumés. Venture partner Jake Schwartz co-founded General Assembly, which sold to the Adecco Group for over $400 million, and has been investing in blockchain since 2014. Investment partner Matt Cooper founded Kraynos Capital, a pre-seed blockchain fund, and spent time at the Maker Foundation. Others came through Morgan Stanley, Kennedy Lewis, Carta, and - in the case of entrepreneur-in-residence Chris Bae - trading desks at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.
The through-line is that almost everyone at New Form has stood on both sides of the bridge the firm keeps talking about. They know how a hedge fund evaluates a counterparty and how a three-person crypto team thinks about its first product. That dual fluency is the actual product the firm sells to founders.
The modelHow a small fund makes its money
The business itself is conventional venture economics: New Form raises capital from limited partners, charges a management fee, and earns carried interest on the upside. What is less conventional is the discipline. Fund I was built to back roughly twenty companies, with a meaningful share of capital reserved for follow-on checks into the winners - the firm invested into about nineteen of those twenty slots before turning to its next vehicle. Fund II has been targeting a raise of roughly $75 million to keep running the same playbook.
Returns come the ordinary ways - markups on later rounds, acquisitions, and eventual public listings. The Tres Finance sale to Fireblocks is the kind of clean, mid-scale exit that early funds are built to produce, and Polymarket is the kind of outlier that can define a vintage. New Form does not appear to publish revenue or valuation figures, and there is no public number for either.
The timingThe seismic shift, finally on schedule
In 2024, Marinier went on CNBC and described a "seismic shift" in how Wall Street was treating blockchain - not as a curiosity, but as infrastructure worth serious institutional attention. The interesting part is that the firm had been positioned for that exact moment since 2019. Being early is only a virtue if the thing you are early to eventually arrives. For most of New Form's life the thesis was contrarian. In 2026, with tokenized securities, prediction markets, and on-chain credit all moving from theory to product, it reads much closer to consensus.
The landscapeWhere New Form fits
New Form competes in a crowded early-stage crypto field that includes firms like Kraynos Capital, Framework Ventures, CoinFund, Castle Island Ventures, and the crypto arms of larger shops such as a16z and Polychain. Its differentiation is not scale - plenty of those funds are bigger - but angle. It is a Wall Street-native investor writing the earliest checks, using an institutional LP network as its edge, and staying narrowly focused on the point where blockchain meets capital markets rather than chasing every corner of crypto.
The recordMilestones so far
Put together, the shape of New Form Capital is easy to describe and hard to copy: a small, focused firm run by people who understand both a testnet and a trading desk, writing the first checks into finance's on-chain future and lending founders a rolodex of institutions on the way up. Whether the broader thesis fully lands is still an open question. But the firm has already produced the two things early-stage investors are judged on - a breakout and an exit - and it is raising more capital to keep going.