Blockchain - Web3 Gaming - Venture Capital
Ronen
Kirsh
The medic-turned-DAO-architect who got to blockchain before your favorite VC firm bought the ticket.
The medic-turned-DAO-architect who got to blockchain before your favorite VC firm bought the ticket.
In 2016, when blockchain was still a word most CEOs Googled in secret, a UC Berkeley economics student named Ronen Kirsh gathered a handful of classmates and started building. Not a pitch deck. Not a Discord. An organization - Blockchain at Berkeley - that would swell to 80 people, consult Fortune 500 companies, and help stage the first conference in America where an SEC official stood at a lectern and explained why crypto mattered. He did this as an undergrad. The commendations came from the IDF before that.
Kirsh's arc doesn't trace the usual Silicon Valley parabola. He spent his early adult years as a Sergeant, Commander, and Medic in an Israeli Special Forces Reconnaissance unit - leading 20 soldiers through conditions that will not come up in a Series A pitch meeting, but absolutely inform how he thinks about teams under pressure. He transferred that discipline to college, then to capital markets, then to crypto, with a speed that feels less like pivoting and more like someone following a thread only they could see.
By 2018, Blockchain at Berkeley was co-organizing San Francisco Blockchain Week and pulling in more than 4,000 attendees. That same year, Kirsh co-founded Dekrypt Capital with three Berkeley colleagues - and raised $20 million to invest in privacy-preserving protocols, scalability, and interoperability. Arrington Capital put in money and described the Dekrypt team as "among the most respected people investing in crypto projects today." This was not a tribute to luck.
He moved through these chapters without the self-promotional machinery most founders mistake for momentum. He wrote a Medium post in 2017 after speaking with more than 100 ICO companies. It compared the boom to the dot-com bubble. The bubble didn't listen. He was right anyway.
Today, Kirsh sits at the center of three significant bets - Forte (blockchain infrastructure for games), Game7 (a DAO with a half-billion-dollar treasury and $100M in grants deployed), and Evmos (an EVM-compatible blockchain on the Cosmos network). He runs GameSpot, a podcast where he interviews the CEOs and founders building the next wave of Web3 games. He lives in Puerto Rico. He is not slowing down.
"Web3 gaming is inevitable. We're finally experiencing real growth and real games hitting the market who will change how games are enjoyed in the next decade."- Ronen Kirsh, @ronenkirsh on X
A career built on showing up before the briefing is finished.
Every organization in this list predates the hype cycle that made it famous.
"When we started @G7_DAO, we found research in our space to frequently be skewed, biased, or marketing driven. So we decided to do it the right way - a research that is intellectually honest, objective and credibly neutral."- Ronen Kirsh, X (formerly Twitter)
"These games will serve as the 'ChatGPT moment for AI' and inspire other game developers."On what's coming for Web3 gaming
"Imagine you bought a car for $10k and your government prohibits you from passing it to your kids. Now, you've spent $10k on games the past decade and Valve prohibits you from passing your account to your kids. Digital property rights is paramount to build a digital future."On the ownership argument for Web3
"The blockchain community in San Francisco has realized that there is too much noise and not enough substance at most events today."On San Francisco Blockchain Week, 2018
"In 2021, Game7 was just an idea, born from a collective vision of game developers and onchain enthusiasts and the promise of what we could build together. Proud to see how far we've come and excited for the next phase of our nation."On Game7's founding and evolution
"We listen, then act."On Game7's operating philosophy
"Web3 gaming is inevitable. We're finally experiencing real growth and real games hitting the market who will change how games are enjoyed in the next decade."On the maturation of Web3 gaming
Ronen Kirsh is betting that blockchain gaming will produce its own "ChatGPT moment" - a single product so good, so evidently better, that the argument against Web3 ownership collapses under the weight of the experience. He is not waiting for a permission slip to build toward that moment.
Game7's research mandate is deliberately neutral - no sponsors, no marketing agendas, just data on what's actually working. This is unusual in a space where most "research" is published by parties with a token to pump. The research initiative is the tell: Kirsh is in this for the architecture, not the announcement.
His argument for Web3 gaming is not about NFTs or speculative assets. It is about property rights. The car analogy is blunt by design - if you cannot pass your digital life to your children the way you pass a car or a house, something fundamental is broken. He is building the infrastructure that makes that passing possible. One grant, one protocol, one game at a time.