Extremely excited to announce that I will be joining @SyncracyCapital to team up with @RyanWatkins_, @HighCoinviction, @WilsonWithiam and @tonydong__. It is my belief that the crypto industry has overindexed to venture vs. liquid. There are structural reasons for this. Long-biased liquid investing is a tough game. Volatility is high and the investable universe for scaled funds has been far too limiting. Historically, there have only been a handful of tokens that have justified a hold period beyond a few months. On the other hand, people NEED exposure to this asset class. Every cycle, there have been a few secular winners that have rapidly ascended to billions of dollars in market cap, achieving post IPO-like valuations while giving public market participants venture-like entries. While the underlying tech gets better and more marketable every year, for allocators who are not in the “trenches”, it is virtually impossible to sift through the glitter to find the gold. You need time and experience to navigate the minefield of alternative tokens outside of $BTC. Thus, the demand for competent crypto-native active managers will only continue to grow. Syncracy is the direct antithesis of all that is broken with liquid fund structures today. They have consistently been nimble enough to move early on the right names (SOL in 2023, HYPE in 2024) - and have also had the courage to size and concentrate with conviction. I’ve long admired their uncanny ability to parse out the generational onchain winners, selectively and repeatedly. My job going forward is to help the team ensure we find the next one. And the next one. You just cannot afford to be late to another $SOL or $HYPE if you want to outperform in this asset class. And there will be plenty of similar opportunities in the future waiting to be uncovered today. Big thanks to Ryan and Dan for believing in me. Can’t wait to learn from them and become the best investor I can be for our LPs. Higher for Syncracy from here.

Seems as though the DAT phenomenon is quite divisive, wanted to share some thoughts on why we thought this was a worthwhile pursuit:

The State of Crypto VC Some insights for founders into the current state of crypto fundraising and some of my personal prediction on the future of crypto venture capital 👇

The Fastest Revenue Scalers are in Crypto Crypto revenue velocity has increased as the ecosystem has evolved from protocols to applications that scale trading attention and monetizing market volatility. DeFi Protocol Era – crypto companies have historically been very fast at generating revenue, with even initial DeFi protocols like Maker and Aave hitting $100m in cumulative revenue within years of monetizing. DeFi Terminal Era – trading terminals have compounded the rate at which applications in crypto earn revenue by providing convenience and better discovery experiences for trading. DeFi Attention Scalers – Apps like Pump, Axiom, and Hyperliquid have more efficiently monetized attention by focusing on rapid product iteration to maximize surface area of products including, spot, perps, leverage, yield, new market contracts, hyper-specific discovery tools, and social products. All of this has been in service of the goal – provide the best product that allows people to trade attention and market volatility. This growth of revenue velocity isn't unique to crypto. It's happening more broadly across tech with traditional SaaS having similarly undergone a transition of explosive revenue velocity in shorter periods of time with more efficient workforces. The driver for SaaS has been the transition towards product-led companies that now leverage AI-first products that have seen unprecedented usage. Where do crypto revenue scalers go from here? Crypto has yet to fully capitalize on leveraging AI within trading and market creation. I expect that a new wave of DeFi Attention Scalers will emerge over time as new apps are able to more effectively use AI to provide curated experiences. This may look like better discovery for prediction markets, social-integrated trading, or otherwise embedding AI-discovery tooling to enable new trading interfaces and token issuance platforms. In a world where all assets are moving onchain, the quantity of assets is going to 100x, and the programmability of those assets leads to more derivatives, the question for users quickly becomes "what should a buy?". The application that provides the most compelling answer to users wins.

I feel like we’re entering an “enterprise blockchain” 2.0 era of sorts, where we’re seeing a ton of companies both within and outside the cryptoeconomy experiment with different ways of building with blockchains, and people are once again becoming skeptical about the value proposition of tokens. “If all this technology is open source, why won’t [insert big company] come in and co-opt it and win?” The difference this time vs the 2016 era, is these companies aren’t all building separate systems from what already exists. They’re building Ethereum L2s, protocols on L1s like Solana, and issuing assets on every blockchain. So now the few generational assets this industry has built, can benefit from the distribution flywheels of centralized exchanges, fintech leaders, and social media giants. There’s still an outstanding question of where most the value will be captured. We’re no longer in the era of every token going up, just because the industry is growing and enterprises like BlackRock, Robinhood, and Stripe are validating the tech. But this shouldn’t be a revelation for an industry that is now firmly in its growth stage, not pioneer phase. Valuations are now at levels where they need to be justified with real economics and believable stories. You don’t get paid anymore for just being super early and figuring out what’s not a complete scam (although even scams worked too for a long time). Anyways, this is an exciting time if you’re willing to put in the work. We’re in the big leagues now and you will no longer find the answers you’re looking for by looking narrowly at the cryptoeconomy. It’s a big world out there and we’re finally starting to shake things up.