Partners to crypto builders since 2013

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Early-stage crypto founders often go beyond building products, setting the rules for entirely new ecosystems of social and financial incentives. Over our 12 years of investing in these visionaries, we’ve learned to look for the key qualities that define what it means to be a true founder. Read more from BCAP Partner @yuan_han_li ↓
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
Part of why crypto gaming hasn't taken off yet is the difficulty of developing great games, meaning you really needed to win the hearts of great game developers. Now that AI lets smaller teams build increasingly ambitious games at lower cost, it feels like a great time to build at that intersection. People are quick to write off entire categories in bear markets, but stronger property rights are a natural fit for games
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
It’s no secret that AI is getting really good at hacking, and financial infrastructure is the obvious target. Why? Because the purpose of most hacks is ultimately to steal money. So why not cut to the chase? One of the most obvious attack surfaces is agentic commerce. It’s still incredibly new, and unlike traditional software, AI is non-deterministic and vulnerable to things like prompt injection, hallucinations, etc. There’s a huge opportunity to build the security layer around it. Importantly, solving the security problem is probably a gating condition for agentic commerce adoption. People are not going to hand agents meaningful financial authority if hacks are happening everywhere. In that sense, the companies solving security are also expanding their own TAM by making the market itself viable. There’s plenty of historical precedent. Every major financial innovation, from credit cards to online banking, created new security risks and, in turn, new security companies and infrastructure to address them. And who better to take on this problem than the leaders in blockchain security? Crypto has been one of the most adversarial financial environments in the world, where the code you’re securing is often literally open source to attackers and successful exploits can directly unlock money. Awesome to see the leading crypto security team, @blockaid_, thinking about this problem. This will be an exciting one to follow.
1/ As consumer agents start to take off with Muse, Instinct, and others to come We wanted to build a tool that would help researchers understand what’s actually happening under the hood We were especially motivated by reports of Instinct losing users’ money Here’s a demo of our Interceptor tool with Muse:
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
if anyone has experience “working full time” with any training data collection platform for RL (eg. Mercor, Handshake, AfterQuery), would love to chat with you!
Just read this piece from my alma mater about a post-training startup that a lot of students have been working for to make side money. I found it interesting. In some sense there's a dystopian element to it: students training their replacements. There's also an eerie similarity to gig work like Uber and DoorDash. This time it's for true knowledge work, which reinforces a lot of the fears people have about the future of whitecollar work, especially entry-level work. On the other hand, is it crazy to believe data annotation is a category that gets a lot bigger from here? That a big portion of our economy will be focused on training LLMs? As long as there's interesting stuff to measure and things humans know that AI doesn't, there should be demand for this kind of data. This could be a growth category. Plus, I'm not convinced that the "AI takes all jobs" narrative is correct, and if anything, gaining fluency in working with LLMs could be an advantage for going into the workplace. For a student, a lot of these roles pay pretty good money. Plus, you can do it from your bedroom. Interesting category of companies to keep track of. h/t @zile_cao for sharing this article with me.
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RT @kashvi: introducing Sup[p]er Intelligence a private dinner series for founders (seed to series D) and senior execs shaping the future…
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
Great write-up on why and how the winning payment rails of the future may be determined by adoption in the densest and most global trading regions "The core insight here is that payment rails spread from counterparty to counterparty, and so I’d expect them to spread faster through industries and businesses with many trading relationships across different markets"
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
Why might the Pearl River Delta become an important node for stablecoin adoption? @yuan_han_li’s premise is that, like other network-effect businesses, payment rails spread through their users, so he expects them “to spread faster through industries and businesses with many trading relationships across different markets.” He goes on to explain why the Pearl River Delta, in particular, is an interesting geo to watch.
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Adoption often begins where pain points start, and it accelerates where trade concentrates. In his latest essay, @yuan_han_li dives into the role of dense trade networks and what motivates the spread of stablecoins.
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
start with someone’s first account and earn the right to be there for everything after. that’s what excites me about what NG.CASH is building. Mario and team have the right DNA to build for this next generation of Brazilian consumers incredibly excited to invest as they lean into their crypto product roadmap 🔥
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
really excited to finally announce our lead investment in @tarecredit! we've spent a lot of time thinking about which assets actually make sense to tokenize next, and consumer credit is one of the more interesting candidates. consumer loans are standardized enough to price at scale, but the infrastructure around them is still incredibly fragmented. tare is trying to give every party around a loan one shared record to work from, and rebuild a lot of the expensive plumbing sitting between borrowers and lenders. great piece from @alekslarsen and @jonah_b on why we led the round:
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Thrilled to back the @tarecredit team helping build a better experience for credit borrowing and lending.
We're backing @tarecredit because the credit system is old, expensive, and ready for an upgrade. Credit is heavily intermediated with slow and opaque manual processes and the plumbing alone costs borrowers and investors north of $100B a year. It's finally become possible to rebuild the entire value chain around a single source of truth, using stablecoins, smart contracts and AI. Led by co-founders @humancapitol @lucasvo and @keerthimoudgal, Tare is the perfect team for the job. Kevin helped build one of the first onchain private credit funds at Blocktower Credit after an extensive career in credit before, Lucas co-founded Centrifuge and is a pioneer in RWAs, and Keerthi was Head of Product at JP Morgan's institutional blockchain platform Kinexys. We're thrilled to announce that we led their seed round alongside a great group of funds and angels including leading private credit firms like Apollo and Janus Henderson and founders like @StaniKulechov of Aave. @jonah_b and I wrote more about our thesis below.
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
We're backing @tarecredit because the credit system is old, expensive, and ready for an upgrade. Credit is heavily intermediated with slow and opaque manual processes and the plumbing alone costs borrowers and investors north of $100B a year. It's finally become possible to rebuild the entire value chain around a single source of truth, using stablecoins, smart contracts and AI. Led by co-founders @humancapitol @lucasvo and @keerthimoudgal, Tare is the perfect team for the job. Kevin helped build one of the first onchain private credit funds at Blocktower Credit after an extensive career in credit before, Lucas co-founded Centrifuge and is a pioneer in RWAs, and Keerthi was Head of Product at JP Morgan's institutional blockchain platform Kinexys. We're thrilled to announce that we led their seed round alongside a great group of funds and angels including leading private credit firms like Apollo and Janus Henderson and founders like @StaniKulechov of Aave. @jonah_b and I wrote more about our thesis below.
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
Build what you wish existed. We did. @BoundlessHQ
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
lets go make all markets programmable
Nasdaq Ventures is investing $100M in Payward as we advance tokenization together with the @Nasdaq Equity Token (NET) framework. Equities on-chain only works if it's built to institutional standard from day one. We're building it with the company that's run public market infrastructure for decades. → payward.com/press-release/pa…
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
Aave's new dashboard is very helpful insights.aave.com/dashboard More onchain orgs should do this
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
Incredible partnership for @krakenfx ! Nice work @arjunsethi @DavidLRipley @jespow and the entire team 💪🏻. It has been awesome watching u grow over a decade from the @bcap seed round investment to today 🙏🏻
Nasdaq Ventures is investing $100M in Payward as we advance tokenization together with the @Nasdaq Equity Token (NET) framework. Equities on-chain only works if it's built to institutional standard from day one. We're building it with the company that's run public market infrastructure for decades. → payward.com/press-release/pa…
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
Some dogs just know how to hunt Quite literally in the case of TRM which is one of a very small handful of companies that actually knows how to identify, track and disrupt criminal activity. They’ve now packaged that expertise into an operating system for crimefighters to combat criminal activity at scale and that solution is resonating with the market. But also figuratively - over the past 8 years, @estebancastano, @rahulr0609 and the TRM team have repeatedly navigated their way to bigger and better opportunities because they genuinely care about actually solving their customers problems It’s awesome to see a company succeed consistently and repeatedly over several years but it’s even better when they hit *another* major inflection point in year 8. That made it really easy for us to back them for the third (!) time as a lead investor
Today, we are at a crossroads. As I write this, AI is saving lives by helping doctors identify diseases faster, and making education more accessible to people everywhere. It’s also being used to inflict harm on a global scale. TRM’s AI-in-Crime Adoption Index found that, in 2026, criminal adoption of AI rose 40% year over year. Today’s threat actors are using AI to execute scams, cyber attacks, and other forms of digital crime at unprecedented speed and scale. In the last 90 days, we’ve also seen a growing number of incidents where AI agents themselves have gone rogue. Business titans and religious leaders are sounding the same alarm: to realize AI’s promise, we need to protect people from its harms. The first line of defense is prevention. Model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are building stronger guardrails, and governments are exploring rules for how AI can be safely used. We call this the prevention layer. At TRM, we’ve spent nearly a decade fighting crime, from fraud and cybercrime to human and wildlife trafficking. That experience has taught us one thing, if nothing else: the prevention layer is essential, but never enough. Criminals will break through. When they do, it’s critical that crimefighters can identify the harm done, find the people and machines behind it, and take action: support the victim, freeze the funds, take down the infrastructure, arrest the offender, disable the agent, dismantle the network. The world needs a new layer of protection. We call it the disruption layer—and it's what we're building, right now. The operating system for crimefighters In 2018, we founded TRM to help crimefighters map how threat actors were using cryptocurrency. We analyzed petabytes of data, mapping over a 100 types of crime. Government agencies and financial institutions worldwide now use TRM to investigate complex criminal networks and combat financial crime. The more cases we supported, however, the more we realized: if we were going to equip crimefighters to disrupt AI-scale crime, crypto would be 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 of the story, but not the 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 story. To build a successful case, investigators must source intelligence not just from the blockchain, but also corporate records, cyber threat data, the dark web, and dozens of other domains. Today’s crimefighters need to use natural language to search across siloed domains, connect the dots and unearth buried insights, automate the rote work, and coordinate with partners across public and private sectors—all while preserving auditability and human judgment. In short, crimefighters need an operating system for the AI era. So we built it. For years, we’ve been developing this OS alongside the investigators who use it. Now, we’ve just announced a new round of funding, valuing TRM at $2 billion, to propel our work—and this fall, we’ll unveil the OS publicly, for the first time. If your organization needs to fight AI-scale crime, please reach out. We want to work with you.
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Huge milestone for the @trmlabs's mission to scale a safer internet. Congratulations @estebancastano and team.
Today, we are at a crossroads. As I write this, AI is saving lives by helping doctors identify diseases faster, and making education more accessible to people everywhere. It’s also being used to inflict harm on a global scale. TRM’s AI-in-Crime Adoption Index found that, in 2026, criminal adoption of AI rose 40% year over year. Today’s threat actors are using AI to execute scams, cyber attacks, and other forms of digital crime at unprecedented speed and scale. In the last 90 days, we’ve also seen a growing number of incidents where AI agents themselves have gone rogue. Business titans and religious leaders are sounding the same alarm: to realize AI’s promise, we need to protect people from its harms. The first line of defense is prevention. Model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are building stronger guardrails, and governments are exploring rules for how AI can be safely used. We call this the prevention layer. At TRM, we’ve spent nearly a decade fighting crime, from fraud and cybercrime to human and wildlife trafficking. That experience has taught us one thing, if nothing else: the prevention layer is essential, but never enough. Criminals will break through. When they do, it’s critical that crimefighters can identify the harm done, find the people and machines behind it, and take action: support the victim, freeze the funds, take down the infrastructure, arrest the offender, disable the agent, dismantle the network. The world needs a new layer of protection. We call it the disruption layer—and it's what we're building, right now. The operating system for crimefighters In 2018, we founded TRM to help crimefighters map how threat actors were using cryptocurrency. We analyzed petabytes of data, mapping over a 100 types of crime. Government agencies and financial institutions worldwide now use TRM to investigate complex criminal networks and combat financial crime. The more cases we supported, however, the more we realized: if we were going to equip crimefighters to disrupt AI-scale crime, crypto would be 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 of the story, but not the 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 story. To build a successful case, investigators must source intelligence not just from the blockchain, but also corporate records, cyber threat data, the dark web, and dozens of other domains. Today’s crimefighters need to use natural language to search across siloed domains, connect the dots and unearth buried insights, automate the rote work, and coordinate with partners across public and private sectors—all while preserving auditability and human judgment. In short, crimefighters need an operating system for the AI era. So we built it. For years, we’ve been developing this OS alongside the investigators who use it. Now, we’ve just announced a new round of funding, valuing TRM at $2 billion, to propel our work—and this fall, we’ll unveil the OS publicly, for the first time. If your organization needs to fight AI-scale crime, please reach out. We want to work with you.
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The sci-fi idea of "work while you sleep" seems a lot less sci-fi now
excited to open source AgentFormation it's a template for spinning up remote, secure, and browser-accessible workspaces for coding agents in AWS CloudFormation. I've been using it daily while walking to work or before heading to bed to kick off a coding task from my phone although we first built this over 8 months ago before claude/codex's remote-control features were released, I still find it great if you prefer TUI's over chat interfaces disclaimer: AgentFormation is still experimental so take a second to review before using it in prod github.com/BlockchainCap/Age…
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