decentralized-finance
(11)
Bloccelerate VC
Bloccelerate built a crypto venture firm around a stubborn observation: capital is often easier to find than a real market. Its answer is equal parts research desk, founder workshop and bridge to institutional finance.
Polymarket
Polymarket turned the future into a constantly repriced feed. Its bigger wager is that a market price can become as familiar - and as useful - as a poll, a pundit or a breaking-news alert.
Consensys
It gave the world MetaMask, wired thousands of apps to Ethereum through Infura, and now wants to make the blockchain cheap enough to actually use. Meet the company Ethereum's co-founder built to onboard the rest of us.
Will Villanueva
Will Villanueva is the co-founder and CEO of DELV (formerly Element Finance), a San Francisco-based decentralized finance company building fixed and variable yield markets on Ethereum. A physicist by training and former Ethereum researcher at ConsenSys, he co-founded Element Finance with Jonny Rhea in 2020 to bring fixed-rate income to DeFi. The company raised a $32M Series A in 2021 at a $320M valuation and later rebranded to DELV, whose flagship product Hyperdrive reimagines fixed and variable rate markets with an everlasting-liquidity AMM design.
DeFi Devs
DeFi Devs is a Miami-based blockchain and AI development company that serves as the lead community developer of the Accumulate Protocol, an identity-based, delegated-proof-of-stake blockchain built for decentralized finance, digital identity, and enterprise tokenization. Founded in 2021 as a subsidiary of Inveniam Capital Partners and led by Factom founder Paul Snow, the firm builds infrastructure for cross-chain atomic transactions, human-readable addresses, and hierarchical key management, positioning Accumulate as an 'Internet of Blockchains' that bridges regulated real-world assets onto decentralized rails.
DELV
DELV, formerly Element Finance, was a research-driven DeFi company that called itself 'the factory for DeFi.' Founded in 2020 by Will Villanueva and Jonny Rhea, it built open-source infrastructure for fixed- and variable-rate yield - most notably the Element Protocol, the Hyperdrive AMM, and the Council on-chain governance framework. Backed by a16z, Placeholder, and Polychain Capital with about $36.4M raised, the team pursued the idea that reliable fixed rates were essential to mainstream DeFi adoption. After a March 2025 Hyperdrive vulnerability and a conclusion that the product had not found market fit, DELV wound down operations in June 2025 with no reported loss of user funds.
Normal
Normal is a Chicago-based crypto company building a non-custodial wallet and investment protocol on the Stellar blockchain. Its app lets everyday users buy crypto, earn yield on USDC savings (routed through the Blend lending protocol), and swap assets with sub-second settlement and sub-cent fees. Beyond the wallet, Normal is building an on-chain 'investment layer' of diversified crypto index tokens - a Top 5 index, plus AI, DeFi, RWA and meme baskets - aiming to make holding a slice of the whole crypto market as simple as opening a savings account. The company's stated goal is blunt: 'make crypto normal.'
Ramu Arunachalam
Ramu Arunachalam is a General Partner at A.Capital Ventures, the San Francisco-based VC firm known for a founder-friendly approach and a portfolio spanning Notion, Anthropic, Databricks, Coinbase, and Replit. An engineer turned product manager turned investor, Ramu brings a rare depth of technical credibility to the table - he helped build VMware's first virtual switch, shaped a16z's Cloud and Big Data thesis during his time as Partner there, and now leads A.Capital's $180M Fund V with a focus on AI and crypto-native companies.
Spencer Bogart
Spencer Bogart is a General Partner at Blockchain Capital, one of the oldest and most active venture firms in the crypto industry. A CFA charter holder who started his crypto career writing Wall Street's first blockchain research report at Needham & Company, Bogart now leads research across Blockchain Capital's five funds and 85+ investments. Known on Twitter as @CremeDeLaCrypto, he made early bets on DeFi before the term existed and has been a consistent voice for Bitcoin fundamentals and crypto infrastructure since 2014.
Richard Craib
Richard Craib is the South African-born founder and CEO of Numerai, the world's first AI-powered crowdsourced hedge fund. By encrypting financial data and opening it to thousands of anonymous data scientists globally - who stake NMR cryptocurrency on their models - Craib built a machine learning meta-model that now manages hundreds of millions in assets. In 2017 he pioneered the concept of a hedge fund issuing its own cryptocurrency. Backed by Paul Tudor Jones, Naval Ravikant, and JPMorgan, Numerai raised a $30M Series C at a $500M valuation in late 2025 and achieved a 25.45% net return in 2024.
Ross Shuel
Ross Shuel is Network Operations Partner at a16z Crypto, the crypto-focused arm of Andreessen Horowitz. A West Point graduate and former U.S. Army Ranger with seven years of military service including a deployment to Afghanistan, Shuel brought a systems-thinker's discipline to crypto governance. At a16z Crypto, he helps portfolio companies navigate the full arc of decentralized governance - from network launch and governance design to on-chain participation as protocols mature. He co-authored research on application token economics and has appeared on the web3 with a16z podcast discussing DAO governance attacks. His ENS identity, shuel.eth, reflects his deep embeddedness in the on-chain world he helps shape.