Where I’m spending time in crypto right now
About a quarter of the way through 2026, I wanted to share the areas in crypto I'm currently spending my time in. I did the same at the start of last year. There’s some overlap with the areas I wrote about then, but my thinking on them has sharpened. There's also new things on my mind. As is the case with investing, this overview is dynamic and only serves as a guiding light. Oftentimes the best opportunities are found in the areas one least expects.
Higher order DeFi
The foundational bricks of DeFi have largely been laid. Across financial functions like lending (Morpho, Aave), exchange (Uniswap, CoW Swap), staking (Lido), and perpetuals (Hyperliquid), many of the core DeFi primitives now exist. On the stablecoin side, major issuers (Circle, Tether) are becoming entrenched.
There’s always opportunity for incumbents to get usurped by newer entrants and I don’t think the base layer is ever fully “done.” But I think the big opportunities going forward lie in the higher order applications built on top of this infrastructure. Product and UI that bridges it with actual end users, whether consumers or businesses.
Take Tenor, one of our portfolio companies. Tenor is an institutional borrower platform built on top of Morpho Midnight (V2). Midnight will launch with a lot of the features institutions need to take onchain loans including fixed rate loans and OTC deals that weren't available in V1. Morpho is consciously focused on only building the underlying infrastructure, the smart contracts that define the lending and borrowing logic, and leaves space for others to build applications on top. Given that it's difficult for institutions to interact with Morpho's infrastructure directly, Tenor is building the platform that makes it easy for them to do so.
Another example from our portfolio is UnblockPay, which has built a stablecoin API that lets fintechs, banks and FX providers plug into stablecoin rails for cross-border payments across Latin America. When a business needs to send money from Brazil to the US, for example, UnblockPay converts Brazilian Reais to stablecoins, transfers them instantly, and off-ramps to dollars on the other side, which is a flow meaningfully faster and cheaper than traditional banking rails. The underlying infrastructure pieces (stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether, local payment rails like Pix) already exist. Unblockpay stitches them together into a single API that businesses can build on.
New consumer markets
Crypto is great at creating new markets or making existing ones more accessible. Some of the biggest outcomes have been consumer companies that leveraged crypto to bring markets closer to end users: Polymarket for prediction markets, Pump.fun for memecoins, and OpenSea for NFTs. One of the fastest growing consumer companies at the moment is our portfolio company Courtyard, which created a new digital collecting experience for physical cards, comics, watches, and more on top of crypto infrastructure.
The necessary infrastructure to create experiences that abstract away the crypto wiring has been built. The challenge is now in building compelling products around markets in sports, culture, social experiences, and more.
That can take time. Prediction markets existed for years before Polymarket got started and took off. Guesser, Veil, and Augur all came before but couldn't create the experience Polymarket did. Similarly, there were memecoin launchpads before Pump.fun. Building consumer products is hard, and sometimes only slight product tweaks or marginally better timing separate the company that takes off from the one that doesn't.
Intelligent finance
There's been a lot written about the intersection of crypto and AI. At a high level, the intersection makes sense. Crypto is about scarcity, AI is about abundance. One feeds off the other.
In practice though, most companies building at this intersection have been more in the business of selling a narrative than building a product.
There's one area of intersection I'm genuinely excited about at the moment, which is intelligent finance. I wrote about it the other week. Crypto has given us programmable money through stablecoins. AI is programmable context and preferences. The synthesis gives us the ability to build financial products that understand us and move money on our behalf.
The first real instantiation of this are agentic wallets, which are products that attach a crypto wallet to an LLM, allowing users to manage their onchain assets through natural language.
It's a space still in its infancy, with some challenges around security and user trust. Getting users to trust LLMs to move around their money isn't something that happens overnight.
Onchain privacy
Over the past few years, we’ve made large strides in blockchain infrastructure, particularly as it relates to performance. Through L1s like Solana and L2s on Ethereum, we’ve cut down latency, reduced costs and increased transaction speed / throughput.
The high-speed rails have been built for finance to move onchain and now that that’s happening, we need to build more and better privacy infrastructure.
Crypto addresses act like public bank accounts, with each transaction between addresses public for everyone to see. For most of blockchain's history, the majority of users were retail who didn’t care all too much about privacy. That’s changing as institutions are coming onchain. My feeling is that they’ll care more about privacy than retail users and create more stuctural demand for better privacy solutions.
There have been notable advancements in privacy infrastructure over the past couple of years. Technologies like ZK-SNARKs can protect our identities while revealing enough information to prove we're trustworthy, while fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) lets you compute over data without ever seeing the underlying data.
The open challenges are regulation and the nascency of the technology itself. There's a balance to be struck between preserving user privacy and complying with the law. At the same time these technologies are still expensive and difficult for developers to build with.
The opportunities I’m looking for as those that make privacy programmable, cheap, and accessible enough for developers to build with and integrate into their products.
Crypto as a launchpad
Crypto has produced, and I think will continue to produce, some of the sharpest minds in economic design, cybersecurity, and regulation.
Why?
Crypto protocols are mini economies that play out at hyper speed. You can introduce incentives through tokens, measure how they impact economic activity on the protocol, then adjust, iterate, and learn, all in compressed timelines. On the security side, crypto protocols are essentially public honeypots: the industry's companies and leaders are under constant attack, whether through phishing, smart contract exploits, or other vectors. On regulation, regulators globally have waged war against crypto for large parts of its existence. There's much more constructive collaboration between regulators and crypto founders today, which needs to continue for crypto to thrive.
Crypto is a breeding ground for people who have learned to operate in tough environments across these functions. Founders who first create a product for the crypto industry and then expand outward is a pattern we've seen, and one I expect to see more of.
Quantum resistance
While crypto is safe today, a quantum computer capable of breaking blockchain cryptography will eventually be built. Recent breakthroughs like Google's Willow chip are indicative of the accelerating progress, and Coinbase recently published a report urging the industry to start preparing well in advance of a post-quantum world. It's clear that blockchains will need to be upgraded to meet this threat.
Among the large L1 blockchains, Bitcoin is most exposed, while Ethereum and Solana face similar risks but have clearer upgrade paths.
Companies being built today face a timing challenge: they are building for a problem that hasn't fully arrived but will at some unknown point in the future. The likely path is to find near-term utility while positioning themselves early for a post-quantum world.
I don't have a strong view on how companies bridge that time gap or what the right first products are. But what I do know is that quantum computing will be incredibly disruptive, and the industry should do everything it can to be prepared for when it arrives.