defi
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Konstantin Richter and the business of making crypto boring
He spent years connecting people, phones and media. With Blockdaemon, Konstantin Richter took on a less glamorous connection: getting the financial establishment onto blockchain networks, one carefully governed step at a time.
Alexandre Elkrief and the machinery of trust
Before he built financial infrastructure, Alexandre Elkrief tried to make the news more trustworthy. From Knowhere to August and Upshift, his career keeps returning to the same awkward question: what should people be able to check for themselves?
Joshua Blew and the complicated business of being Normal
A teenage stock-picker learned to write code, built banking software, and set out to make crypto easier to use. Joshua Blew’s story is a study in how an impatient investor becomes a patient builder.
Aya Kantorovich and the trouble with trust
She helped build an institutional crypto trading desk, then raised money for her own company as FTX collapsed. At August and Upshift, Aya Kantorovich is working on a question that survived the crash: how much should your money depend on someone else’s word?
Charles St. Louis and the difficult art of staying useful
He helped write the rules for decentralized organizations, became DELV’s CEO, and led its wind-down. Now Charles St. Louis is taking those lessons back to Ethereum’s wider financial ecosystem.
Blockwave Labs and the business of making money move
First came wallets, then loyalty points, then trading vaults. Now the Seoul builder is bringing its blockchain experience to the less glamorous business of payments and settlement.
Ellipsis Labs built an exchange. Then it went after the clock.
Phoenix put the order book on-chain. Now Ellipsis Labs is working on the machinery underneath finance - and the milliseconds that decide who gets a fair price.
Chaos Labs and the price of keeping money safe
Chaos Labs built its business helping DeFi protocols survive volatile markets. Its departure from Aave, and its widening ambitions in AI, reveal what automated risk management still asks of humans.
Gauntlet and the trouble with too much money
A $775 million deposit sent yields tumbling. Gauntlet’s response reveals the work hiding behind DeFi’s deceptively simple “Earn” button.
Uniswap made a market out of a formula
A laid-off engineer turned a coding exercise into a way to trade without handing over your coins. Uniswap’s next experiment is making that open market pay for its own upkeep.
Liquid Labs wants to put the whole trade onchain
The company behind GTE began by joining token launches, liquidity pools, and an order book. Its next act asks whether a decentralized exchange can make the machinery disappear.
Superstate wants Wall Street to keep its shares - and change its clock
A Treasury fund was the rehearsal. Superstate is now building the ownership records and payment rails that let funds and public-company shares move through crypto markets.
Avalanche wants to give business a chain of its own
FIFA wanted more control over its digital collectibles. Avalanche’s answer was a blockchain FIFA could call its own - and a cheaper way for the next business to follow.
Zerion and the ten-cent theory of crypto
A wallet company discovered that the cheapest route can be the wrong route. Its larger wager is that making crypto understandable is a business of its own.
Phantom’s $3 Billion Bet on Fewer Instructions
Crypto asked people to become their own bank. Phantom bet they would prefer an app. A friendly ghost, a Solana beachhead and $268 million in funding have turned that wager into a much bigger ambition.
David Hoffman and the Price of Changing Your Mind
He helped make Ethereum a public conversation, then sold his own ETH. The Bankless co-founder’s story begins with a childhood computer in Seattle and reaches a harder question: what happens when a believer revises the thesis?
Reserve Built the Basket. Now It Needs Buyers.
A project born to protect savings from inflation has become a factory for onchain funds. Its hardest experiment is no longer writing the contracts - it is finding a basket people want when the incentives stop.
The Token Was Never the Property
Jointer tried to turn commercial property into something you could buy by the dollar and leave by the click. The twist was realizing that a digital deed was not enough - liquidity had to be designed as the product.
BABs Asked Crypto to Show Its Work
The Web3 growth shop began with an NFT idea and ended up chasing a harder prize: proof that attention can become users, liquidity and trust.
Eco Built the Wallet. Then It Found the Real Business Hiding Underneath
After raising roughly $95 million for a consumer money app, Eco discovered that the wallet was not the hardest part. Its new bet is the plumbing that lets stablecoins cross chains without making users think about bridges, gas or stranded transactions.
Deepanshu Is Turning Wall Street's Most Complicated Product Into a Yes-or-No Question
After years inside quantitative finance, the EthosX co-founder is betting that the next trading interface will look less like a terminal and more like a conversation.
Sid Powell Put Wall Street Credit Onchain - Then the Market Made Him Rewrite the Terms
A banker built a faster credit market, watched crypto expose its weakest assumptions, and returned with a more cautious machine. Sid Powell's Maple story is a lesson in what survives when finance meets software.
Derek Alia Keeps Building In the Open
From iPhone apps to decentralized markets and agentic science, the San Francisco engineer has followed one stubborn idea: useful systems should invite people in, then get out of their way.
Clinton Bembry’s Second Exit Was Built on Making Crypto Feel Boring
First Astro Wallet sold to Coinbase. Then Slingshot sold to Magic Eden. Across both companies, Clinton Bembry has pursued the same unfashionable idea: crypto works better when users do not have to think about crypto.
Amir Bandeali Built the Pipes for a World of Tokens
A former Chicago trader left the desk, learned to build, and bet that tokenized value would need open markets. Nearly a decade later, 0x is still solving the unglamorous machinery of how assets actually move.
Coinshift Is Trading the DAO Back Office for Wall Street's Private-Credit Machine
Coinshift began by helping crypto teams count and move their money. Five years later, it is packaging institutional credit for Ethereum - a revealing pivot from servicing onchain finance to manufacturing its assets.
The Growth Team Crypto Founders Borrow Instead of Building
ForceField sells Web3 companies something scarcer than another campaign: an embedded growth team with a venture network behind it. The wager is that crypto's fragmented audiences can be turned into measurable users, liquidity and developer activity.
Variant Bet on Ownership. Now It Wants to Fund Autonomy.
The New York venture firm made its name arguing that internet users should become owners. Its new $222 million fund stretches that idea into a broader test: does the technology give people more agency, or merely automate them?
REDLINE LAB Is Building the Missing Middle of Latin American Web3
From a Panama base, Soren Azorian's venture studio is assembling capital, code and cross-border infrastructure into one Web3 portfolio. The wager is that the region needs an operating system for founders, not another pitch competition.
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.