I’ve been thinking about a dinner party story Eric Ries told me.

(Yes, that Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup)

Someone suggests a restaurant they haven’t visited in a few years. First bite. Person next to Eric pulls out their phone. “Sorry, I could taste it. This place has been taken over by private equity.”

Everyone around the table had a version of the same story. A brand they loved. A product that used to mean something. The moment they noticed it was gone.

Eric calls the force that does this financial gravity. I’ve been calling it something else for the last eight years - another story for another day - but it doesn’t seem to fit anymore.

I asked Eric to tell the story on the show - here’s a snippet of it.

The force that doesn’t need your permission

Here’s the thing about gravity. You don’t have to believe in it. It operates whether you do or not.

In traditional finance, I watched it work like clockwork. A company builds something real - genuine quality, genuine trust, a customer relationship that took a decade to earn. Then it grows. Then it gets valuable. And then the question that was never on the agenda starts showing up in every meeting: what might the market think?

Not what customers want, or what the mission requires, it's what the market might think.

The word ‘might’ is the tell. Eric pointed it out, and I haven’t been able to unhear it since. Gravity is always operating on what something might want, not what it actually said. It’s the ghost in the room. And once it’s there, it doesn’t leave.

I’ve watched CEOs of public companies describe the exact same moment. Before the IPO, they were building. After? Everyone’s watching the ticker. Same people. Same values. Different gravitational field.

In crypto, we didn’t just miss this; we accelerated it.

Last month, I virtually sat across from Amor Sexton, Global COO of Blockdaemon, and we talked about what actually happened to Drift and Kelp. $577 million gone in 18 days. The headlines called them hacks, but they weren’t. The smart contracts did exactly what they were told to do. The problem was governance - who had the keys, who could override what, and what the incentive structure was when things got hard.

Amor’s thesis: the losses that are defining this year’s DeFi calendar were governance and operational failures dressed up as security incidents. The code was fine. The humans around the code were operating without the structural guardrails that traditional finance spent decades building the hard way.

And I’ve said it on this show before: I’ve seen bad tokens ruin too many good companies in this space.

Here’s what I mean. A founder spends two years building something real with genuine product, genuine users, and genuine network effects. Then the token launches. Day one, the price spikes (or not). Six months later, you can’t find the original whitepaper on the website. The product roadmap has stopped optimizing for users and started optimizing for token holders. The gravity field shifted the moment the token started trading, and nobody on the team saw it happen because it happened in every individual decision that seemed reasonable at the time.

Recalling a story from a founder who shared a crypto VC’s request of him nails this point:

“I don’t want you building a company, I want you pumping that token!”

That’s financial gravity. And in crypto, we handed it a lever with 100x the mechanical advantage of a public equity listing and wondered why it pulled harder.

Last month, Sal Ternullo told me the ‘race-to-TGE’ (token generation event) game that defined the last cycle is largely over. The founders who are winning now are the ones who built the product first and designed the token second. And, they walked into a pitch meeting with a real answer on value accrual, not a whitepaper and a launch date.

That’s the same insight from a different angle. Sal was talking about token economics. Eric is talking about corporate structure. But the underlying principle is identical: if you don’t build the right architecture at the beginning, the financial gravity that arrives with your success will use that architecture against you.

Product before token, never be broken.

Structure before scale, never go stale.

Same discipline, same moment in the journey, same consequence if you skip it.

The structure is the answer, not intentions.

The thing I took from this conversation (and from reading the manuscript of Eric’s new book Incorruptible in preparation for it) is something I’ve believed for a long time but couldn’t quite articulate cleanly: a great team can build something extraordinary and still lose it, not because they were beaten by a better team, but because they never built the structure to protect what they created. Good intentions don’t survive a hostile cap table, a PE takeover, or a token that starts trading before the product is ready. The architecture either holds or it doesn’t, and by the time you find out which, it’s usually too late to fix it.

Eric’s not making a moral argument; he’s making an engineering argument. The forces that corrupted your favorite brand, your favorite protocol, your favorite company - they didn’t need a villain. They just needed the absence of structure designed to resist them.

The Novo Nordisk story hit me harder than I expected. A hundred years ago, a Nobel laureate and his wife - who nearly died from diabetes - built an insulin company and immediately worried about what would happen when it became valuable. They worried about it in 1923, before Martin Shkreli by fifty years, and before the modern pharmaceutical pricing debate by three generations. And they built a non-profit foundation to hold the mission permanently, with a for-profit subsidiary underneath it to raise capital.

That structure protected more than $500 billion in shareholder value. Because it was designed, from day one, to resist the thing that would eventually come for it.

Eric asked every founder he spoke to the same question about that: are you sure you’re smarter than a Nobel laureate?

I’ve been in enough board meetings, on enough cap tables, and through enough cycles to know the honest answer is almost always no.

The pattern

What I keep seeing across this show, across every conversation where a guest talks about what went wrong, or what almost went wrong, or what they did differently, is the same thing Eric is describing.

The companies that last are the ones where someone, at the beginning, sat down and asked: what are the forces that will eventually come for this? And then built something designed to resist them.

Not a mission statement, values document or good intentions on a wall in the meeting room of their first office.

Structure.

Rob Viglione at Horizen Labs is building cryptographic infrastructure because he understands that in an agentic economy, the architecture of trust has to be baked in at the protocol layer. You can’t rely on the humans to behave correctly every time - that’s the same insight. Amor Sexton is arguing that DeFi needs TradFi-style operational risk infrastructure because the alternative is watching the same failures repeat themselves at increasing scale. That’s the same insight. Sal Ternullo is telling founders that the token comes after the product, not before it, because the gravity that arrives with a live token will exploit any structural weakness you left unaddressed. That’s the same insight.

Eric Ries has been watching this pattern play out across every industry for fifteen years and finally wrote the engineering manual for fixing it.

The pattern is always the same: build something worth protecting, forget to protect it, and then watch someone take it.

The question is whether you decide to do something about that at the beginning, when it’s a two-page filing in Delaware and a conversation with your lawyer, or at the end, when it’s a wake.

Where this leaves me

Financial gravity is not a crypto problem. It’s not a startup problem. It’s not even a business problem in the narrow sense. It’s a design problem, and like all design problems, it’s much cheaper to solve at the beginning than at the end.

At Norio Ventures, I’m not looking for founders with a mission statement up on some wall. I’m looking for founders who understand the forces that will eventually come for what they’re building and have thought carefully about the architecture they need to withstand them. The structural decisions, cap table design, the legal charter, and the mission guardian. The discipline to balance vision with execution.

These are not administrative details. They are the difference between building something that lasts and building something that becomes someone else’s golden goose.

If you’re building in crypto, fintech, or AI and thinking about these questions, I’m always happy to hear from founders working along these lines.

A companion thread

If you’ve been listening to MoneyNeverSleeps recently, you’ll recognize these themes across the recent run of episodes.

In EP 314 with Amor Sexton at Blockdaemon, the conversation was about what DeFi’s biggest losses of the last year had in common and why calling them hacks missed the point entirely.

In EP 315 with Sal Ternullo at A100x Ventures and SVRN, the question was whether the race-to-TGE era is finally over and what discipline looks like in the next cycle.

In EP 310 with Rob Viglione at Horizen Labs, we talked about what it means to bake trust into the protocol layer rather than relying on the humans around it to behave correctly.

And in EP 316 with Eric Ries, all of it converged into a single framework - financial gravity - and a single founder question: what does the structure that resists it actually look like?

None of those episodes used the same language, but they were all circling the same thing.

Til next time

A note on The Geometry of Fintech Part III: it’s coming, but I’m going to let it breathe for a couple of months. The ideas are still forming, and I’d rather wait until there’s something genuinely new to say than publish it half-baked.

One other thing worth mentioning, and I say this without naming anyone specific, but it happened more than once in recent months. I ran into a former guest who had no idea the show had moved to a new format. Hadn’t seen it come through. Wasn’t sure what I was up to.

So for anyone who’s been away or hasn’t checked in since the older episodes: MoneyNeverSleeps has changed. The show is now video-first on YouTube, under 15 minutes per episode, drawn from a tighter recorded conversation. I’ve been doing this intentionally because the most interesting part of a 45-minute podcast was always packed into about 15 minutes, and I spent years listening to the good stuff get buried in the back half of a long episode. The new format puts the best of the conversation front and centre, without the self-indulgent detours I used to let myself take.

The feedback has been really good. People are finishing episodes, guests are sharing them, and the show feels sharper.

If you’ve been listening for a while, thank you. If you’re new here, welcome. Either way, the full back catalogue of 316 episodes is at MoneyNeverSleeps.ie, reorganized into themed playlists so you can explore by topic rather than just scrolling chronologically.

📺 Video on YouTube

🎧 Audio and Video on Spotify

🎧 Audio on Apple Podcasts

🔎 Deeper-dive shownotes on MoneyNeverSleeps.ie

If this way of thinking resonates, follow along here. I’ll be writing more regularly - not show notes, but reflections like this one, connecting the threads across episodes as they emerge.

And if you’re building - particularly in crypto, fintech, or AI - I’m always happy to hear from founders thinking along these lines.

🌐 norioventures.com

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn

❎ Follow me on X/Twitter

A quick note: if you’re receiving this and don’t remember signing up, it’s likely because we’ve interacted through Norio Ventures, MoneyNeverSleeps, or at a CryptoMondays event. If this isn’t for you, no hard feelings, and you can unsubscribe below. If it is, welcome back. More to come.

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If A and B, then C

I remember the first time I saw an algorithmic trading desk up close.

September 2000.
A hedge fund office in Westport, Connecticut.

Rows of screens. Programmers where traders used to sit. Execution algos slicing orders automatically.

The head trader told me something I have never forgotten.

Because of the algos, they had taken out half the trading floor.

They replaced it with a half-court basketball court.

Less noise.
Fewer traders.
More code.

It felt futuristic at the time.

But the market structure itself had not changed.

The algos still operated inside the same exchange hours.
The same custody model.
The same clearing cycles.
The same settlement delays.

Machines were optimizing inside rails designed for humans.

That memory resurfaced recently in a different conversation at a conference in London earlier this month.

The person I was speaking with agreed with Part I.

Yes, AI will likely become the dominant user of stablecoins.

That felt intuitive.

But when I extended the thesis - if stablecoins pair with tokenized securities, then AI becomes a dominant user of tokenized securities - that is when she pushed back.

Algorithmic trading is nothing new, she said.

Hedge funds have been automating execution for decades.

Fair point.

But that is not the story.

This is not about hedge funds upgrading their algos.

This is about widening the universe.

Not esoteric strategies.
Not proprietary alpha.
Not high-frequency trading.

Plain-vanilla asset allocation.

Balanced portfolios.
ETF rebalancing.
Risk-managed pension allocations.
Wealth management optimization at scale.

When the settlement layer changes, optimization stops being niche.

It becomes structural.

The proof

Let’s run it cleanly.

Premise A
AI becomes the dominant user of stablecoins.

Machines optimize continuously. They do not wait for cut-off times. They do not care about batch cycles. If stablecoins are programmable, instant, and always available, machines will prefer them.

Premise B
Stablecoins pair with tokenized securities as the new settlement base layer.

This is no longer theoretical.

Superstate has launched a Direct Issuance Program allowing SEC-registered public companies to issue newly created shares directly onchain in exchange for stablecoins. Investors receive tokenized equity immediately. Shareholder records update in real time through an SEC-registered transfer agent.

Primary issuance, onchain.

Securitize is enabling fully onchain trading of natively digitally issued public equities. During US market hours, trading occurs on best bid and offer. After hours, liquidity shifts to automated market maker models.

Continuous trading, by design.

Nasdaq has formally asked the SEC for approval to allow tokenized versions of listed stocks and ETFs to trade on its existing order books. Same ticker. Same CUSIP. Same shareholder rights. The difference is that investors can choose to settle those shares into a blockchain wallet instead of only into a brokerage account.

This is not a parallel crypto venue.

This is tokenization embedded inside the national market system.

Exchanges.
Transfer agents.
Issuers.
Regulators.

The base layer is shifting.

Once that happens, the properties of the system change.

Settlement becomes instant.
Records update in real time.
Markets can operate continuously.

Twenty-four-hour markets are not built for humans.

They are built for agents.

There are 168 hours in a week.

U.S. equity markets are open 6.5 hours a day, five days a week. That is 32.5 hours. Roughly 19 percent of the week.

Even if you include pre-market and after-hours trading, you reach about 16 hours per weekday. Around 80 hours per week. Still less than half the week.

And extended hours are not the same thing as continuous markets. Liquidity is thinner. Spreads are wider. Institutional participation is limited. Settlement remains periodic.

Even globally, stitching together the U.S., Europe and Asia sessions does not create a single continuous system. Liquidity fragments. Clearing and custody remain jurisdictional.

AI does not optimize half the week.

It runs continuously.

If capital becomes programmable and settlement becomes continuous, markets that operate less than half the time begin to look like a design constraint, not a law of nature.

Conclusion C
If AI dominates stablecoin settlement, and stablecoins settle tokenized securities, then AI inevitably becomes a dominant user of tokenized securities.

Not because it is exciting.

Because the structure now supports it.

Beyond hedge funds

The pushback assumes this is a hedge fund story.

It is not.

Hedge funds have long automated execution. But those systems optimize within legacy custody, clearing, and exchange hours.

They optimise inside constraints.

What is changing now is the constraint itself.

When primary issuance is onchain.
When transfer agents are onchain.
When exchanges embed tokenized settlement.
When securities clear against stablecoins.

Optimization is no longer bounded by market hours and batch settlement.

This extends beyond trading desks.

Consider the wealth manager overseeing diversified portfolios for high-net-worth clients.

Tokenized ETFs settle onchain.
An AI agent rebalances continuously against a defined risk profile.

Drawdowns.
Volatility shifts.
Liquidity conditions.
Macro signals.

All encoded.

Not quarterly.

Continuously.

At the pension fund level, the implications are larger.

If tokenized securities enable real-time rebalancing across asset classes at lower cost, risk-adjusted returns improve.

If risk-adjusted returns improve, assets grow.

In asset management, gathering assets is oxygen.

Saving fees helps.

Improving outcomes wins mandates.

The three strands, sharpened

The geometry tightens.

Offchain fintech
Optimized for human interaction with legacy settlement rails.

Adaptive fintech
Positioned to operate across both systems.

Onchain fintech
Native to tokenized assets, stablecoin settlement, and agent execution.

As public equities, ETFs, and other securities move into tokenized form, the competitive advantage shifts toward systems built for continuous optimization.

Offchain inherits latency.

Onchain inherits programmability.

The extended theorem

If AI becomes the dominant user of stablecoins
and stablecoins settle tokenized securities
then AI becomes a dominant user of tokenized securities.

Not because crypto won.

Because the market structure changed.

Geometry again.

Once the base layer shifts, everything built on top of it reorganises.

Where this leaves me

If the base layer of finance is moving onchain, and if AI becomes the dominant allocator of capital on that base layer, then the opportunity is not at the surface.

It is in the connective tissue.

At Norio Ventures, I am not trying to predict which institution moves first.

I am looking for the founders building the infrastructure that makes this shift inevitable. The orchestration layers. The compliance-native rails. The abstractions that allow wealth managers, pension funds, and fintech platforms to plug into programmable settlement without rewriting their entire stack.

Adaptive fintech will survive the transition.

Onchain-native fintech will define it.

If this geometry is right, the winners are the teams building for a world where capital moves continuously, not periodically.

And that world is forming faster than most people think.

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A companion thread

If you have been listening to MoneyNeverSleeps recently, you will recognise this shift in tone.

In “2026 Crypto Predictions,” Alejandro Gutierrez and I discussed what happens when infrastructure quietly becomes inevitable.

In “Avoiding Founder Burnout” with Ollie Walsh, the conversation was about resilience and adaptability when the environment changes faster than expected.

With Joni Pirovich in “Scaling Human Expertise,” we explored what happens when intelligence becomes leverage rather than labour.

And in “The Next Money Rails” with Sean Lee, we zoomed out to consider what programmable money means in a world of competing sovereign systems.

None of those episodes explicitly used the phrase “the geometry of fintech.”

But that is what they were circling.

MoneyNeverSleeps has entered a sharper phase. Shorter conversations. Video-first on YouTube. The full back catalog reorganized into themed playlists so you can explore 300+ episodes by theme rather than chronology.

If this way of thinking resonates, the recent run of episodes is a good companion to this series.

The ideas are not abstract.

They are already in motion.

📺 Video on YouTube

🎧 Audio and Video on Spotify

🎧 Audio on Apple Podcasts

Til next time…

If this way of thinking resonates, you can follow along here.

I’ll be writing more regularly - not show notes, but reflections like this - with Part III of The Geometry of Fintech coming next.

And again, a massive hat-tip to David Birch for sharing that one killer line with me: AI will become the dominant user of stablecoins. Check out the post he inspired here which is Part I.

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And if you’re building - particularly in adaptive or onchain fintech - I’m always happy to hear from founders thinking along these lines.

🌐 Check out Norio Ventures at norioventures.com.

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn

❎ Follow me on X/Twitter

A quick note

If you are receiving this and do not remember signing up, it is likely because we have interacted recently through Norio Ventures, MoneyNeverSleeps, or at a CryptoMondays event.

If this is not for you, we can still be friends. You can unsubscribe below.

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The Geometry of Fintech

I was never great at math.

I stumbled through algebra, barely survived trigonometry, and in 1990, I found the beats and lyrics of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet far more interesting than anything I’d find in a math textbook.

But in 10th grade, something clicked: geometry.

It was the first math class I ever aced.

Not because I suddenly loved numbers, but because geometry wasn’t about memorizing formulas. It was about logic. If A is true, and B follows from A, then C isn’t optional. You don’t argue with it. You accept it and move on.

That way of thinking stuck with me. It probably explains why I later found statistics easier than long division, and why I’m instinctively drawn to systems that reveal their structure once you look at them from the right angle.

That geometry lesson came back to me earlier this month, not in a classroom, but on a stage in Amsterdam.

An onstage moment

I was moderating a panel at the ABN AMRO + Techstars Future of Finance Accelerator Demo Day, immediately after a keynote by David Birch. Dave made a statement that stopped me in my tracks:

“AI will become the dominant user of stablecoins.”

At first glance, that sounds provocative. Maybe even theoretical.

But the more I sat with it - especially while watching nine finely tuned fintech pitches back-to-back - the more it started to feel… inevitable.

Earlier in the discussion, I’d said something fairly standard: that stablecoins solve real problems in emerging markets - you can’t trust banks, you can’t trust governments, you can’t trust your currency - but those problems don’t really exist in developed markets.

Dave pushed back.

He didn’t fully finish the thought, but he didn’t need to. Earlier in his talk, he’d dropped another stat that stayed with me:

£292 billion sitting in UK current accounts earning nothing.

That’s not a technology problem.
That’s not a regulatory problem.
That’s a trust problem.

Trust didn’t disappear - it got quieter

In emerging markets, trust failures are loud and visible: inflation, capital controls, bank collapses.

In developed markets, trust failures are quieter - but no less real.

• Money sitting idle because inertia is profitable for banks.

• Insurance priced opaquely because customers don’t switch often enough.

• Financial products designed around friction, not outcomes.

We tolerate it because switching is hard, optimization is time-consuming, and the systems are stacked against individuals paying attention.

But an AI agent won’t tolerate that.

AI doesn’t care about bank brands.
It doesn’t care about legacy relationships.
It doesn’t care that “this is how it’s always worked.”

If you tell your AI agent to optimise your finances - savings, payments, insurance, subscriptions - it will do exactly that. Continuously. Relentlessly.

And crucially: it won’t wait for banks to open on Monday morning.

Why stablecoins matter more in developed markets than we think

This is where the geometry snapped into place for me.

If AI agents are going to move money around on your behalf - reallocating, rebalancing, settling, optimizing - they need rails that are:

• programmable

• instant

• available 24/7

• cheap

• deterministic

• permissionable via code, not paperwork

That’s not fiat money.
That’s not SWIFT.
That’s not batch settlement.

That’s stablecoins.

On stage, I said something that landed more strongly than I expected:

AI agents are the only ones in the room who treat crypto like a grown-up.

Humans argue about narratives.
AI cares about execution.

And once you see stablecoins as machine money, not consumer money, a lot of things suddenly make sense.

Lex Sokolin recently called stablecoins “robot money.”
It’s a great phrase, because robots don’t need brands, branches, or business hours. They need reliable, programmable settlement.

The quiet implication for fintech

Sitting through those pitches in Amsterdam, I had a realization that’s still reshaping how I think about fintech:

If AI becomes the dominant user of stablecoins, every fintech product will need onchain settlement.

Not because crypto “won.”
Not because regulation collapsed.
But because optimization demands it.

We’re heading toward a distinction that will matter a lot:

• Offchain fintech: beautiful UX wrapped around slow, permissioned rails

• Adaptive fintech: products designed to plug into onchain settlement when needed

• Onchain fintech: systems built natively for programmable money, AI agents, and continuous optimisation

Stripe sees this clearly. Their acquisitions - Bridge, Privy, Metronome - aren’t a crypto strategy. They’re an infrastructure strategy. They’re building the plumbing that lets money behave like software.

For a fund like Norio Ventures, this doesn’t mean chasing the next Stripe-sized outcome. It means backing the smaller, sharper teams building the connective tissue - the ramps, abstractions, orchestration layers - that let institutions and fintechs move onchain without blowing themselves up.

If all of finance is moving onchain, fintech will too.

Geometry doesn’t care whether we like the conclusion.

Where this leaves me

Most major financial innovations have historically been institution-led: credit cards, electronic trading, derivatives.

Crypto flipped that - it started with individuals.

Now AI accelerates the shift again.

Customers will move first.
Machines will move faster.
Institutions will meet them there - or become background infrastructure.

That’s not ideology.
That’s geometry.

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A companion conversation

As I was processing all of this, I recorded this week’s episode of MoneyNeverSleeps with Garrett Cassidy.

We didn’t explicitly call it “the geometry of fintech,” but we circled it from multiple angles - stablecoins, AI agents, geopolitics, dollar dominance, and why programmable money changes who actually holds power in the system.

It’s a good companion piece if you want to hear this thinking unfold in real time.

📺 Video on YouTube

🎧 Audio and Video on Spotify

🎧 Audio on Apple Podcasts

Til next time…

If this way of thinking resonates, you can follow along here.

I’ll be writing more regularly - not show notes, but reflections like this - with Part II of The Geometry of Fintech coming next.

Subscribe now

MoneyNeverSleeps has also entered a new era: shorter, sharper conversations, video-first on YouTube, and a fully reorganized back catalog into themed playlists, giving listeners a new way to explore the first 300 episodes.

And if you’re building - particularly in adaptive or onchain fintech - I’m always happy to hear from founders thinking along these lines.

🌐 Check out Norio Ventures at norioventures.com.

🔗 Connect on LinkedIn

❎ Follow me on X/Twitter

Leave a comment

Last month, we closed the first seven-year chapter of MoneyNeverSleeps with Episode 300 - recorded live at the Podcast Studios at HeadStuff HQ, the former Westland Studios in Dublin. U2, Hozier, Christy Moore… and now, somehow, us. Not bad for a show that started with two mics, two founders, and endless questions in borrowed rooms around the city.

Episode 300 wasn’t just a milestone - it was, honestly, the feel-good moment of the year for me. The room was buzzing in a way that felt like a reunion, a celebration, and a turning point all at once. And thanks to Conan Brophy (who I finally dragged onto the mic after seven years) and the team at the Podcast Studios at Headstuff, the whole thing sounded as good as it felt.

Before we get into the recap, a confession:

I’d planned to launch the new format of the show in November. But when you’re building the next little big thing with Norio Ventures, the path has a habit of reinventing itself mid-stride. So the new era of MoneyNeverSleeps will kick off in December - sharper, faster, video-first, and built for where the world of onchain finance is actually heading.

But first, let’s talk about 300.

The Night We Hit 300

The episode opens with the countdown from the studio crew - “4, 3, 2, 1… Live from Dublin!” - and the crowd lets out a proper cheer. Right out of the gate, you can feel the energy.

Then it hits me: seven years, 299 episodes, and hundreds of conversations with founders, operators, investors, regulators, engineers, artists, and dreamers… all leading to this moment.

I was joined on stage by:

• Mai Santamaria - always sharp, always honest, always willing to say the thing others are dancing around

• Alejandro Gutierrez - community-builder, connector, future-spotter

• Conan Brophy - the producer behind every episode since 2018

• Paul Smyth - one of the show’s original supporters and recurring co-conspirators

• Barry Darmody - Episode 130 legend and one of our all-time most-downloaded guests

What followed was part reunion, part time machine, part therapy session.

How It All Started

We went all the way back to 2018:

Eoin Fitzgerald stopping me in Dogpatch Labs and saying, “Pete, I want to do a podcast - will you help me?”

Two mics. Towels on tables to kill the echo. Glass-walled rooms where passers-by stared like we were zoo exhibits. Conan carrying around bins of gear across Dublin. Guests who somehow let us record them anyway.

When Eoin joined the Central Bank in 2023, I honestly thought the show was done. But through a combination of friendship, stubbornness, and a shove from a few people who told me I was mad to stop, the show found its second wind - with Mai, Alejandro, Laura Walsh, and Paul stepping in as recurring co-hosts.

To be honest, this era of the show became the most meaningful. It was more global, more technical, more personal, and more connected to the world I was working in every day.

Five Big Takeaways from 300 Episodes

1. The Power of Curiosity Compounds

What started as a simple experiment - two people trying to understand how founders think - turned into a living conversation with the people building what doesn’t exist yet. The more questions we asked, the better the answers became. Curiosity didn’t just fuel the show - it built a community.

2. Crossover Stories Hit Hardest

The episodes that consistently outperformed weren’t siloed into “just crypto” or “just fintech.” They lived in the collision zones - where stablecoins reshaped payments, RWAs transformed capital markets, and venture investors started building onchain. Those moments revealed how innovation really happens: at the edges.

3. Familiar Voices Build Trust - Big Names Bring the Heat

Recurring co-hosts and frequent guests - Alejandro, Laura, Mai, Paul, Ollie Walsh - built loyalty through continuity and trust. Meanwhile, heavyweight appearances from Joey Krug, Matthew Graham, and Sam Williams created huge spikes in audience engagement. Together, they show that trust and ambition are equally essential.

4. Founder Journeys Are Timeless

Founder origin stories remained evergreen across 300 episodes. People tuned in to hear how someone built something from nothing - the pivots, the scars, the lessons. It’s a reminder that being a founder is brutally hard - and sharing those stories helps others go further.

5. Content Is the Flywheel — and It’s Just Getting Started

MoneyNeverSleeps was never just a podcast. It became an engine - for ideas, access, and community. As we enter the next chapter - sharper, faster, video-first, and focused on the most relevant stories in onchain finance, crypto, fintech, AI, and startups - the mission remains: keep learning out loud and bring people along for the ride.

And one thing became clear in the data:

People return for the conversations, not the categories.

Authenticity always wins.

The Episodes That Stuck

My Top 14 MoneyNeverSleeps Episodes (No Particular Order)

(As mentioned live on the night - the ones that stuck with me, shifted my thinking, or just left a mark.)

🧠 Joey Krug - Pantera Capital (Ep. 166)

A masterclass in crypto economics. Joey’s ability to map out incentive design as “gameplay theatre in your head” blew mine open. It was one of those rare conversations that changed how I think about protocols, coordination, and value creation.

🌍 Matthew Graham - Sino Global Capital (Ep. 165)

A raw, unfiltered look at how venture really operates in crypto. 37 f-bombs later, I walked away with a deeper understanding of market dynamics, investor psychology, and the geopolitical chess game around blockchain.

🧱 Sam Williams - Arweave (Ep. 205)

Sam reframed my perspective on the future of the internet with one phrase: “the protocolization of web services.” It made me see web3 not as a new industry, but as a new substrate for everything built online.

🔮 2025 Predictions Special - with Alejandro Gutierrez (Ep. 280)

One of my favourite “thinking in public” episodes. Alejandro and I went deep on what the next few years of crypto, tokenization, and fintech would look like - and where the real opportunities would emerge. It wasn’t just speculation; it was an exercise in building conviction, and many of those calls are already playing out.

🧠 AI and the Future of Finance - with Mai Santamaria (Ep. 241)

This conversation felt like a turning point. Mai and I explored how AI would reshape everything from investment decisions to compliance to customer experience - and why it’s not a threat, but a multiplier. It helped crystallise how I think about AI as an accelerant to every thesis I care about.

🌀 Fintech Flywheel Origins - with Eoin Fitzgerald (Ep. 147)

This is where so many of the ideas that underpin my investing philosophy originated. In breaking down Square’s $29 billion acquisition of Afterpay, Eoin and I explored the flywheel effect that powers the most successful fintechs - how customer acquisition, network effects, product velocity, and embedded finance combine to create unstoppable momentum. That conversation shaped how I now evaluate startups and ecosystems alike.

💡 Robert Alice - Portraits of a Mind (Ep. 128)

A conversation that merged art, philosophy, and technology. Robert’s 10,000-hours thesis on creativity and persistence has stuck with me ever since - and shaped how I think about founder tenacity.

🌐 Achia Nila - Empowering Women Through Code (Ep. 143)

One of the most inspiring stories we’ve ever told. Achia’s work teaching women in Bangladesh to code is a reminder of why we do this - technology is at its best when it opens doors and changes lives.

🎤 Arabian Prince - NWA Meets RWAs (Ep. 283)

Yes, that Arabian Prince, founding member of rap legends NWA. This episode was a wild mash-up of culture and capital - exploring how technology meets art, music, and education. It also reinforced a key belief of mine: innovation doesn’t happen in isolation.

🧭 Brian McDonald - What Founders Really Want (Eps. 118 +119)

Brian helped me reframe how I support founders. His insight - that the most important question you can ask is “What do you really want to do?” - has shaped every board conversation and mentoring session since.

🇮🇪 Barry Darmody - Search4Less (Ep. 130)

Proof that local stories can have global resonance. Barry’s journey - from building in Ireland to scaling beyond it - is a reminder that proximity, relevance, and credibility still matter more than hype.

🔥 Somi Arian - Live Mentoring on Air (Ep. 236)

This was one of the most experimental episodes we ever did - a live mentoring session with a founder questioning their path. It reminded me that vulnerability, honesty, and open dialogue are as important as any product or pitch.

🔑 Lou Kerner - CryptoMondays Origins (Ep. 237)

This conversation directly sparked the creation of CryptoMondays Ireland - proof that ideas born in a podcast studio can ripple into real-world impact. It’s also a personal milestone: a reminder that MoneyNeverSleeps has always been about more than conversation - it’s about community.

🪐 Mihai Alisie - Ethereum Co-Founder (Eps. 44+45)

An early credibility milestone for the show - and for me personally. Talking with Mihai about the early days of Ethereum wasn’t just a history lesson; it was a front-row seat to the mindset, conviction, and chaos behind one of the most transformative protocols ever built. It anchored my belief that visionary founders often look naïve in the moment - right up until the world catches up.

These weren’t just big names, they were stories that shifted how I think, how I invest, and how I build.

🔮 The Predictions We Made (and Re-Made)

We revisited the 2025 bold predictions that Alejandro and I recorded earlier this year. Some landed perfectly (tokenization, stablecoins, AI agents), some are unfolding in real time (multichain developers, bank tokens), and some were…um…a touch ambitious (the US Bitcoin Reserve).

But the magic wasn’t in getting them “right.”

The magic was in how the crowd reacted - leaning in, debating with us, nodding along. You could feel how fast the world is moving, and how badly people want clarity, direction, and real stories from the front lines.

🇮🇪 Ireland’s Onchain Moment

One of the best parts of the night was talking about the green shoots in Ireland:

• Solana Superteam Ireland ramping up

• New founders building with real fire at grassroots level

• Irish-led Solana projects like Keel launching globally

• Stablecoin & tokenization conversations finally reaching boardrooms

• Younger developers showing up at events with better questions than we asked in our 30s

It’s happening - quietly yet quickly. And that night, we all felt it.

What’s Next - The New Era of MoneyNeverSleeps

The long-form interview format?
Beautiful, but no longer sustainable with Norio Ventures kicking into its next chapter.

So here’s the plan:

🔹Shorter

10–15 minute weekly riffs.
One theme. One story. One insight.

🔹 Video-First

YouTube as the primary home.
Spotify/Apple via auto-audio from video.
Clips for social to widen the funnel.

🔹 Guest co-host Format

Mai, Alejandro, Paul, Laura, and others rotating in depending on the story, but also a crop of new faces who bring me the stories they’re the most passionate about.

🔹Still MoneyNeverSleeps at its core

Curiosity.

Momentum.

The builders’ mindset.

And the belief that the next generation of founders will push the edges of what finance can become.

The themes, the founders, the trends - all tied into what we’re building next.

Target: kickoff in December, unless building steals every hour between now and then - but either way, it’s coming fast.

And… yes… the cheeky pint format may emerge at some point, John Collison style.

💬 Quote of the Night

“This community - whether you’re listening, reading, watching, mentoring, building - is what makes all of this possible. It’s the reason we kept showing up for seven years. And it’s the reason this isn’t the end. It’s just a pivot.”

That’s the heartbeat of the whole episode.

A Final Reflection

There was a moment at the live show where someone asked:

What inspired you to get into blockchain?

And all I could think about was the whitepaper landing in my lap in 2014, being fed up with financial plumbing, and the hope - the belief - that someone would fix it.

Ten years later, I’m more convinced than ever:

The rails are here, and we’re finally finishing the bridge.

MoneyNeverSleeps has always been about belief.

Belief in founders.

Belief in momentum.

Belief in the future.

Seven years down, a new era ahead, and the flywheel keeps spinning.

Listen to the podcast

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🎙️What Started as a Podcast…

Seven years.

Three hundred episodes.

Hundreds of conversations with the founders, operators, investors, regulators, and technologists who are building what doesn’t exist yet.

What started in 2018 with my original co-host Eoin Fitzgerald as a way to have deeper conversations with founders and make sense of a rapidly changing landscape has turned into something much bigger - a living, evolving conversation about how money moves, how businesses grow, and how technology is rewriting the rules of the future.

And now, we’re hitting a milestone.

🚀 The 300th Episode — Live in Dublin

Next Wednesday, 8th October, we’re recording MoneyNeverSleeps Episode 300 - live and in front of an audience in Dublin, sponsored by our friends at Search4Less.

This isn’t just another episode. It’s a celebration of the journey so far - and a launchpad for what’s next.

I’ll be joined by Mai Santamaria, Alejandro Gutierrez, and a few surprise guests. Together, we’ll:

• Reflect on the biggest lessons from 300 episodes

• Explore where fintech, crypto, tokenization, AI, and startups are heading

• Share stories and shoutouts from superfans, past guests, and friends of the show

• Reveal the plan for the next era of MoneyNeverSleeps

🔮 A New Chapter Ahead

When Eoin and I started MoneyNeverSleeps, I had no idea how much it would change the way I think. Every conversation has been a chance to learn, to challenge assumptions, to zoom out - and sometimes to zoom way in - on the ideas shaping what’s next.

But as with any great story, it’s time for a new chapter.

The next era of MoneyNeverSleeps will look a little different: shorter, sharper, 10–15 minute video episodes focused on the most important story of the week across onchain finance, crypto, fintech, startups, and AI. Think less “long-form interview” and more “signal over noise.”

The goal is the same as it’s always been: to keep learning out loud, to keep sharing insights, and to keep the content flywheel spinning as Norio Ventures enters its next phase.

✍️ What’s Next with Norio Ventures

With Norio Ventures Fund I kicking off, I’ve been doing a ton of writing lately - digging deeper into the ideas, themes, and theses shaping the next wave of onchain finance, crypto, and AI. Over the coming months, I’ll start sharing more of that here on Substack, along with other insights from the journey.

If you want a sneak peek of where it’s heading, I shared some thoughts recently on LinkedIn and on Episode 299:

👉 Read the post on LinkedIn

🎧 Listen to Episode 299

🥂 Join Us for the Milestone

📍 Location: Central Dublin - near Pearse Station (exact location shared upon registration)
📆 Date: Wednesday, 8th October
🕔 Time: Doors open 5:00 PM | Recording starts 6:00 PM sharp

This is more than a podcast milestone - it’s a moment to celebrate the journey, connect with the MoneyNeverSleeps community, and set the stage for what’s coming next.

🎟️ Seats are limited (~40), so if you’d like to join us, register here:
👉 Luma Event Link

💫 A Final Thought

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over seven years and 300 episodes, it’s this: none of this happens alone.

Whether you’ve been listening since day one, just started reading these posts, stumbled over a clip that sparked a new idea, or rolled up your sleeves to help a founder turn ambition into action - you are part of this story.

Founders - the ones building new rails, reimagining finance, or creating something from nothing - need every ounce of support we can give them. The right insight at the right time, the right introduction, even just a few words of encouragement - those small moments can change everything.

This community - all of you - is what makes MoneyNeverSleeps more than a podcast and Norio Ventures more than a fund. It’s a collective belief that the future is something we build together. And that belief is what will carry us into the next chapter - stronger, bolder, and more unstoppable than ever.

Here’s to the next era. 🚀– Pete

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On March 7th, we hosted the first-ever CryptoMondays Ireland, and something clicked.💥

It wasn’t about maxis, memes, or market charts — it was about curiosity.

We packed out the upstairs at Toners Pub in Dublin with folks from across the tech, startup, and investor scenes. Not just the crypto-native crowd, but also founders, execs, and operators from web2 and enterprise — all wanting to get a better grasp of where this space is going. And, introducing the Techstars Web3 Class of 2025 live at the event helped everyone do just that.

Because here’s the thing:

It’s not all coins and charts.

It’s not just for degens and devs.

Web3 isn’t just hype and headlines, it’s the next version of the internet.

And “onchain” isn’t some secret club — it’s open for anyone willing to learn.

It means new ways of building, funding, owning, and growing — and while Ireland’s been active in this space for years, it’s time to connect the dots, cut through the noise, and show the world what’s really happening here.

CryptoMondays Ireland, powered by Techstars and Solana Superteam Ireland

🗓️ Monday, April 7th | 🕡 6:30pm

📍 Upstairs at Toners Pub (Rogers Lane entrance), Dublin 2

🎟️ RSVP here

This time, we’re making it official: Alejandro Gutierrez is launching Solana Superteam Ireland, a new community for builders, creatives, and founders looking to explore what’s possible with Web3 and onchain finance — whether you're deep in the space or just getting started.

We’ll also have a superfast fireside chat with Alejandro himself, who has been in the trenches of real-world asset tokenization, building the rails that connect traditional finance to the open, transparent world of onchain infrastructure.

CryptoMondays isn’t about shilling tokens.
It’s about shining a light on the people building real things with real purpose.
It’s for anyone who’s curious, cautious, or ready to contribute.

So if you’ve been watching from the sidelines… this is your nudge.
And if you’re already in the game… bring someone who isn’t.

See you Monday night.

— Pete

This Week’s Episode

99 Problems (But My Legals Ain’t One)”

In this episode, I sat down with Anthony Rose, co-founder and CEO of SeedLegals, for one of the most insight-rich conversations I’ve had on the podcast. Anthony is the kind of founder who doesn’t just solve hard problems—he chooses them. From Kazaa to iPlayer to SeedLegals, he’s turned complexity into clarity time and time again.

Here are some of the standout takeaways and quote-worthy moments for founders, builders, and product minds:

💡 "You don’t start by loving a problem… you fall in love with it by solving it, and by seeing people’s lives change because of what you built."

Analysis: This quote perfectly frames founder-problem fit as a process, not a prerequisite. It's not about chasing a romantic vision—it's about finding meaning through momentum and impact. For Anthony, love for the problem grew from seeing real-world friction dissolve for thousands of startup founders.

⚙️ "Most founders start out as introverts who just want to build. But if you can’t reinvent yourself to sell, you won’t survive."

Analysis: Anthony drops a hard truth here—product obsession is great, but not enough. You’ve got to evolve. The best founders learn to pitch, persuade, and win people, not just write code. Reinvention is a feature, not a bug.

📜 "Legal documents are like the manual in your car. They’re not supposed to be inspiring—they're supposed to be there when things go wrong."

Analysis: This metaphor nails it. Legal docs aren’t about what’s likely—they’re about what’s possible. SeedLegals isn’t just creating documents; it’s encoding the collective trauma of startup history into smarter defaults and cleaner processes.

🔁 "Your funding round docs don’t need to survive to IPO. They just need to get you to the next round."

Analysis: Founders often over-engineer for an imagined future. Anthony reminds us that startup legals should be lean, iterative, and contextual—just like the product itself. Don’t future-proof what’s meant to be updated in 18 months.

🧠 "The things that motivate me most aren’t the industries—they’re the puzzles. Give me something broken that no one wants to touch, and I’m in."

Analysis: This is the hallmark of a builder’s mindset. Anthony’s pattern of success isn’t tied to sector—it’s tied to his willingness to run toward problems others avoid, and treat them like product challenges instead of institutional ones.

🗽 "My metric for US expansion is simple—how fast can I go from zero recognition at events to people asking, ‘Hey, are you the SeedLegals guy?’"

Analysis: This is guerrilla market entry 101. Anthony isn’t launching SeedLegals in the US from a spreadsheet—he’s walking the streets, meeting founders, and embedding himself in the community. Community-led growth, founder-style.

🧾 "If your investor pitch deck is weird, your legal documents won’t save you."

Analysis: A reminder that legals don’t fix the fundamentals. You need a compelling story, a real problem, and traction. Legal frameworks protect the upside—but they can’t create it. Focus where it counts.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 "The biggest risks for founders aren't from investors… they’re from co-founder fallout."

Analysis: This rarely gets enough airtime. Boards and investors matter, but nothing derails a startup faster than internal dysfunction. Anthony’s built-in founder protections at SeedLegals (like “no pay, no play”) are based on hard-learned patterns from thousands of cases.

💬 "A bit of naivety helps in sales. Founders see what’s missing. Salespeople see what’s working."

Analysis: Brilliant contrast. Founders are wired to spot gaps, but customers want clarity, not potential. Learning to sell what works now—not what’s coming next—is a survival skill for any early-stage founder.

🎶 Bonus Quote: "At night, I listen to Wagner and do emails. That’s my creative zone."

Analysis: Startup brains are wired differently. For Anthony, late-night opera isn’t just background noise—it’s a signal that it’s time to build, think, and ship. Whatever your creative rhythm is, honour it.

Final Thought:
Anthony Rose brings a rare mix of deep product thinking, founder empathy, and sharp execution. If you’re building something complex, trying to find your “why,” or just want to protect yourself from hidden legal traps—this episode is worth your time.

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Investing in Web3

As many of our listeners and readers know, I lead the Techstars Web3 accelerator, investing in entrepreneurs building in web3 and enabling the next wave of growth in the decentralized internet and in tokenized economies.  Applications have now closed for our Spring 2025 class, but drop me a line here if you’d like to hear more about the core benefits of the program for web3 founders - mentorship, network, and investment - or meet our alumni who are currently raising.

👉Follow Techstars Web3 for updates: X (Twitter) | Farcaster | LinkedIn

The Expanse of Bangkok

Although I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of The Expanse, something about Bangkok made me think of the show where you’ve got people from all over the solar system 200 years in the future just trying to get from point A to point B.

Here are my 5 takeaways from my 120-hour door-to-door journey from Dublin to Bangkok and back again for the DevCon 2024 conference:

1 - The Journey

Don’t do what I did - 40 hours of traveling in 120 hours away from home. Thankfully, all four legs of my journey (Dublin-Dubai, Dubai-Bangkok, Bangkok-Dubai, Dubai-Dublin) were bang on time. If I were to do this again, whether it be Bangkok or another city that takes 15-16 hours to reach, I’d stay longer - maybe 7-8 days.

2 - The People

The people I met along the way - taxi drivers, train station agents, wait staff, hotel staff, anyone who pointed me in the right direction - were just so incredibly friendly and helpful No matter where I was trying to go, someone was always willing to do their best to help me.

3 - The City

The blend of the old and the new was just striking - so much modern architecture alongside old ramshackle buildings, sort of like a love child of NYC and Hong Kong with a twist of Singapore. Navigating all of this on the trains and in taxis was sluggish at best, especially with the 34 degrees Celsius (93 F) heat. It takes 45-minutes to an hour to get anywhere in the city unless you like arriving a sweaty mess or putting your life in someone else’s hands and feet on the back of a scooter.

This is a list of 5, but it could easily be 6 with the food - I was in heaven with the Thai cuisine.

4 - The Conference

In contrast to the sales and marketing-focused Token2049 Singapore, DevCon 2024 had a different feel, and it’s in the name (‘dev’). As it’s Ethereum-focused, DevCon attracts a lot more pure builders/developers, which is exactly why I went, as I’m looking for the next bunch of fantastic founders to invest in via the Techstars Web3 accelerator.

Job done. I ended up with about 30 new candidates (I met them all at side-events), and as in-person meetings are 10x more effective than virtual, you get 10x the work done by being there. Southeast Asia is a hotbed of web3 activity right now, and a massive gathering in Bangkok (or arguably Singapore, but more buttoned-up) seemed like the right place to be at the epicenter of the tectonic shift underway.

5 - The Side-Events

One site listed 930 side-events from 11-17th November related to DevCon. Seriously.

However, the side-events are where everything happens - they’re more intimate and you’re always going to fall into the random conversations that don’t tend to happen at the actual conference.

Once you register for an event on Luma (everyone uses this), you can see who’s signed up and pick which ones you’ll attend based on who you want to meet. I was deciding on side events based on triangulating the time, location, expected attendees (builders vs investors, or both), sponsors and organizers.

But as you register for 4-5 side-events per day, no one really knows for sure where anyone else will be. Five minutes before you head in one direction to a side-event, you might learn about an event that sounds better and the whole direction of your day and night changes.

I was only at the actual DevCon venue for 2 hours on Wednesday and 2 hours on Thursday, both for specific meetings. The one panel I did attend though in support of a friend on-stage was surprisingly not the empty venue I had expected - even with everyone at side-events!

Note to organizers of any side-event - always invite 3x the capacity of the event if you want to fill the room. Only a third of registered attendees ever turn up.

Where to next?

Nowhere. We’ve got over 600 applications to review from web3 founders interested in Techstars mentorship, network and investment in 2025, so I’ll be right here at home for the foreseeable future!

This Week’s Podcast

This week, we’re diving into the ultimate fundraising playbook for web3 startups. This isn’t just a checklist—it’s the real, hard-hitting truth about what it takes to secure that critical first round of funding in web3.

This week’s episode comes from a breakout session I hosted at a Techstars event, designed to help founders navigate the maze of fundraising in web3. Spoiler alert: fundraising is hard, and web3 fundraising? Even harder. But with the right mindset and a plan that’s rock-solid, you might just win the game. Let’s break it down.

The Fundraising Mission

Fundraising is a campaign—it’s intense, time-consuming, and will test every ounce of your resilience. As a founder, you’re running two full-time jobs: managing your business and executing your fundraise.

The table stakes? Be in the top 10% of investable ventures in your category. Ask yourself honestly—does your product, story, and plan make you a no-brainer investment?

The Basics

1. How Much to Raise (Pre-Seed/Seed)?

   • Small raises (<$1M) can close faster but appeal to fewer investors.

   • Larger raises ($3–5M) attract big pre-seed/seed investors but require traction and a razor-sharp plan to back it up.

2. Who to Target?

   • Know your audience: angels, VCs, launchpads, ecosystems.

   • Web2 investors dipping into web3 will care about different things than web3 native investors.

3. Lawyer Up.

   • In web3, your legal structure can make or break you. Whether you’re issuing tokens, equity, or both, your legal docs must be airtight.

Building the Machine

Fundraising success depends on preparation and precision:

1. Build Your Narrative

Your story needs to inspire. Answer these questions:

• What problem are you solving?

• How does your solution uniquely fit, and who’s it for?

• Why are you different, and why now?

• How will you get it to market?

• Why is your team the best positioned to deliver this?

• Where will you be in 12–18 months with this funding?

2. Create Your “House of Paper”

• One-pager: Your problem, solution, traction, and ask on one page.

• Deck: One version to send, another for live pitches. Keep it clear, concise, and 20pt font minimum for the pitch version!

• Litepaper-Whitepaper-Tokenomics (if applicable): This is where the heavy lifting happens. Get some help to get it right.

3. Build Your Pipeline

• Identify at least 100 target investors.

• Use warm intros—founders they’ve backed are your best allies.

• Tier them (A, B, C) and pitch in reverse order to refine your approach.

4. Go Social

Talk to everyone—founders, friends, family, even your dog. Gather feedback, adjust your plan, and widen your network.

Execution: The Final Frontier

Here’s the kicker—you’ll hear “no” 95 times out of 100. Learn to love the no because it gets you closer to the right fit.

1. Lead Investors: Finding the lead is critical; they set the tone for the round. You may be able to influence a “follow” investor into a “lead”, but not always.

2. Event Strategy: Attending conferences? Plan ahead. Side events are often where the magic happens. Don’t go without a plan, it’s a crapshoot otherwise.

3. Close Fast: Aim for 20 investor calls a week over 6–8 weeks. Keep the momentum.

The Fine Print

Beware of the landmines:

• Launchpads and Market Makers: Read every word of the contract, twice. And a third time with your lawyer.

• Regulatory Considerations: If you’re adding a token, ensure it’s necessary. Don’t try to make a loyalty program sound like a decentralized network.

Final Thoughts

Fundraising in web3 isn’t for the faint of heart. But with the right preparation, resilience, and focus, you’ll find yourself well on the path to building something extraordinary.

Want to learn more? Check out the show notes at MoneyNeverSleeps for the slides and video recording from the session (also below), plus additional resources like pitch deck templates and tokenomics examples.

If you like what you heard, drop us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—it helps others find the show.

Until next time, keep building and keep hustling.

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X-Post (Tweet!) of the Week

Sharing Dealflow

Many of the alumni from the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024 are currently fundraising, and you can check out the Airtable here for details on all of the companies/projects. If you’re investing in early-stage web3 companies/projects, let me know which of the Techstars Web3 grads look interesting to you!

See ya!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to tune in to our next episode!

Pete 🎸

Links:

✅Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

🙏Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

📣Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

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Share The MoneyNeverSleeps Newsletter

Listen to the podcast

Before diving into what happened this week, this is just a quick ask: if you're enjoying this newsletter, please share it with friends!

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Investing in Web3

As many of our listeners and readers know, I lead the Techstars Web3 accelerator, investing in entrepreneurs building in web3 and enabling the next wave of growth in the decentralized internet and in tokenized economies.  Applications are now open for our Spring 2025 class, so check out our thesis update for 2025 and apply here if you’re an early-stage founder building in web3. For everyone else, please share with friends who might fit the bill!

👉Follow Techstars Web3 for updates: X (Twitter) | Farcaster | LinkedIn

Next up, I’ll be heading to DevCon in Bangkok to meet web3 builders and investors from November 12-14th, so let me know if you’ll be there too and we can meet up!

One of the places I’ll be is the Builder and Investor Meetup alongside folks from bitsCrunch, Blockchain Founders Capital, Biconomy, 1inch and Covalent on Wednesday, November 13th. Register in the link above if you’re building or investing in web3 and you’ll be at DevCon.

This Week’s Podcast

Artizen’s Mission to Fund Creativity: René Pinnell on Reinventing Funding for Creators

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with René Pinnell, the visionary founder of Artizen, a match-funding platform that’s transforming how creative projects are funded.

With over two decades in the creative industry, René has produced award-winning projects and helped secure over $50 million in funding for artists. Now, he’s bringing his insights and passion for innovation to Artizen, a platform designed to empower creators, scientists, and innovators through community-driven funding.

As a point of transparency, I invested in Artizen through Techstars, as Artizen formed part of the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024. As I’m such a big fan of the mission that René and Artizen are on, I was thrilled to feature René’s story on MoneyNeverSleeps.

A Creative Legacy and the Road to Artizen

René’s path to launching Artizen was heavily influenced by his upbringing. “Almost everyone in my family is an artist,” he shared, describing a lineage filled with jazz musicians, filmmakers, and writers. “Growing up in a family like this taught me both the beauty and the struggle of a creative life,” he continued, explaining how financial instability can accompany artistic pursuits. This experience, he said, “drove me to build something that could give creators the support they need without the usual gatekeeping and limitations.”

Artizen, René explains, addresses these funding barriers by inviting brands, creators, and fans to work together in a way that’s transparent, community-driven, and impactful. He adds, “It’s not just artists who need this. Scientists, coders, entrepreneurs—anyone building something new in the world can benefit from a platform that gives them a fair shot at funding.”

Artizen’s 3-Sided Marketplace: Bringing Brands, Creators, and Fans Together

The heart of Artizen is its 3-sided marketplace, where creators submit projects to be match-funded by brands and supported by fans. “At Artizen, we think of ourselves as building a new kind of game,” René said. “It’s about inviting creators, brands, and fans into a collaborative process that scales naturally.”

Explaining how brands benefit, René noted, “Brands need creators to build content and experiences that expand their ecosystems. Artizen offers them a new approach, where they’re not just throwing money at events or marketing but actually investing in people with fresh, impactful ideas.”

The unique match-funding model also engages fans directly. “Fans get to be part of the journey,” René shared, “They’re voting, supporting, and ultimately driving what they want to see more of in the world.” This structure allows brands to maximize their investment while creators gain visibility and momentum with community support. “It’s a win-win-win,” René said, “and that’s what excites me about Artizen.”

Embracing Crypto and Community for Scalable Growth

After Stripe initially de-platformed Artizen, René pivoted to a blockchain-based model, allowing for decentralized and transparent transactions. “Moving to crypto wasn’t the easy path, but it was the right one for us,” René said. “Building Artizen on crypto rails means we can offer more transparency, more control for creators, and better scalability.”

The journey, however, hasn’t been without challenges. “Building something like Artizen takes time and a lot of trial and error,” René reflected. “You’re constantly balancing the needs of creators, the interests of brands, and the engagement of fans.” Now, Artizen has returned to Stripe for credit card processing while maintaining a crypto-based infrastructure, creating a flexible, hybrid funding model. “With the crypto framework, we’re ready to scale,” René shared, adding that this hybrid approach “puts the power back in the hands of our community.”

Scaling Through High-Profile Partnerships

Looking forward, René plans to bring more high-profile match-funds to Artizen with well-known creators. “I’m excited about this next phase,” he said. “We’re talking with people like Jonny Greenwood and Darren Aronofsky, who are passionate about supporting new talent and ideas.” These partnerships will not only draw fans but also attract brands seeking credibility and visibility through Artizen’s unique platform.

Reflecting on Artizen’s growth and grass-roots level funding, René said, “The long-term vision is to empower people to create match-funds around whatever they’re passionate about. Whether it’s neighborhood art projects or supporting decentralized AI, the idea is to democratize funding so that creativity can flourish.”

Finding Harmony as a Creator and Founder

As a founder with deep creative roots, René acknowledges the challenges of balancing his entrepreneurial drive with his artistic spirit. “For a long time, I missed the joy of creating purely for the sake of it,” he admitted. “But I realized Artizen itself is my art project—it’s the thing I’m building to give others a platform.” By reframing his perspective, he found a way to bring his artistic intuition to the startup world. “I realized I could design Artizen like I’d design a film, making it a creative and fulfilling process.”

René’s deep commitment to Artizen has not only shaped the platform’s unique structure but also fueled its innovative game-like design. “When creators join Artizen, I don’t try to explain the whole process right away,” he explained. “It’s like learning a new game. Step by step, they see how it works and realize, ‘Hey, I’m actually raising funds and growing my community.’”

Key Takeaways

1. A Platform for Creative Empowerment: Artizen’s model of match-funding unites creators, brands, and fans in a way that’s transparent, community-driven, and scalable.

2. Crypto for Greater Control: Moving to a crypto-based framework has given Artizen the flexibility and transparency it needed to grow.

3. The Joy of Building a New Game: By treating Artizen as his art project, René brings creativity and intuition into the platform’s design, offering creators a meaningful and engaging funding experience.

As Artizen continues to evolve, René’s vision is to make it a catalyst for creativity worldwide. From community-driven match-funds to brand partnerships with impact, Artizen is designed to fuel the next generation of art, science, and technology.

To dive deeper into René’s journey and the inspiring vision behind Artizen, tune into the full episode of MoneyNeverSleeps. You’ll hear more about the challenges, the passion, and the innovative spirit that’s shaping the future of creative funding.

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🎧Don’t forget to follow MoneyNeverSleeps on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get each episode freshly delivered to your podcast queue!

Reference Links

👉Follow René Pinnell on X/(Twitter) and LinkedIn

👉Follow Artizen on X/(Twitter) and LinkedIn

👉Learn more about Artizen and René's ‘Wayback Machine’

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Sharing Dealflow

Many of the alumni from the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024 are currently fundraising, and you can check out the Airtable here for details on all of the companies/projects. If you’re investing in early-stage web3 companies/projects, let me know which of the Techstars Web3 grads look interesting to you!

See ya!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to tune in to our next episode!

Pete 🎸

Links:

✅Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

🙏Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

📣Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

📣Follow us on LinkedIn: Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps 

Share The MoneyNeverSleeps Newsletter

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Before diving into what happened this week, this is just a quick ask: if you're enjoying this newsletter, please share it with friends!

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Investing in Web3

As many of our listeners and readers know, I lead the Techstars Web3 accelerator, investing in entrepreneurs building in web3 and enabling the next wave of growth in the decentralized internet and in tokenized economies.  Applications are now open for our Spring 2025 class, so check out our thesis update for 2025 and apply here if you’re an early-stage founder building in web3. For everyone else, please share with friends who might fit the bill!

👉Follow Techstars Web3 for updates: X (Twitter) | Farcaster | LinkedIn

Next up, I’ll be heading to DevCon in Bangkok to meet web3 builders and investors, so let me know if you’ll be there too and we can meet up!

One of the places I’ll be is the Builder and Investor Meetup alongside folks from bitsCrunch, Blockchain Founders Capital, Biconomy, 1inch and Covalent on Wednesday, November 13th. Register in the link above if you’re building or investing in web3 and you’ll be at DevCon.

This Week’s Podcast

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Unleashing Impact: The Journey of AID:Tech with Niall Dennehy

The digital universe demands innovation, and for those of us living in the dynamic crossroads of web3, digital identity, and humanitarian aid, it's not just about keeping up—it's about leading the charge.

I was thrilled to bring our #1 MoneyNeverSleeps Superfan Niall Dennehy, co-founder of AID:Tech, back onto the show for the first time since episode 11 in 2018, sharing an inspiring story of perseverance and impact-driven innovation. In prepping for this interview, I listened back to episode 11 which we recorded on a hot summer day in Dublin (the irony!) in the offices of Top Tier Recruitment, our podcast sponsor at the time. I also traced things forward to the current day with how AID:Tech’s journey had progressed through the news.

My ‘wow’ moment came when I was struck by just how consistent their messaging has been since I first went down the AID:Tech rabbit hole with Niall that day in 2018. Surviving for 2 years as a startup is hard enough, but AID:Tech are now at 9 years and running (founded in 2015). I’ve kept my eye on them as Niall has been so helpful to the podcast with guest intros and other helpful network connections, and I’ve seen what they’ve been through. Even though the AID:Tech story is still being written, what they’ve achieved against the pushback and naysayers is nothing short of remarkable.

Let's dive into the key discussions from Niall's update and see how AID:Tech continues to bridge gaps in identity and payments across the globe.

AID:Tech's Mission: Building Trust in Identity

AID:Tech stands at the forefront of technological evolution with a firm belief: fix identity, and you fix payments (h/t Simon Taylor). Since its inception, AID:Tech has aimed to create traceability in the flow of funds for NGOs, governments, and charities - this chat completely reaffirmed their dedication to this vision. AID:Tech has harnessed the potential of blockchain to provide digital identities, enabling rapid financial assistance to disaster-stricken individuals in the U.S. The Kare Survivor Wallet, a brilliant iteration of their platform, is not just a technological marvel—it exemplifies real-world application with its ability to restrict the purchase of certain goods through program-specific wallets.

Navigating Challenges with Consistency

AID:Tech's journey is marked by consistency and an unwavering mission. Since we last heard from Niall in 2018, AID:Tech's focus hasn't drifted. Anyone in the startup world knows how rare and refreshing it is to see such steadfast commitment. They have proven their doubters wrong and have navigated the complexities of multiple bear markets by holding onto their core vision. A mission that respects identity as the heart of payments continues to transcend borders, highlighting similar identity challenges in developed and developing nations alike.

Financial Longevity with Strategic Fundraising

For any mission-driven organization, the challenge is balancing impact with financial sustainability. AID:Tech has mastered this balancing act by being strategic in its fundraising efforts. Attracting patient capital that supports their mission has been a priority. By winning impactful grants and forging partnerships with credible institutions like the Algorand Foundation, AID:Tech has effectively leveraged non-dilutive capital, staying afloat without diluting ownership excessively.

The Flywheel of Impact: A Mission-Driven Startup

The true genius of AID:Tech's model lies in its ability to create a flywheel of impact—where each success fuels further growth. With each iteration, the Kare platform becomes more sophisticated, proving its mettle through impactful real-world use cases. New team members are drawn to AID:Tech's mission, perpetuating a cycle of enhanced product development and, in turn, more extensive reach.

Key Takeaways

Just Keep Pushing: The AID:Tech team have built the bridge between web3 and humanitarian aid, offering innovative solutions like the Kare Survivor Wallet to solve real-world problems.

Consistent Mission: With a steadfast focus on identity as the core of payments, AID:Tech addresses global identity challenges consistently.

Strategic Fundraising: By capturing both non-dilutive capital and mission-driven investors, AID:Techremains financially sustainable while nurturing growth.

Impact-Focused: The concept of a mission-driven flywheel drives AID:Tech, allowing them to continually expand their outreach and improve community impact.

In conclusion, AID:Tech’s unyielding commitment to their mission has not only fueled their growth but has also inspired others in the web3 space to dream bigger and aim higher. With the ongoing evolution of identity and payments, Joe Thmpson, Niall Dennehy and their team remain true to their roots, consistently driven by core values that aim to fix humanitarian relief through digital identity.

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Timestamps

01:48 AID:Tech's Impact and Innovations

03:19 The Evolution of AID:Tech 

04:22 The Core Mission: Identity and Payments

07:44 Real-World Applications and Success Stories

11:18 Challenges and Perseverance in the Startup World

13:08 Future of Payments and Digital Identity

14:19 The Kare Survivor Wallet in Action

20:02 Community Impact and Personal Stories

24:55 The Flywheel of a Mission-Driven Startup

26:02 Philosophical Insights and Team Alignment

27:36 Navigating Fundraising for Impact Ventures

30:56 The Importance of Non-Dilutive Capital

33:50 Personal Growth and Mindset

36:37 The Five H's for Founders: Happy, Helpful, Humble, Hungry & Healthy

39:27 Final Thoughts and Gratitude

Don’t forget to follow MoneyNeverSleeps on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get each episode freshly delivered to your podcast queue!

Reference Links

👉Follow Niall Dennehy on X/(Twitter) and LinkedIn

👉Learn more about:

• AID:Tech

• Kare Survivor Wallet

• Post on the Kare Survivor Wallet’s deployment for hurricane relief aid 

• Episode 11 of MoneyNeverSleeps from August 2018: 

• Matt Keller’s X/(Twitter) post on Algorand and the Kare Survivor Wallet

X-Post (Tweet!) of the Week

Sharing Dealflow

Many of the alumni from the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024 are currently fundraising, and you can check out the Airtable here for details on all of the companies/projects. If you’re investing in early-stage web3 companies/projects, let me know which of the Techstars Web3 grads look interesting to you!

See ya!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to tune in to our next episode!

Pete 🎸

Links:

✅Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

🙏Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

📣Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

📣Follow us on LinkedIn: Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps 

Share The MoneyNeverSleeps Newsletter

Listen to the podcast

Before diving into what happened this week, this is just a quick ask: if you're enjoying this newsletter, please share it with friends!

Share The MoneyNeverSleeps Newsletter

Investing in Web3

As many of our listeners and readers know, I lead the Techstars Web3 accelerator, investing in entrepreneurs building in web3 and enabling the next wave of growth in the decentralized internet and in tokenized economies.  Applications are now open for our Spring 2025 class, so check out our thesis update for 2025 and apply here if you’re an early-stage founder building in web3. For everyone else, please share with friends who might fit the bill!

👉Follow Techstars Web3 for updates: X (Twitter) | Farcaster | LinkedIn

Next up, I’ll be heading to DevCon in Bangkok to meet web3 builders and investors, so let me know if you’ll be there too and we can meet up!

This Week’s Podcast

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Luca Franchi and the Decentralized Revolution

In the ever-evolving world of technology and entrepreneurship, innovation is constant. This week, we delve into the groundbreaking journey of Luca Franchi, co-founder and CEO of Ambient, and his mission to reshape the digital and environmental landscape through decentralized physical infrastructure networks, or DePIN.

Meeting The Founder: Luca Franchi

Before he catapulted into the project that became the Ambient Network, Luca Franchi's career was filled with dynamism and adaptation, with threads of startups and large corporates such as Sky, O2 UK and Telefónica across enterprise and consumer verticals.

The Birth of Ambient

We open the session by exploring Luca Franchi’s inspiring career trajectory. With over two decades of experience in fostering innovation across the U.S. and Europe, Luca found himself at a pivotal point in his life where he was eager to blend his passion for Web3 and climate tech.

We discuss how his return to London from Silicon Valley marked the beginning of a transformative journey. The path led to the creation of Ambient, which promises real-time environmental monitoring powered by decentralized networks.

Ambient is a DePIN at the leading edge of decentralized environmental monitoring, harnessing the power of its vast sensor network to deliver real-time, hyper-local, actionable environmental data. By utilizing distributed technologies and a community-focused participation model, Ambient not only enhances environmental awareness but also drives impactful change across the globe.

Navigating the Web3 Ecosystem

Luca explains how once he decided to forge ahead with Ambient, the transition from concept to reality involved immersing himself in a global community of like-minded individuals and securing partnerships. He sheds light on his early initiatives, including a crucial alliance with Borderless Capital and his strategy to integrate real-world data from decentralized air quality sensors. This underscores the immense potential of web3 and its applicability in addressing global challenges like environmental health.

The Ambient Network and AmbiGo!

Ambient's core network, originally stemming from the acquisition of PlanetWatch, symbolizes a new era of data-driven insights that empower everyday users and enterprises alike. Through initiatives like the AmbiGo! app, users can engage directly with the network, contributing data and gaining insights into their surroundings. This participative model is not just about data collection; it’s about fostering community engagement and incentivizing information sharing.

Overcoming Challenges and Looking Forward

As the conversation unfolds, we segue into the hurdles of launching such a cutting-edge venture. From fundraising to technological integration, Luca describes the intricate dance of aligning all moving parts toward a common goal. His narrative offers invaluable lessons in perseverance and strategic planning for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to navigate the nuanced realm of high-tech startups.

Key Takeaways

1 - Integration of Passions: Luca Franchi’s journey exemplifies the power of aligning personal interests with professional pursuits, particularly at the intersection of web3 and climate tech.

2 - Importance of Network and Partnerships: Building a robust network with key industry players is crucial in the journey of startup success.

3 - Community Engagement: Creating platforms that encourage active user participation can lead to sustainable and impactful technological ecosystems.

4 - Constant Innovation and Learning: The rapid developments in blockchain technology and decentralized systems highlight the necessity for entrepreneurs to remain adaptable and forward-thinking.

5 - Work-Life Balance: Amidst the pursuit of ambitious goals, maintaining personal well-being and family connections is vital, as emphasized by both Luca and me.

In conclusion, Luca Franchi’s story is not just one of technological innovation but a testament to the spirit of collaboration and enduring passion for meaningful change. His insights provide a rich tapestry of lessons for those navigating the intersections of entrepreneurship, technology, and environmental sustainability.

For listeners and readers eager to dive deeper, visit the Money Never Sleeps podcast and explore further resources on the Ambient Network. As the decentralized web continues to evolve, let these stories inspire and guide the next generation of innovators.

Don’t forget to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you enjoy the show. Until next time, keep your mind open and your curiosity alive!

Listen to the podcast

Don’t forget to follow MoneyNeverSleeps on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get each episode freshly delivered to your podcast queue!

Reference Links

👉Follow Luca Franchi on X/(Twitter) and LinkedIn

👉Learn more about Ambient

👉Books referenced in the episode:

• Decoded by Jay-Z

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

X-Post (Tweet!) of the Week

Sharing Dealflow

Many of the alumni from the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024 are currently fundraising, and you can check out the Airtable here for details on all of the companies/projects. If you’re investing in early-stage web3 companies/projects, let me know which of the Techstars Web3 grads look interesting to you!

See ya!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to tune in to our next episode!

Pete 🎸

Links:

✅Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

🙏Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

📣Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

📣Follow us on LinkedIn: Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps 

Share The MoneyNeverSleeps Newsletter

Listen to the podcast

Before diving into what happened this week, this is just a quick ask: if you're enjoying this newsletter, please share it with friends!

Share The MoneyNeverSleeps Newsletter

Investing in Web3

As many of our listeners and readers know, I lead the Techstars Web3 accelerator, investing in entrepreneurs building in web3 and enabling the next wave of growth in the decentralized internet and in tokenized economies.  Applications are now open for our Spring 2025 class, so check out our thesis update for 2025 and apply here if you’re an early-stage founder building in web3. For everyone else, please share with friends who might fit the bill!

👉Follow Techstars Web3 for updates: X (Twitter) | Farcaster | LinkedIn

I’ll be at ZebuLive in London this week, so let me know if you’ll be there too and we can meet up!

This Week’s Podcast

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Building the 3D Internet

This week, I had an intriguing conversation with Luis Ramirez, co-founder and CEO of Mawari. In this episode, we explored the innovative journey and vision behind Mawari, a pioneer in cloud rendering and streaming technology. For Luis and his team, the future of content lies beyond screens—it is frameless.

Founded in 2017 with nothing more than a radical idea and a belief that content should seamlessly integrate with reality, Mawari is meticulously sculpting a new era in spatial computing, effectively building the 3D internet.

Mawari enables real-time 3D content streaming to spatial computing devices like the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 through a global network of GPUs, leveraging web3 elements such as DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) to overcome the limitations of traditional centralized networks.

Uniquely positioned to address one of the core challenges in the spatial computing industry, formerly known as XR (eXtended Reality), Mawari focuses on delivering scalable infrastructure for real-time 3D applications. Mawari has since launched the Mawari Network — a DePIN and the only full-stack spatial computing platform offering decentralized compute and storage resources optimized for AR/VR experiences. 

As a side note and in the spirit of transparency, Mawari recently announced the closing of their $10.8mn strategic funding round, and I’m thrilled to be part of the round as an angel investor. 

In this episode, Luis and I riff on his journey from music to technology, the inception of the Mawari vision, building the team and overcoming challenges, the role of decentralization in the Mawari Network, Luis’ lessons learned from raising $17.3mn across two rounds in 3 years, and the essence of persistence, creativity, and the strategic foresight required to scale a tech startup in the evolving landscape of XR, AR, VR, and Web3.

Timestamps

00:39 Meet Luis Ramirez: From Music to Technology

06:18 The Birth of Mawari and The Mawari Vision

15:02 Challenges and Innovations in XR and Web3

21:40 Building and Scaling the Mawari Team

32:20 Fundraising Journey and Future Milestones

38:57 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Final Takeaways

It’s hard not to feel inspired by Luis Ramirez and the transformative work at Mawari. They are redefining the intersection of technology and reality, with a revolutionary approach to digital experiences. As Mawari continues to turn this vision into reality, it signifies the dawn of a new era where content is not confined by frames but liberated through immersive integration into our surroundings.

For listeners eager to delve deeper into the fascinating mind of Luis Ramirez and the groundbreaking initiatives at Mawari, check out the full episode. Don’t forget to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you enjoy the show. Until next time, keep your mind open and your curiosity alive!

Listen to the podcast

Don’t forget to follow MoneyNeverSleeps on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get each episode freshly delivered to your podcast queue!

Reference Links

👉Follow Luis Ramirez on LinkedIn

👉Learn more about Mawari

X-Post (Tweet!) of the Week

Sharing Dealflow

Many of the alumni from the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024 are currently fundraising, and you can check out the Airtable here for details on all of the companies/projects. If you’re investing in early-stage web3 companies/projects, let me know which of the Techstars Web3 grads look interesting to you!

See ya!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to tune in to our next episode!

Pete 🎸

Links:

✅Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

🙏Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

📣Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

📣Follow us on LinkedIn: Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps 

Share The MoneyNeverSleeps Newsletter

Listen to the podcast

Before diving into what happened this week, this is just a quick ask: if you're enjoying this newsletter, please share it with friends!

Share The MoneyNeverSleeps Newsletter

Investing in Web3

As many of our listeners and readers know, I lead the Techstars Web3 accelerator, investing in entrepreneurs building in web3 and enabling the next wave of growth in the decentralized internet and in tokenized economies.  Applications are now open for our Spring 2025 class, so check out our thesis update for 2025 and apply here if you’re an early-stage founder building in web3. For everyone else, please share with friends who might fit the bill!

👉Follow Techstars Web3 for updates: X (Twitter) | Farcaster | LinkedIn

This Week’s Podcast

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Stablecoins - not just for crypto traders anymore

Our focus today is on the transformative power of stablecoins, the unsung heroes of the digital economy, especially within emerging markets. Joining me in this deep dive is Linda Jeng, Founder and CEO of Digital Self Labs.

Linda joins me in exploring the evolving landscape of stablecoins. Our discussion focuses on our key takeaways from Castle Island Ventures' latest stablecoin report, 'Stablecoins: the Emerging Market Story'.

To kick things off, Linda shares her background in financial regulation, blockchain, and AI, and offers critical insights into how stablecoins are reshaping financial systems in emerging markets. Through a detailed analysis of the Castle Island Ventures report written with Brevan Howard Digital, our conversation reveals the growing use of stablecoins for cross-border payments, currency conversion, and as a stable store of value, reflecting their importance beyond crypto trading.

We also touch on regulatory perspectives, why non-dollar stablecoin volumes are so meager, and the potential impact of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) on the stablecoin market.

Linda Jeng is a trailblazing leader in the digital economy through ‘shaping a self-empowered future through blockchain and AI technologies’. Digital Self Labs is a regulatory and policy advisory firm combining blockchain expertise with policy and regulatory strategy.

With over 15 years of government experience, Linda has held key roles at institutions like the U.S. Federal Reserve, US Treasury Department, the SEC and the Bank for International Settlements. Linda is also a Visiting Scholar at Georgetown Law, a Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law School, and a Bank for International Settlements Research Fellow. Her deep expertise in financial systems and her advocacy for data transparency and decentralized technology make her a pivotal figure in shaping the future of finance.

Timestamps

02:57 Linda Jeng's Career Journey

05:36 Castle Island Ventures and ‘Stablecoins: The Emerging Market Story’

09:59 Understanding Stablecoins in Emerging Markets

14:15 The Role of Stablecoins in Global Finance

19:38 Challenges and Opportunities for Stablecoins

20:59 The Future of Stablecoins and Digital Identity

46:23 Final Thoughts and Key Takeaways

48:50 Closing Remarks and Acknowledgements

Reference Links

👉Follow Linda Jeng on X(Twitter) and LinkedIn

👉Stablecoins: The Emerging Market Story (Castle Island Ventures & Brevan Howard Digital, 12-Sep-24) 

👉The Finternet: The financial system for the future (Bank for International Settlements, 19-Apr-24)

👉International Association of Deposit Insurers

👉Overview of the Bancor Proposal from Bretton Woods (Wikipedia)

👉Stablecoin companies now 16th largest holder of U.S. treasuries globally (CryptoSlate, 18-Oct-23)

Final Takeaways

Here are some key takeaways from our deep dive into Castle Island Ventures’ ‘Stablecoins: The Emerging Markets Story’.

1. “Stablecoins as the Killer App of Crypto”

   Stablecoins account for 50 percent of all value settled on public blockchains and continue to grow during crypto bear markets (data from the report)

2. Real Usage Volumes

   Stablecoin volumes continued to grow during crypto bear markets as stablecoins crossed the chasm into the mainstream, with real usage volumes of $3.7trn in 2023 and projected to reach over $5trn in real usage volumes in 2024 (data from the report). The $3-5trn level is even more interesting when compared to something as common as the Faster Payments Scheme in the UK which does about $3trn in annual transaction volume.

3. Day-to-Day Use Cases

   The feedback gathered with the survey pointed to a number of day-to-day use cases solving everyday problems for consumers and SMEs in emerging markets that are not problems for US consumers, which explains why the average US consumer or small business owner just does not get the point of stablecoins, if they’re even aware stablecoins exist.

4. Dominance of the U.S. Dollar

   The U.S. dollar’s ubiquity in global commerce and as a stable store of value around the world is being mirrored in the digital realm through USD-pegged stablecoins.

   While consumers and businesses outside the US would have a need for the U.S. dollar with or without stablecoins, they have far less of a need for liquidity in the other big currencies like euro, sterling and yen. This is one of the reasons why U.S. dollar stablecoins dominate the stablecoin landscape, as in many of the problems that U.S. Dollar stablecoins solve - things like fast and cheap cross-border remittance, more stable savings than your domestic currency, better currency conversion rates than your domestic currency - aren’t generally solved with non-dollar currencies today.

   So even though non-dollar stablecoins are available, dollar stablecoin users (both individuals and businesses) and those who might become stablecoin users don’t really have an addressable problem that non-dollar stablecoins solve better than dollar stablecoins - yet.

   Overall, the stablecoin story will continue to unfold as the long arc of the global monetary system bends towards digital.

Listen to the podcast

Don’t forget to follow MoneyNeverSleeps on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get each episode freshly delivered to your podcast queue!

X-Post (Tweet!) of the Week

Sharing Dealflow

Many of the alumni from the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024 are currently fundraising, and you can check out the Airtable here for details on all of the companies/projects. If you’re investing in early-stage web3 companies/projects, let me know which of the Techstars Web3 grads look interesting to you!

See ya!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to tune in to our next episode. If you have any insights or experiences with stablecoins, feel free to share them in the comments below!

Pete 🎸

Links:

✅Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

🙏Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

📣Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

📣Follow us on LinkedIn: Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps 

Share The MoneyNeverSleeps Newsletter

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Before diving into what happened this week, this is just a quick ask: if you're enjoying this newsletter, please share it with friends!

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Taking the Show on the Road

Something had to give…

Leading the Techstars Web3 accelerator program means that I put some things on ice during the program, and this newsletter was one of them. However, with the program now coming to a close on June 6th, I wanted to give all of our loyal readers the details on the big Techstars Web3 Demo Day!

We’ll be in NYC for the week of June 3rd-7th as part of NY Tech Week, and we’ve got some upcoming opportunities to meet and hear from the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024 (Lookbook).

Join us online, or if you happen to be in NYC during Tech Week, it would be awesome to see you at any of these events in person.

Either way, please also feel free to share with your colleagues and your network!

For Everyone:

• Demo Day (Virtual) | Thursday June 6, 2024

• Demo Day (NYC) | Thursday June 6, 2024 

• Web3 Happy Hour (NYC) | Thursday June 6, 2024

For Investors:

• Investor-Founder Coffee Dates (Virtual) | Tuesday June 4, 2024 + Wednesday June 5, 2024 

• Investor-Founder Coffee Dates (NYC) | Tuesday June 4, 2024 + Wednesday June 5, 2024

After the accelerator winds down after Demo Day, I’ll be back with the newsletter on a more regular basis!

This Week’s Podcast

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Building the Alpeh Zero Ecosystem

This week, we dive into Aleph Zero, a privacy-enhancing layer one blockchain renowned for prioritizing scalability, security and speed, with co-founder Antoni Zolciak and Head of Investments Piotr Saczuk. 

Antoni discusses his transition from technology marketer to blockchain, emphasizing the humanist aspect of technology and the broad scope of blockchain's potential applications. Piotr shares his journey from TradFi to blockchain investments, highlighting the importance of values and adaptability in the fast-paced crypto industry. 

The discussion explores the challenges and strategies involved in building the Aleph Zero community, driven by transparency, support, and a user-focused approach. We also talk about the nuances of ecosystem investing, the importance of UX, and the integral role of a strong community in fostering innovation and adoption. Additionally, we look inside Aleph Zero’s relationship with the Techstars Web3 accelerator, and the related benefits to web3 founders.

00:24 Introducing Aleph Zero: A Privacy-Enhancing Blockchain

01:16 The Journey to Aleph Zero: Antoni’s and Piotr’s Stories

01:24 Building a Thriving Ecosystem and Community in Web3

05:30 The Art of Keeping Up with Blockchain's Pace

10:48 From Concept to Ecosystem: The Growth of Aleph Zero

21:27 Investing in the Future: The Ecosystem Funding Program

25:05 The Importance of UX and Security in Web3 Development

32:34 Finding the Right Founders to Build on Aleph Zero

38:33 Closing Thoughts and Personal Revelations

Antoni Zolciak is co-founder of the Aleph Zero Foundation and Cardinal Cryptography, the core developer of the Aleph Zero blockchain.  Antoni is a technology marketer with over 10 years of professional experience in public relations and content creation projects for global brands such as ING, Samsung, Sony, Olympus and Nikon.  But now, he’s here to tell the story of incredibly smart people working on decentralized innovations.

Piotr Saczuk is the Head of Investments at the Aleph Zero Foundation.  After university, Piotr had a short spell in TradFi before going down the crypto rabbit hole with Finoa, Unmind DAO, Soonami, and then finally to Cardinal Cryptography and Aleph Zero, first as ecosystem investments manager and then into his current role as Head of Investments.

Follow Antoni & Piotr on X/Twitter: Antoni Zolciak | Piotr Saczuk

Learn more about and follow Aleph Zero: X-Twitter | Linktree 

 Connect with Antoni & Piotr on LinkedIn: Antoni Zolciak | Piotr Saczuk

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X-Post (Tweet!) of the Week

Writing a forwardable blurb/email is a skill not to be taken for granted. Thanks to our Techstars Web3 Mentor-in-Residence Adrian Grant for sharing this post from Elizabeth Yin (The Hustle Fund) on how to do it right!

Link: https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/1794086843366969851

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading (and listening)!

-Pete

Links:

✅Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

🙏Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

📣Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

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Catching Up

We’re back after a few weeks off the newsletter due to the tsunami of calls, data gathering and deep thinking it takes to decide on investing in 12 early-stage blockchain startups in one fell swoop. We’re just about there with finalizing the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024, and watch out for the big reveal on the podcast in mid-March on the identity of the 12 companies/projects!

This Week’s Podcast

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Collecting & Connecting the Dots

In the book Setting the Table by restauranteur Danny Meyer, he talks about the ABCD’s of hospitality, or ‘Always Be Connecting the Dots’.

The longer form of the ABCDs, which is one of Danny’s many mnemonic devices, is ‘always be collecting the dots so that you can always be connecting the dots’.

Danny describes ‘dots’ as data, experiences, thoughts, feelings and memories. Just having that lights-always-on awareness of the connectivity between everything going on around you helps you to draw more meaningful inferences and build stronger relationships with people. Take note of chance coincidences, pull on those threads of curiosity, and you’ll be surprised at what you find.

This more or less sums up my modus operandi, and is the reason why podcasting helps me to build trust and build relationships fast. I forget who said it, but I truly believe that the world moves at the speed of trust.

Constant content creation for an audience requires a lot of things to go your way in terms of building the new connections that you need to enable publishing weekly. I take note of every suggested introduction or chance coincidence that happens as it might just point to a compelling narrative to unwind with an interesting person in a conversation recorded for the masses.

Coincidentally, this context also enables my role as a venture investor, where your network and relationships make all of the difference in finding incredible founders on a mission to change the world. You’ve got to collect tons of dots before you can connect the dots that point to a good investment, and after you invest, the dot-collecting and connecting goes into overdrive.

Back in September 2014, I started collecting the dots in crypto, which were mostly personal proof points that something incredibly interesting was going on that piqued my curiosity. Seven years later, I started doing the same thing with the intersection of blockchain and AI after a chance intro to Lou Kerner, as he brought me into a community of folks looking deeply at blockchain-AI crossover.

Although Lou and I didn’t get into this topic in episode 237, Mai Santamaria and I stumbled into the blockchain-AI intersection in episode 241 as Mai had been reading Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat at the same time that I put Vitalik Buterin’s ‘d/acc’ techno-optimism treatise in front of her.

Thankfully, MoneyNeverSleeps superfan Niall Dennehy from AID:Tech was listening to Mai and me that week. After Niall finished the episode, a thought sparked for him and he offered me an email intro to Evan Miyazono from the Atlas Computing Initiative. Evan has a past in blockchain and a present and future in AI, so he and I ended up recording episode 246 last month.

Coming full circle, I still had that itch to scratch on digital identity and blockchain that was left over from episode 241 with Mai, and I wanted to return the favor to Niall for the intro to Evan Miyazono. Niall has blockchain and digital identity at the core of what he does, and I thought that a deeper dive into this intersection might be enjoyable for him.

So, I reached out to Mai last week with my thesis, and the result is this week’s episode!

Digital Identity, Trust, Risk & Blockchain

Mai Santamaria joins me once again as guest co-host this week as we riff on the intersection of digital identity, digital wallets, blockchain, CBDCs, and how the political regime under which an individual lives influences your sense of trust and risk.

We also blow to bits my expectation that the new EU digital identity wallet will have anything to do with blockchain, contrary to what we’re seeing with digital identity frameworks in Latin America. 

Mai is one of the most helpful people I know and always has a uniquely incisive insight or two on what’s going on at the crossover of finance and emerging tech.  Mai originally featured on episode 5 of MoneyNeverSleeps back in 2018, she made a cameo on our 200th episode last year, she’s a Techstars mentor, and she recently helped me make sense of the crossover of blockchain and AI in episode 241.

In this episode, Mai and I riff on the topic of digital identity through the lens of the new European Union digital identity wallet brought forth by the eIDAS2 legislation, and look at digital identity regimes in Latin America through the latest news on Nubank’s expansion.

With the investments I’m making right now, topics like decentralization, over-centralization, and the elements of trust and risk when it comes to how individuals feel about who has access to their data are also a focal point of this chat.

Some History…

Before Mai and I recorded episode 241 back in December, we caught up over coffee at a local place outside of the Dublin city centre that just happened to be full of parents and toddlers at mid-day on a Tuesday, hence its nickname, “Nappy Valley”.

I don’t remember exactly what it was that Mai said that got me thinking about digital identity and blockchain, but I started waving my hands around, animating my opinion that digital identity is the missing link in web3 wallets.

I then shared my view about how maybe CBDCs aren’t as wickedly evil as I thought, and this takes a bit of care to help connect the dots:

• When I referred to ‘digital identity’ and ‘CBDCs’ in short order, something clicked for Mai, and she started telling me about the new eIDAS2 legislation enabling digital identity wallets in EU countries.

• I thought that if digital identity in the EU works as expected, you should be able to prove your identity to another party, either online or in person through some kind of digital authentication, without providing the other party with any of your personal information.

• In blockchain, this type of authentication is enabled by a technology called zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. If ZK proofs are part of a blockchain-based technology solution enabling the EU digital identity wallet, then an individual’s data in that wallet will not be revealed to other parties seeking to authenticate that you are who you say you are.

• Following the logic, if that same digital wallet is used when the digital euro is eventually available as a CBDC, does that protect an individual from having their financial activity tracked by an overseer, because ZK proofs are enabling the whole construct?

We didn’t have an answer that day in Nappy Valley, and we didn’t even talk about it on episode 241 in December, but now we do have an answer:

The new EU digital identity wallet, my friends, will have nothing to do with ZK proofs, and certainly nothing to do with blockchain. Sad but true.

I figured this out while preparing to record episode 246 with Mai, which has since been referred to as one of the Top 5 all-time episodes of MoneyNeverSleeps by superfan and digital identity guru Niall Dennehy.

Smartly, Mai parked the technology element of this conversation within the first 5 minutes of the episode after my rehash of the ZK-proof-blockchain-spiel, and we instead focused on the human element of being able to authenticate yourself many different ways, and how that impacts your trust in others and your sense of risk.

Make sure you listen to episode 247 with Mai to hear the whole conversation!    

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X-Post (Tweet!) of the Week

An oldie but a goodie, for Valentine’s Day!

Sharing Dealflow

As most readers are aware, I lead the Techstars Web3 accelerator program, investing at the pre-seed level up to $120,000 into each of 12 web3 companies/projects each year, and then leading them through a 13-week program to get them moving faster. Here’s an overview from the Techstars blog post where I announced the 2024 program back in September.

As I mentioned above, we’re nearly there with building the class of 2024, and all will be revealed in mid-March. If you’re an angel investor, VC, or just a blockchain-crypto-web3 enthusiast and want to see what kind of companies we’re investing in this time around, watch this space!

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading (and listening)!

-Pete

Links:

👉Follow our guest co-host Mai Santamaria on  LinkedIn

✅Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

🙏Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

📣Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

📣Follow us on LinkedIn: Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps 

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New Year, New Format

To give all of you, dear readers, even more insight into what I do beyond the podcast, I’m adding two simple sections to this newsletter. I’ll still do the breakdown of each episode with further analysis of the topics we covered that week, but from here on out, you can also expect:

• X-Posts (Tweets) of the Week - My commentary on what grabbed my attention the most on Elon’s evolving beast of a social media platform.

• Sharing Dealflow - Updates on the portfolio companies that form part of the Techstars Web3 accelerator that I lead, as we’re now building our third class of 12 web3 companies/projects.

This Week’s Podcast

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Lizzo Is Right

I knew we were taking a risk recording at 10am GMT on January 10th, which was about 10 hours before the SEC finally approved Spot Bitcoin ETFs. We recorded anyway, and I then dropped in an emergency break-in post-production snippet sharing the big news in the first few minutes of the episode.

As the approval was pretty much a done deal for a while, all of the ETF sponsors (the technical name for asset managers running ETFs) were ready to go as soon as the SEC sent up the white smoke (with a bit of a premature unauthorized oopsy the day before), and 11 Spot Bitcoin ETFs started trading in the market 12 hours later on the morning of January 11th.

Asset managers have been fighting the good fight to get a Spot Bitcoin ETF to market for nearly 10 years in the face of rejection after rejection after rejection from the SEC, who were finally ruled to be “arbitrary and capricious” by the DC Circuit Court in August 2023 in their rejection of Grayscale’s application, a ruling that paved the way for Wednesday’s long-awaiting approvals. 

On the long-awaited big day, a record $4.6bn in trade volume was transacted in Spot Bitcoin ETFs from sponsors such as Fidelity, BlackRock, Invesco Galaxy, Van Eck, Franklin, Wisdomtree, Bitwise and Grayscale.  

Although guest co-host Alejandro Gutierrez (CEO of Defactor Labs) and I called it during the episode, no crystal ball was required as this was bound to happen, and we’ll have more on this next week.

For now though, in the words of the great Lizzo, “It’s about damn time!”

Roundup of Messaris’ Crypto Theses 2024

The meat of this episode is a roundup of Messari’s Crypto Theses for 2024. We riffed on our respective Top 5 out of the 100 or so predictions from Messari CEO Ryan Selkis’s 194-page super-insightful read.

Alejandro and I each selected the 5 key trends, people, companies, and projects to watch in 2024 that were the most meaningful to each one of us.  In short, these are the 100 topics that Ryan Selkis highlighted in his excellent analysis of how he expects 2024 to play out in crypto, blockchain, and wider digital assets. As you read on below, please note that we’ve numbered our Top 5 to correspond to the actual Messari document.

Pete’s Top 5 

1.8 AI & Crypto: Money for the Machines

The crossover of blockchain and AI - can blockchain save AI from running amok?  There are some very intelligent people living at the intersection of blockchain and AI, and I’m excited to see what they come up with.  Here’s a good primer from CoinMarketCap.

1.9 Three New De’s: DePIN, DeSoc, DeSci

Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), decentralized social media (DeSoc) and decentralized science (DeSci) all have been bubbling up over the last 6-8 years (or longer), but the investment community / VCs have finally given them names.  I’ve been waiting and watching for 10 years (since I went down the blockchain rabbit hole) for blockchain to reach a maturity level where applications in the real world are possible like this, and I’m particularly excited about DePIN and DeSci.

2.4 Senator Elizabeth Warren (and her Minions)

The American political system stops innovation. When faced with the emergence of new technology that could become disruptive to their businesses and industries, corporate titans flinch and make weighty campaign contributions to their favorite politicians.  Faced with the fear of not getting re-elected, these politicians help to erect obstacles on the path of the innovators to make it more difficult for them to scale.  After the corporate titans either 1) learn about the emerging tech they were worried about to begin with or 2) see their competitors working successfully with those technologies, the incumbents back down and innovators can move on with fewer obstructions.  (h/t to Nic Carter from Castle Island Ventures for inspiring the thoughts on this one).

“The concept of serving societies and being elected as a privilege has completely changed; now, it’s about power, influence, and personal benefit more than anything else.” Alejandro Gutierrez on MoneyNeverSleeps ep 244

6.4 The ETF Race(s)

We saw the SEC approval and subsequent launch of Spot Bitcoin ETFs the week of January 8th, and over $4.6bn in volume of these fund products changed hands on the first day of trading last week.

While I agree with the pundits on this one and their expectations that these products will reach between $20bn and $100bn in assets (in aggregate) for 2024, I still only see a 6-8 year lifespan for these products, perhaps maxing out at $500bn. While $500bn is a huge chunk of the crypto markets today ($1.67tn as of today, 16-Jan-24), that pot of mainly institutional capital will be less material to the crypto markets overall in the year 2030.

What we’ll see happen over the coming 5 years is twofold:

1 - The US introduces crypto regulation right-sized for what Europe refers to as Crypto Asset Service Providers, including centralized crypto exchanges. This US regulation will be separate and distinct from existing regulations for traditional securities exchanges.

2 - The inflow of new capital into crypto, with ETF products (watch out for the Ethereum ETF next) pushing crypto assets more into the mainstream, will enable the investment required to fund the next wave of entrepreneurs building easier-to-use crypto wallet infrastructure. This investment will come from early-stage venture capital funds investing in founders who are building the utilities with better UX now, but with institutional benefits still a few years away.   

This big improvement in UX (without sacrificing the security of crypto assets) combined with regulatory evolution, will enable registered investment advisors (RIAs) and institutional investors such as pensions, endowments, and charities to buy crypto assets directly through institutional wallets or centralized exchanges, rather than paying an ETF sponsor to buy, hold and sell it for you.

Of course, institutional investors will have to make the case to their compliance teams to relax their investment restrictions to include direct crypto asset investing (instead of through regulated ETFs), and they’ll feel more comfortable doing so because the entry points and trading venues are regulated.

And, just to say it once again, as I’m always summoning the spirit of Roy Amara who said this (in the 1960’s!): 

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Roy Amara

So, we will not see traditional institutional investors going direct into crypto markets en masse outside of ETFs during the expected 2024-2025 bull run, and perhaps not even in the one after. 

Let’s shoot for the year 2030 for traditional institutional investors and registered investment advisors (RIAs) to have their preferred UX-rich technology at their fingertips, alongside the regulatory clarity, for these investors to buy and sell crypto assets in the way they were intended to be bought and sold: direct in the crypto markets.  

7.8 Solana’s Resurgence + MOVE It or Lose It (Layer 1 Network Trends) - I went to the Solana Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam in November, and I liked what I found.  It’s a thriving ecosystem that is supporting those building everything from Triple-A MMORPG games to DePIN such as Helium and USDC stablecoin settlements on the Visa network.  The people are fascinating as well, with this blend of take-on-the-world ambition and real-world pragmatism that is befitting what is now the 5th most valuable crypto asset by market cap.  

Alejandro’s Top 5

1.2 ETH & The World Computer(s)

Alejandro thought it interesting how ETH is not seen as a store of value but as a technical solution.  In the Messari document, Selkis expressed his view that the long-term investment case for Ethereum is more of a Visa or Mastercard analogy than a Microsoft or Google one. Alejandro points to this as support for his belief that Ethereum will become the rails for financial development, fintech, and overall, a new foundational system for finance.  

I share this view with Alejandro, and although he was not suggesting a winner-take-all future with Ethereum as the only rails for finance, I think we’ll see an oligopoly of sorts across Ethereum and a handful of existing or not-yet-developed protocols.

Don’t get us wrong though, the Ethereum analogy to Visa or Mastercard is not a like-for-like comparison, as the capabilities of Ethereum make it a quantum-leap improvement over the world’s current financial rails.  

(Again, think long-term, folks!)  

1.4 The Resurgence of Private Crypto Markets? 

Alejandro is optimistic that we’ll see a resurgence in the private crypto markets (crypto venture capital-driven) but he is seeing a lot of recycled money (VCs reinvesting gains from their winners/exits) instead of new venture money coming into crypto VC funds.  In 2020 and 2021, we had a lot of Covid-fueled money-printing going on, and that helped to spur the last crypto bull run.  In 2024, the macro situation is far less favorable. 

I agree with Alejandro on this one - the longer investment decision-making process in private markets means that the private market capital engine takes longer to warm up than the public market engine.  I’m not sure that we’re going to see crypto VCs flooded with new capital in 2024, and I’m looking to 2025 for the funding situation to improve for early-stage startups building in crypto.  

2.8 Lucas Vogelsang (Centrifuge), Denelle Dixon (Stellar) & Christine Moy (Apollo)

Alejandro is passionate about real-world assets (RWA) and he and his Defactor colleagues have been working with Centrifuge since inception.  Before Defactor, Alejandro worked with Consol Freight to create one of the first RWA pools on Centrifuge, working alongside Lucas and the Centrifuge team on developing a lot of the concepts.

Alejandro points to Lucas as one of the leaders in the RWA space, and that his dream of creating these fully decentralized on-chain marketplaces has been successful so far.

However, Alejandro posed this question:  how decentralized can these protocols be?  

We’re still talking about the real-world asset component which, at the moment, is fully centralized, i.e., backing the on-chain token is an off-chain asset held in custody with an individual firm with traditional financial services providers.

At the same time, Alejandro is giving kudos to Lucas and to Martin Quensel as it’s been a difficult path to get the RWA market to this stage and they’re finally getting the attention and recognition that they deserve. 

5.10 MiCA & TFR: Europe’s “Leadership”

Alejandro pointed out that Europe is the guiding light for other jurisdictions when it comes to crypto regulation, and he took a different stance than Selkis did.  In the Messari document, Selkis suggested that MiCA could be more hurtful than helpful to crypto firms.  However, Alejandro and I both thought that the pros outweigh the cons and that at least we have *something* in Europe.

83% of major global hubs and the G20 have either passed national crypto legislation or have crypto regulation in place. The US is not included on this list (see 2.4 above) and Alejandro and I agreed that US legislators should be embarrassed, not even as an also-ran, but as a non-runner.  Europe, on the other hand, is way out ahead, with more to come with MiCA 2.0 in the coming years. 

8.8 Oracles/8.9 RWA Diversification

Alejandro’s final prediction in his Top 5 is a prediction in its own right - RWA diversification will not happen without oracles.  I thought that oracles providing prices of RWAs into the on-chain asset was a no-brainer. Still, Alejandro took it a step further: he’d like to see the proof that the real-world asset actually exists sourced from an oracle as well, which allows a big step forward with the true decentralization of these protocols.  

I didn't think I was going to write this much about our Top 5, but once I’m on a roll at the keyboard, these things happen.  Either way, I highly recommend you give the Messari’s Crypto Theses for 2024 a read - 194 pages go a lot quicker than you think!

Don’t forget to follow MoneyNeverSleeps on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get into the flow of the full conversation!

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X-Posts (Tweets!) of the Week

Since this is my first time sharing the posts on X that caught my attention, I’ll call them X-Posts, and let’s see if it catches on. “Tweets of the Week” is so much more fun to say, but the world is changing at the pace of Elon these days….

That’s Nic Carter, Founding Partner at Castle Island Ventures, with his take on Gary Gensler’s parting shot in his statement on the approval of Spot Bitcoin ETFs.

(And yes, I can imagine 10-year-old Nic Carter, headphoned and moustached, flipping over the Monopoly board…can you?)

Gary Gensler is a smart man, and I’m sure he knows the most widely used asset for illicit activity is the US Dollar.

However, he can’t possibly underwrite bitcoin when his expected ambition is to underwrite the US Dollar - literally. When his political allies finally enable his appointment as US Secretary of the Treasury, Gary Gensler will, in fact, have his signature embossed on every piece of US currency (fiat) printed during his tenure.

Sharing Dealflow

As most readers are aware, I lead the Techstars Web3 accelerator program, investing at the pre-seed level up to $120,000 into each of 12 web3 companies/projects each year. Here’s an overview from the Techstars blog post where I announced the 2024 program back in September.

As an update on the class of 2024, we are in serious crunch-time mode right now, having reviewed over 600 applications in the last few months. Everything is taking shape with our Top 50, and we’ll have our Class of 2024 put together by the end of January.

The program starts on March 11th with a week of orientation in Dublin, and then we go virtual for the rest of the accelerator program, except for one week in London at the end of April and then in-person end-of-program events in early June.

So, to all of my fellow investor friends out there, please keep an eye on this space, as we’ll be announcing the Techstars Web3 Class of 2024 in mid-March, and giving early access to investors in our network.

Also, as this is our third class since 2022, we have 21 active web3 portfolio companies, many of whom are in fundraising mode as we speak. Here are the class announcements from 2022 and 2023 to have a look at the companies, and drop me a line if you’re interested in learning more about any of the founding teams.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

-Pete

Links:

Read Messari’s Crypto Theses for 2024

Follow our guest co-host Alejandro Gutierrez on X(Twitter) and LinkedIn

Learn more about Defactor Labs and follow them on X(Twitter) 

Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

Subscribe to our MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter on Substack

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website and email us at info@norioventures.com

Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

Follow us on LinkedIn: Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps 

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More Media & Events

I’m taking a break from additional media and events for the next few weeks while interviewing over 100 founders alongside some Techstars colleagues, mentors, and investors to build the Techstars Web3 class of 2024. Don’t worry though, we’ll be back in 2024 with more virtual and in-person events to bring to life the topics we riff on! 🎸

This Week’s Podcast

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Looking into the Solana ecosystem

I’m joined this week by two of the great people I met at the Solana Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam last month, Amira Valliani, the Head of Policy, and Nick Ducoff, the Head of Institutional Growth - both at the Solana Foundation.

Before my trip to Amsterdam in November for the Solana Breakpoint conference, my engagement with the Solana community over the years had been lacking. At Solana Breakpoint, I found a diverse community with a bunch of smart and engaging people building interesting projects, and I wanted to go deeper, hence this episode.

In this conversation, Amira and Nick both tell their personal stories about their path to the Solana Foundation and what they brought with them into the Solana Foundation from their past lives as startup founders.  We also riffed on my observations on the diversity of projects being built on the Solana blockchain from high-volume stablecoin networks to Triple-A games like the massive galactic game world that is Star Atlas, and we also covered what we would all like to see from web3 founders going forward.

Naming the Episode

As all of the interview-style MoneyNeverSleeps podcast episodes are named after hip-hop tracks, I usually ask my guests at the end of a recording session if they’ve got a favorite hip-hop artist. Then, before publishing the episode, I go looking for a track from that artist that fits what we talked about and usually request an image on DALL-E 2 that depicts both the hip-hop track and the topic of the conversation, and I use this for the episode artwork.

Most of the time, this works, and other times…well, even I have limits to my creativity and associative thinking. Amira and Nick both asked me for Jay-Z, and the closest track I came up with was ‘Anything’, as in ‘you can build anything on Solana’.

I didn’t feel like ‘Anything’ would do this conversation justice, so I kept looking. When I’m stuck, I usually default to something by Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Nas, Snoop Dogg, or of course, the legend himself, Dr. Dre.

So, Dre’s track ‘Light Speed’ featuring Hittman from his 1999 album, 2001, did the trick this week, given Solana’s tagline of ‘powerful for developers, fast for everyone’.

Beyond the tagline, the whole reason I wanted to bring Amira and Nick onto the podcast was to dive deeper into my takeaways from 24 hours at the Solana Breakpoint conference in November.

Beyond the great people I met who are building on Solana, here’s my top takeaway:

If Visa, Worldpay and Nuvei identified the Solana blockchain as the optimal chain on which to build USDC stablecoin-powered credit card network settlements, AND Triple-A games like the high-transaction volume and massive galactic game world that is Star Atlas are also building on Solana, it has got to be pretty damn fast.

Or as some would say….light speed!

What did we cover?

First, a bit of background on both Amira and Nick:

Amira Valliani - Head of Policy, Solana Foundation

Amira runs the global policy team at the Solana Foundation, which supports the decentralization, security, and adoption of Solana, one of the world's most widely-used open-source public blockchains.

Amira is a seasoned startup founder and policy strategist interested in using technology to drive growth while creating a more just economic landscape. Her background extends across the public and private sectors, including having built and sold a venture-backed startup (exited founder/CEO of podcast monetization platform Glow) and serving as a foreign policy aide in the Obama White House.

Nick Ducoff, Head of Institutional Growth, Solana Foundation

Nick leads institutional growth at the Solana Foundation, and he’s responsible for digital assets and permissioned environments. After exiting his last startup, he joined G20 Ventures as a Venture Partner focused on blockchain and B2B SaaS investments.

Prior to joining G20 Ventures, Nick was an angel investor in companies including Flipside Crypto ($50M Series A), Unchained Capital ($60M Series B), Hologram ($65M Series B), and Panorama Education ($60M Series C).

Nick previously co-founded two VC-backed tech companies that were acquired:

• Infochimps, founded in 2010, delivers Big Data systems with unprecedented speed, scale and flexibility to enterprise companies, and was acquired by DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC).

• Edmit, founded in 2017, helps high school students and their families make smarter college financial decisions and was acquired in 2021.

Very coincidentally, about a month before I connected with Amira and Nick in the context of the Solana Breakpoint conference, two of the stories we covered on MoneyNeverSleeps were in the context of Solana:

• Long Take: Visa, Worldpay, and Nuvei settling transactions using stablecoin USDC on Solana (Fintech Blueprint by Lex Sokolin, 6-Sep-23) - ep 231 w/ Alejandro Gutierrez

• Just One Game on Solana Is Doing More Daily Transactions Than All of Polygon (Decrypt, 9-Oct-23) - ep 234 w/ Pet Berisha

At Breakpoint, I got to see the latest mind-blowing previews of the Solana-based game Star Atlas (whose builders also built the SAGE Labs game noted above), and I also met the people who worked on the Visa/USDC/Solana project.

Looking under the hood though, both financial transactions and game transactions need to be on a lightning-fast blockchain.  So, what may seem like two examples of teams building on Solana at either end of the universe (finance and gaming) are actually close cousins of each other with the scalability demands of both.

❓I asked Amira and Nick if we can expect more of the same diversity of Solana-based apps or if things will eventually go in a specific direction.

🔎Nick looking across the universe of apps being built on Solana:

“The Solana blockchain is extremely fast, cheap, and secure, and that enables all sorts of different utility. We don't know what people are going to innovate and create but we want to support that innovation and that new value creation.

“It could be in gaming, infrastructure, physical infrastructure, it could be in institutional finance. We're seeing these incredible use cases that were not previously possible on a blockchain but now possible because of the extremely fast, cheap, and secure nature of Solana's blockchain. I think for Solana, diversity of utility is a strength because we've achieved broad adoption.

“But if you haven't achieved that broad adoption, then focusing on a niche makes sense. We're starting to see more layer one and layer two blockchains zero in on their go-to-market niches, and that isn't to say that we won't focus on specific verticals, but I think our breadth is our strength.”

🔎Amira highlighting one of her favorite projects on Solana as a bellwether for the breadth of applications:

“We might see sort of some of these use cases cluster around certain verticals. Blockchain has all kinds of use cases, but I think there's always going to be a pretty diverse breadth of people using blockchains for use cases that we really could not have predicted.

“One of my favorite use cases on blockchain is Helium, and they’re building a distributed 5G network. It’s a community-powered 5G network where anyone can buy a hotspot, stick it on their house, and help create 5G for their community in a way that is much more affordable than some of the legacy carriers.

“If you ask most people in the general population about blockchain today, and you tell them that there's a really cool blockchain company that's providing 5G and competes with your cell phone network, they would be like, ‘get out of town, this stuff is just a speculative currency, isn’t it?’

“No one would have predicted in 2017 that a distributed 5G network could have been one of the use cases of blockchain.”

“And then you realize there are all these companies building on top of Helium with these really interesting use cases. I met a team that was using Helium's radio receivers (that form part of the Helium network) to track lions in the Maasai Mara because it was much more efficient than using existing radio technology. So you can never really guess what people build.

“We provide the resources and support to the ecosystem to further whatever their vision is and then sit back and watch what happens. I think we'll see some pretty broad use cases - if you look back 15 years ago at what people might build on top of smartphone app stores, you probably wouldn't have guessed that a big use case is going to be home-sharing or ride-sharing.

“We're just starting to crack the surface of how people might use blockchain, and so I think you should expect a lot of really interesting ends to that puzzle.

Lessons learned and other founder-life anecdotes

🔎Amira on a lesson learned from her life as a startup founder that she has brought with her into the Solana Foundation:

“Being a founder and working in different businesses has given me a really deep appreciation for what it means to found a company and the challenges that founders face in particular. These [challenges] are really difficult to appreciate, not just for people in government, but people in general who haven't had the chance to be a founder themselves.

“The challenges of being a founder are pretty singular and hard to imagine. Being able to take that lens and talk to policymakers, and also do a lot of work directly with founders [engaging with the Solana Foundation] and be able to understand what they're going through is so powerful. [Being a founder] is a lonely job, and it's a hard job and it requires so much clarity all the time.

“When you see a company thriving and you see a great pitch from a founder or you see the business growing and people attaching themselves to it, it feels like success was already fated. But for the person or people who came up with the idea to build that company, there was so much that was not written yet.

“There's so much they had to figure out, and being able to appreciate that and understand what it's like to be on that side of the table is one of the most powerful lessons that anyone operating in [business] can learn.”

🔎Amira connecting the dots between the founder mentality and her policy role:

“If you look at Congress, it is slow moving. It's really hard to get a bill through but if you actually spend time in the shoes of someone who is in one of these jobs, thinking every day about what they can do to make the country better….I know there's a lot of politicking that goes on and a lot of skepticism around Washington, but you don't take a job on the Hill, at the State Department or at the White House and just grind yourself away for a decade, 15 years, whatever it is without some dedication to the cause.

“These are not glamorous roles. They require a lot of grinding and it's really because people want to make the country a better place, a safer place and do right by people. And I think being able to appreciate that and communicate the considerations that someone who is reading threat analyses or tying to parse through new technology.

“Being able to communicate those challenges to founders and people operating in this space has been really valuable and I’m proud that I'm able to do that work.”

🔎Nick on the tokenization of real-world assets:

“BCG did some analysis for the World Economic Forum last year, and they predicted by 2030 that $16 trillion of global illiquid assets will be tokenized. And that's actually their conservative forecast - their upside forecast for that period, which is only six years away, is that as much as $68 trillion of the market will be tokenized in that period.

“I don't know whether it's five years, two years, 10 years, but the train has left the station. When I talk to leading global financial institutions, they're all investing in blockchain, both in back office efficiencies as well as new products for a world that is increasingly 24/7/365.

“Markets want to be fast and markets want to be efficient. Blockchain enables all of those things and Solana is very well suited to become the leading blockchain as tokenization becomes a reality.”

Don’t forget to follow MoneyNeverSleeps on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get into the flow of the full conversation!

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Episode title inspired by 'Light Speed' by Dr. Dre

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More Media & Events

I’m taking a break from additional media and events for the next few weeks while interviewing over 100 founders alongside some Techstars colleagues, mentors, and investors to build the Techstars Web3 class of 2024. Don’t worry though, we’ll be back in 2024 with more virtual and in-person events to bring to life the topics we riff on! 🎸

This Week’s Podcast

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Money Talks with Paul Smyth

Paul Smyth joins me as guest co-host this week, and he is a specialist executive recruiter and executive coach within the fintech industry.  As a founder of two startups, Paul has a unique view of startup ecosystems.

Paul and I met back in 2017 shortly before I photo-bombed his stand at a fintech event in Dublin, and we’ve collaborated quite a bit since then.  He and his business partner and life partner Laura Smyth from Top Tier Recruitment were the original sponsors of MoneyNeverSleeps back in 2018. 

Since then, Paul and Laura have also launched the Possible Coaching business that counts me as one of their proud customers.  I was so happy with the outcome of Paul’s coaching of me that I asked him to coach the founders that we bring through the Techstars Web3 accelerator.  As one of the many hats he wears, Paul is a fantastic Coach-in-Residence for Techstars, helping startup founders find their way to positive outcomes.  

In this Money Talks segment, Paul and I kick things off with a look at the recent “State of European Tech 2023” report produced by Atomico, the on-traditional European Venture Capital firm.  We then get into some of the key issues at play with the proposed Digital Euro, and how Central Bank Digital Currency (or CBDC) adoption may be impacted by the context of privacy in personal financial transactions.  This leads us to a rundown on SocGen’s new stablecoin listed on the Bitstamp exchange, and we finish with a big question on what matters more in startup success:  great founders or great markets.

What did we cover?

Great Founder vs. Great Market debate

📰Reid Hoffman on the Psychology of Great Founders (The Generalist, 5-Dec-23)

Let’s go last thing first this week!

Way back in 2019, Eoin Fitzgerald and I decided to deviate from the weekly interview-style episode with something called the ‘Money Talks’ segment, during which Eoin and I would riff on 4-5 recent news stories that resonated with us. The spitballing we ended up doing during these episodes on particularly thorny concepts like flywheels and ‘rundles’ helped me to craft some heuristics I still rely on today for how I invest in startups.

Lo and behold, Eoin couldn't make the first Money Talks session we prepped for way back in 2019, and Paul Smyth jumped in at the last minute. This became episode 65 in November 2019, and the rest is history, as we’ve done another 70 or so episodes using this formula. It also seems to be a great way to bring on new guest co-hosts, as all I’m asking folks to do is bring two news stories to the table that resonate with them, and we riff on those with a couple that I pick out as well.

As I didn’t share this one with Paul before we recorded, I surprised him with my question inspired by Mario Gabriele’s recent post in The Generalist newsletter. The way our conversation played out points to his experience as a startup founder and as a coach of other startup founders (in addition to executives in mid-sized and enterprise firms). Here’s how it went down:

🔎Mark Andreessen said back in 2007 that great markets rule all, and that you can have a mediocre founder in a great market that grows an incredible business, rather than having an incredibly brilliant founder in a mediocre market.

In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.

Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn’t matter—you’re going to fail.

Mark Andreessen, ‘The Pmarca Guide to Startups’ (2007)

❓I asked Paul “You've fought through mediocre markets. What do you think wins out, a great founder or a great market?”

“For me, I’d back a founder more than a market, for the long term. If you have a really good founder who's naturally gifted and works really hard, they'll do better in a down market, but they'd also do better in an up market. If you have a mediocre founder, they'll do well in an up market and if you're investing in them and you get in early, you'll make money off them for sure.

“But when the market starts to turn, the cracks will start to appear.”

❓I pushed a bit more, by commenting that I’m always on a quest for fantastic founders, and Paul had this to say:

“But it's not just the founder, it's got to be the team. There are not too many solo founders out there.

“That team piece is just so important and it gets really hard because the pressure is insane, and people want to go in different directions. Accountability and communication and all of those soft skills come into really sharp focus as you start to go through the tough times.

“You want someone who can work within that team but is almost that natural leader of that team as well.”

🎙The ‘natural leader’ part caught my attention - when I jumped into the wild of Startupland back in 2016, one of my big eye-opening experiences was that not all startup founders are fantastically wonderful, charismatic leaders. There are very few of these people in the world.

❓ So I asked Paul this: “Can one great founder build a fantastic team and have the emotional intelligence to be able to keep people moving through thick and thin, through the ups and downs, the great markets, the mediocre markets? Yes, it takes a team, but is it still that one amazing founder?

“One of the other things that I would commonly see in great founders is the ability to know when they need to bring in help to let go a little bit. As a founder, you’re able to identify your own blind spots and be honest with yourself about ‘I'm good at this, but I'm not as good at that, and I can get the business to a certain level, but I can't go beyond that. I need to bring in external help.’

“Whether that's a new CEO and you step into a position as a head of a different function, or you just stay in your lane and focus on the area that you're really good at - either way, that's so difficult for founders to do.

“I see it on the recruitment side in particular - a couple of hires that we've made externally for clients in that early growth stage, they haven't worked out. The commonality has been not that they've hired people who couldn't work in a startup, but because the founder couldn't let go of the thing that they've been doing for three or four years.”

👉 Listen in for the rest of the debate, it starts at about 34:00 in this week’s episode (242)!

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State of European Tech (and European VCs)

📰European tech funding halves to $45 billion, back to pre-Covid levels — but AI is a bright spot (CNBC, 28-Nov-23)

📰State of European Tech 2023 (Atomico, Nov-23)

After a back and forth on what to expect from bitcoin in 2024, Paul and I dove into the key points in Atomico’s fantastic report, and added our own thoughts on the state of European venture capital. Here are the key findings, verbatim from the report:

Investment levels have dropped globally

“The market reset is not a solely European concern. The projected volume of total investment in 2023 is expected to equal less than half of the investment seen in the peak year of 2021 across every global region.

“Europe outpacing US in new tech founders despite global slowdown”

While there is a higher bar to enter entrepreneurship today, annual volume of founders starting new tech startups in Europe exceeds the US, and has done so consistently for every one of the past five years.

Ecosystem value bounces back to $3 trillion

After $400B in value was wiped from the ecosystem during last year’s downturn, public markets have rallied to bring Europe’s value back up to its historic high.

-Atomico’s ‘State of European Tech 2023’

🎙 “Embrace risk, shape the future” pretty much says it all.

There is a common perception that European VCs are more risk-averse than their US counterparts, and personally, I think this has something to do with the cultural diversity of Europe. With so many cultures and languages combined together into one geographic region, we end up with a far more heterogeneous investment landscape in Europe than the more homogenous US market.

In a nutshell, European VCs do embrace risk, it's just in smaller pockets of risk that are centered around these domestic hubs of activity and you don't see the bigger check writers at scale at the earliest stages. You're seeing a lot of the smaller VCs writing smaller checks at the earliest stages, but the bigger checks are going to those at Series A or Series B level, not pre-seed and seed.

Given how many domestic centers we have sprinkled around Europe, each a hotpot of startup activity and investment, we have a fragmentation of VCs as well. One of the biggest mistakes I see founders make in Ireland is trying to pitch to seed-stage VCs for their pre-seed round. However, with the relatively low volume of startups coming out of Ireland versus a US region like New York City or Silicon Valley, it’s not economical for the local Irish VCs to split themselves into ‘pre-seed’ and ‘seed’ investors - they’re all just ‘seed’, but might do a bit of pre-seed.

Many Irish startup founders either aren’t aware of the structural difference, or don’t care, and a lot of them end up beating their heads against the wall trying to raise a seed round from Irish VCs for a pre-product / pre-revenue proposition. This is why I hint to founders building their investor pipeline that they’ll quickly end up targeting investors outside of Ireland when they aim to build a pipeline of 100+ investors (which they should do).

I’ve got to expect that this trend is similar across other European startup hubs (bar London, but which is naturally conservative anyway). What we’re lacking in Europe are the pre-seed investors investing across geographies in multiple European ecosystems, as so much of European venture investing is local compared to the US.

❓Is it more feasible to invest at the pre-seed and seed stage level across the entire US because it’s just one country, compared to investing across the 28 countries in Europe plus the UK? Is a pan-European pre-seed VC at scale the best way for European VCs to ‘embrace risk’?

Those are a couple of good questions for an upcoming episode!

Stablecoins vs. CBDCs

📰Fiery Public Hearing on Digital Euro Sees Experts Diverge on Key Issues (CoinDesk, 28-Nov-23)

📰France’s 3rd-largest bank, Société Générale, launches euro-pegged stablecoin (Cointelegraph, 6-Dec-23)

I have not been a fan of the concept of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to date because the assumption is that central banks will be operating private blockchains as the rails of a CBDC, and to me, a private blockchain is no different than a centralized database.

A centralized database of an entire economy’s retail spending, investing, borrowing, and lending just seems so preposterous, both from a scale perspective and that of privacy.

However, if central banks license their to-be-developed CBDC technology to commercial banks, that might work, as most people are already accustomed to commercial banks safekeeping their data.

Beyond this, a thought occurred to me when catching up with Mai Santamaria a few weeks ago. If Europe is the “Land of GDPR” and preservers of privacy, then how could the rails of the proposed Digital Euro be anything but a decentralized public blockchain, optimized with zero-knowledge privacy?

👉 Listen in as Paul and I dive into this meaty topic, it starts at about 16:00 in this week’s episode (242)!

Don’t forget to follow MoneyNeverSleeps on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get into the flow of the full conversation!

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Links:

Follow our guest co-host Paul Smyth on LinkedIn and X(Twitter)

Connect with Possible Coaching and Top Tier Recruitment

Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website and email us at info@norioventures.com

Follow us on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend  |  MoneyNeverSleeps  

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Before diving into what happened this week, this is just a quick ask: if you're enjoying this newsletter, please share it with friends!

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More Media & Events

I’m taking a break from additional media and events for the next three weeks while interviewing over 100 founders alongside some Techstars colleagues, mentors, and investors to build the Techstars Web3 class of 2024. Don’t worry though, we’ll be back in 2024 with more virtual and in-person events to bring to life the topics we riff on! 🎸

This Week’s Podcast

Listen to the podcast

Money Talks with Mai Santamaria

This week I’m joined by guest co-host Mai Santamaria, the Head of the Financial Advisory Unit for the Department of Finance in Ireland. Mai and I met in February 2018 at a meeting of the Irish Blockchain Expert Group which later became the industry group now referred to as Blockchain Ireland.  

She’s one of the most helpful people I know and always has a uniquely incisive insight or two on what’s going on at the crossover of finance and emerging tech when she and I catch up.  Mai originally featured on episode 5 of MoneyNeverSleeps back in 2018, she made a cameo on our 200th episode last year, she’s a Techstars mentor, and has received a ton of shout-outs from Eoin Fitzgerald and me on this podcast over the years.

In this episode, Mai and I riff on where crypto exchange Binance goes from here after pleading guilty to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act in the US and being fined $4.3bn, with co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zao stepping down.  We also look at the new crypto-friendly Argentinian president, Javier Milei, and what he might do with dollarization and crypto adoption, and then finish up with Mai’s mind-opening counterpoint on Ethereum co-founder Vitalk Buterin’s new manifesto. 

What did we cover?

Vitalik's Techno-Optimism Manifesto

📰Everyone Needs a Manifesto (CoinDesk, 28-Nov-23)

📰My techno-optimism (Vitalik Buterin, 27-Nov-23)

Last week, Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum) published his manifesto and CoinDesk analyzed the manifesto with an opinion piece. Within the CoinDesk piece, they quoted Camila Russo who wonderfully summarized it in The Defiant.

“Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin introduced a novel philosophical approach to technology, termed 'd/acc' - Defensive (or Decentralization, or Differential) Acceleration, in a blog post published Monday.

“Buterin's 'd/acc' philosophy advocates for a deliberate and balanced path in technological development, focusing on technologies that ensure defense, decentralization, and human flourishing.

“The concept emerges as a counterbalance to the unbridled techno-optimism espoused by figures like Marc Andreessen and challenges the e/acc (effective accelerationist) movement.”

Camila Russo, The Defiant

So, I went a bit deeper into the manifesto, and what stood out to me immediately was Vitalik’s view on the path on which humanity travels today:

I talked through this with Mai on the podcast, doing my best to paint the picture of the child on three different paths. Vitalik is saying that we have an opportunity - technology acceleration and decentralization can lead us down a path toward a good place, or toward a bad place.

“We need active human intention to choose the directions that we want, as the formula of "maximize profit" will not arrive at them automatically.”

Vitalik Buterin

🔎Mai got it immediately, and here is her take:

“I read the opinion piece, and my personal view was heavily influenced by the fact that I've been reading Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat.

“My first reaction was this: he's totally missing the point, he's missing AI.

“The manifesto reminded me of Scary Smart because, in the book, Mo Gawdat equates AI to a child. AI today is a six to eight-year-old child, and we’re teaching them. That’s how we’ve taught AI to date, we give it something and it figures it out. The perfect example is the little box with, square, triangle and round pegs and the child picks it up and figures out which peg is going to fit into which hole.

“That's how AI has evolved. It takes the data, trial and error, looks for those historical patterns and it learns from them. We're feeding that six to eight-year-old child with information today.

“The equivalent to this box that we have with round, square and triangle pegs is all the data that's online. If the data we’re feeding AI with from a humankind perspective - negativity, riots in Dublin, blowing things up, war, terrorism - that's what that child is going to learn to be the norm.“

🎙Here’s where I took the mic back, but just for a second, as Mai was on a roll:

“Whoa, that’s deep, Mai - I’m looking at those three pictures in Vitalik’s manifesto of the child on the different paths. I was looking at that from the perspective of the child on the different paths being society and humanity, but is that child on the different paths actually AI?”

🔎Mai’s response on if the child on the different paths is AI:

“Yeah, it is, but if we are surpassed by AI, it doesn't matter.

“It will be technology deciding the future technology. AI is clearly more intelligent than us, and how technology evolves, that future path, that castle will not be up to us.

Whether that castle at the end of the path is bright or it’s dark, it will not be up to us, it will be up to AI.”

🎙Digging away at my mind for the last six months or so has been the intersection of blockchain and AI, but I always feel like I was missing something until now, and here’s the path I’m headed down:

“That’s deep. What you're saying here, Mai, is getting me thinking about the digitally unique entity, the intelligent entity that could be proven to be its own unique entity, like Neuromancer and Wintermute in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

“Like Gibson said, ‘The future is already here, it’s just not that evenly distributed.’”

So that was my missing link at the intersection of blockchain and AI, even if it’s just the key to unlock deeper thought, and that’s what happens when friends riff on emerging tech! 🙏 Thank you Mai Santamaria!

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Binance and CZ

📰Binance CEO Resigns, Part of $4.3 Billion Settlement With US (Sporting Crypto, 27-Nov-23)

🔎Mai’s response when I asked her if Binance will become boring:

“Binance could become boring, but I do not think this will be the end of it. The SEC were not party to these multi-agency agreements, and that pretty much shows us there's an action still ongoing.

“So there's more to come, but now what's going to happen is under this monitoring arrangement, the SEC will have access to information that is only going to feed into the action that they have underway.

“John Reed Stark worked for the SEC for many, many years, and I know he's always been super critical of crypto overall. But he equated the Binance agreement to what he called a ‘financial colonoscopy’.

🔎Mai’s thoughts when I called out the “reckless driver” context of CZ’s position at the helm of Binance and the same for SBF at FTX .

“I would never endorse any of that behavior, most particularly with SBF doing what he did and so willingly trying to obfuscate and lie. I would never be able to support, condone, or accept any of that. But I always say that it's also important to have perspective, and we need to be coherent as well.

“And we're specifically talking about crypto and not broader digital assets and blockchain on a wider perspective. What I said about coherence is this: why do we demand 100 percent, top-notch, excellent, premium, 10 out of 10 behavior all the time when it comes to the crypto world, but we don't have that same filter when it comes to the rest of our financial transactions. Why are we not coherent?

“I 100 percent do not condone the behavior, but I'm just saying, can we be a little bit self-critical here as well? If I want the premium, top-notch, 10 out of 10, 5-star behavior, I will demand it for everything, not just for some.”

Argentina's New President

📰Argentina Has a New Pro-Bitcoin President—Who Is Javier Milei? (Decrypt, 20-Nov-23)

📰Elon Musk Sees A Bright Future For Argentina Under Its New Pro-Bitcoin President (Binance Square, 21-Nov-23) 

🔎Mai’s take on new Argentinian President Javier Milei’s stance on Bitcoin:

“There's been a lot in the news about Mr. Milei saying that he's pro-Bitcoin, but I’m not sure how much more pro-Bitcoin he is than his fellow prime minister in El Salvador.

“I think Mr. Milei’s been more against central banking than pro-Bitcoin, if that makes sense. But the dollarization of the economy in Argentina would have a huge impact. It would be great if they were able to stabilize inflation, which is 150, 148 percent at the moment. It’s been higher than that, as I think it was a thousand percent or something when they pegged the Argentinian peso against the dollar a few decades ago.

“Even though dollarization sounds like one of Mr. Milei’s proposals and certainly one of his election promises, he can't print his own dollars, and I don’t think the IMF will be lending them any more cash.”

“It seems as though extreme political views are linked with strange haircuts.”

Mai Santamaria

Don’t forget to follow MoneyNeverSleeps on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get into the flow of the full conversation, hear the full conversation listen to the

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Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify 

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website and email us at info@norioventures.com

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Before diving into this week’s newsletter, this is just a quick heads up: if you're building in web3, or you know someone who is, the next class of the Techstars Web3 accelerator takes place in Spring 2024, and applications are open now.

As web3 is global and borderless, so is Techstars Web3. Although most of the accelerator content is delivered virtually, the class does meet up in person for a week at a time at the beginning, middle, and end of the program in different cities around the world. Jump on over to the Techstars Web3 website to learn more and apply.

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More Media & Events

Are you an early-stage founder looking for insights into the ever-evolving world of VC funding?

Techstars invites you to join their EMEA event with a deep dive into the current state of the European early-stage VC market. This is your opportunity to hear from top European VCs and gain valuable knowledge to navigate the investment landscape. This is a joint virtual event hosted by Techstars Sustainability Paris, Techstars Berlin, Techstars ABN Amro, Techstars Tel Aviv, and Techstars Web3.

🗓 Date: Tuesday, November 28, 2023

⏰ Time: 17:00 - 18:30 CET / 16:00 - 17:30 GMT

👉 Register here on Eventbrite

 Featured Speakers:

• Armelle de Tinguy, Partner at Elaia

• Shivram Ayyagari, Partner at EQT Ventures

• Chris Adelsbach, Partner at Outrun Ventures

• Yorai Fainmesser, General Partner at Disruptive AI Venture Capital

• Jocelyn Cheng, Head of DCG Expeditions

You’ll also get to meet the Managing Directors of each of the five Techstars programs that are co-hosting this event, including yours truly ;-) The last part of the event will feature topical (sustainability, fintech, web3, etc.) breakout rooms to ask all of your questions about the accelerator programs and of their featured investor. For example, my breakout room will be with Jocelyn Cheng from DCG (Digital Currency Group) Expeditions, who are backing the world’s top fintech and crypto founders.

 Discussion Topics:

• What are the sectors and technologies prioritized by investors in 2024? 

• What are the top fundraising mistakes founders make in turbulent times and how can you avoid them?

• How do you build a pipeline with top investors as efficiently as possible? 

• What should your fundraising process look like?

• How long should founders expect to close a (pre)-seed fundraise?

Don’t miss this opportunity to gain invaluable insights and connect with industry experts. Register now and mark your calendar for this incredible event!

This Week’s Podcast

Over the summer, my pal Sunil Sharma from Techstars Toronto messaged me on WhatsApp and asked me this:

“Hey Pete, do you know who Alex Tapscott is?”

As I had read Alex’s first book ‘Blockchain Revolution’ back in 2016, I was intrigued, even more so as his second book, ‘Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier’ was about to hit the shelves.

Sunil was in the process of arranging for Alex to speak at Techstars’ Foundercon event in San Francisco in early October, an effort on which Sunil and I were initially working together to get more of a web3 presence at Foundercon. However, as the recovery period for an invasive surgery on my cranky right foot extended past Foundercon, an 11-hour non-stop flight from Dublin to San Francisco was not in the cards. So, thankfully, Sunil and Alex ran with the ball at Foundercon.

In my last call with Alex and Sunil in September when I broke the news to them that I wouldn’t be able to make it to Foundercon, I suggested to Alex that we try to do some kind of virtual book tour event. This week’s podcast episode is the output of that idea!

Listen to the podcast

What’s Next with web3?

When I was setting this one up, I was thinking that with Alex’s recent book tour, he had done a lot of speaking about the new book, so let’s try to take a different approach to this conversation.

So, I wanted to bring in a couple of voices that could reflect on Alex’s sentiment on web3 and add additional context for the audience. As I’m always trying to improve the societal representativeness of web3, I reached out to my network with the goal of having a diverse panel of VCs. Despite best efforts, we ended up with a ‘manel’, but through it all, I’m committed to increasing diversity in tech and venture capital. Hopefully, by just calling it out, I can draw some attention to this that will influence others to do better than me this time around.

The incredibly insightful duo of Justin Swart from BITKRAFT Ventures and Sterling Campbell from Blockchain Capital joined Alex and me for this conversation, which was a live session on Crowdcast (here’s the replay link).

To kick things off, I asked Alex to share his thoughts on what to expect next from those building in web3.  That’s a huge question, but Alex had done so much research and had so many conversations in preparing to write the new book, that I knew he’d have a good answer to get the conversation started.

As I expected, this first question triggered the conversation with Alex, Justin, and Sterling on the critical need for accessibility in technology, where web3 user growth would come from, the role of gaming in web3 adoption, alignment of value and protocols, the movement towards decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) and the future of blockchain protocols.

Contributors

Alex Tapscott - Author of Web3: Charting the Internet's Next Economic and Cultural Frontier (and ‘Blockchain Revolution’), Managing Director and Portfolio Manager at Ninepoint Partners, a Toronto-based alternative investment manager and Founder at Blockchain Research Institute

Justin Swart - Principal at BITKRAFT Ventures, a global investment platform specializing in Synthetic Reality: the space where our physical and digital worlds converge. Driven by video games and gaming technology, Web3, and AI.  BITKRAFT’s portfolio includes Epic Games, Discord and Immutable.

Sterling Campbell - Investor at Blockchain Capital, partners to crypto builders since 2013, with investments including Techstars grad Arweave, Aave, Coinbase, Kraken, and OpenSea.

Top Quotes

Alex Tapscott on increasing adoption of web3:

“The biggest customers for most large businesses are not actually asking to use this technology in the very early days. And I look at the different technologies of web3 - think about blockchains, one of the big benefits of tokens is that you can custody your own assets, you can move value peer to peer. You can be your own bank.

For a lot of people in the world who maybe don't have access to financial services or live in a country where the local currency is hyperinflationary or the financial system is underdeveloped, that's a superpower. And for a lot of people in certain use cases, like say gaming, that's (web3 integration) something that can enrich the experience of playing a game.

But for a lot of people, it's actually a big nuisance. The idea that you would want to be your own bank is something that I think doesn't appeal to, let's say a lot of older, wealthier people in places like North America.

So how do we get from where we are today to where we can be? I think that in this industry, there are three kinds of people. There are missionaries, there are mercenaries, and there are pragmatists.

Missionaries are the people who are pushing the frontier forward. They're the ones who are taking enormous risks and are willing to experiment with things that are still unknown to most people. Mercenaries are the people who see a gold rush, for example, there's a gold rush happening in AI. There was a gold rush in crypto and there will be again, in my opinion.

So naturally, that's going to attract a certain kind of individual. But the people who are going to help to scale this technology are the pragmatists. They're the ones who are going to take the lessons we've learned from web2 on how to build user interfaces and products and empower users in such a way that enriches their experience rather than taking away from it.

That's going to be one of the big challenges and opportunities for a lot of developers and leaders who are in this web3.”

Justin Swart on the impact of gaming on web3:

“Our hope, and what we fundamentally bet the firm on, is that gaming will be the toolset and the mechanism that helps users cross the chasm into this new web3 world.

If you just start at the top, there are 3.6 billion gamers out there. You may think of gamers on very high-end expensive PCs. But in truth, the parent waiting for their kids at school and playing Candy Crush is also a gamer, particularly given the amount that they spend on in-game purchases and in-game items.

If you narrow it down, there are already 2 billion PC gamers out there in the world if you want to talk about more traditional and hardcore gamers. What's ingrained in those kinds of behaviors is stuff that is very aligned with what's happening in the cryptocurrency space. What you're seeing there are gamers living in virtual economies and being used to thriving, working with complex at times, but also simple virtual economies, buying stuff in virtual economies to live in this space.

They’re buying items that they can own or they have ownership of a character they’ve built in an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), for example.

It all goes back to an example that Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum) gave on why he created Ethereum, i.e., his World of Warcraft account got nerfed. He was so infuriated that he decided to build a world computer where you can remove these impacts and build something a bit more trustless and a bit more permissionless.

Sterling Campbell on what really matters in web3:

“When we look at things, it's always under that lens of how much longevity something has. A protocol that aligns usage, ownership, et cetera, is one that is venture investable while the more flash-in-the-pan, quick-hitters are ones that we've seen time and time again.

Ultimately, usage and ‘what works’ trumps all.

Something that we've seen with stablecoins, for example, is that people just actually use them and that they find value in them.

They don't care and they have no alliance or allegiance to what protocol they're using. If Tron is the cheapest, they'll use Tron. If Solana is the cheapest, they'll use Solana. Whatever makes this as easy as possible to get to the end result that they're looking for. They (stablecoin users) have little allegiance and I think that that's the most important part because we get so caught up in dogma and touting bags. It's more important to understand, at the end of the day, the use cases trump everything.

Whatever creates the best possible experience for the end user is what will win out.”

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Before diving into this week’s newsletter, this is just a quick heads up: if you're building in web3, or you know someone who is, the next class of the Techstars Web3 accelerator takes place in Spring 2024, and applications are open now.

As web3 is global and borderless, so is Techstars Web3. Although most of the accelerator content is delivered virtually, the class does meet up in person for a week at a time at the beginning, middle, and end of the program in different cities around the world. Jump on over to the Techstars Web3 website to learn more and apply.

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More Media & Events

Today (20-Nov-23) at 4pm GMT/11am ET, I’m hosting a virtual session with Alex Tapscott, author of Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier (Harper Collins).  We'll also be joined by Justin Swart from BITKRAFT Ventures and Sterling Campbell from Blockchain Capital sharing their insights on what to expect next with Web3.

We’ll finish the session with a crowd Q&A, so register here and get your questions ready!

This Week’s Podcast

One of the best parts of running a podcast is the hundreds of hours of content that we end up with, and I get to go through and pick out the best of each conversation.  Sometimes, the content is from just one conversation, and the output makes its way to your ears as a full-length interview or as a topical Money Talks segment.  Every once in a while, I like to go back through and curate the most insightful things that multiple guests have shared on a specific topic, and we end up with episodes like our Web3 Wishlist that we produced this week.  

This one was a bit different, as I also reached out to a few friends in web3 that I had not yet had the opportunity to interview for the podcast, and I jumped right to the end result with this one question:

“What would you like to see web3 founders solve, or if it’s easier, what would you like to see them do more of or less of?”

What we ended up with focuses on user experience, digital identity, decentralized finance, AI, regulatory issues, real-world assets, broader real-world applications and a few personal traits that we’d like to see bubble up to the surface in terms of founders’ modus operandi.

The diverse panel includes John Hallahan from Fireblocks, Arry Yu from the U.S. Blockchain Coalition, Hesus Inoma from i13 Ventures, Niamh O'Connell from CasperLabs, Prashanth Swaminathan from Woodstock Fund, Sean Lee from the Crypto Council for Innovation, Clarisse Hagege from Dfns, and Lou Kerner from the Crypto Oracle Collective. 

Here’s a summary of what our experts said:

• User Experience - we’d like web3 to be less clunky, but still with bomb-proof security.

• Digital Identity - this is a huge opportunity with real-world applications, and no one is getting it right just yet.

• Interoperability - our past, present and future is multi-chain, and we need to be able to transfer assets freely and securely across blockchains.

• Crossover value - AI with web3, DeFi with real-world assets, consumer apps with blockchain, insurance with DeFi.

• Regulation - not all jurisdictions (ahem…Uncle Sam) are at the races and need to get moving

• Founder mindset - be the adult in the room, don’t launch a token if you don’t need one, and learn fast from your mistakes.  

The Web3 Wishlist

John Hallahan is Director of Business Solutions & Advisory at Fireblocks, whose mission is to enable every business to easily and securely support digital assets and cryptocurrencies. John is also a fantastic mentor for the Techstars Web3 program and one of the Irish blockchain OGs who I've known as long as I've been in this space.

“Fundamentally for me, there are three things at the moment that are stopping widespread adoption. I think the first one is in relation to UX. Anyone's aware if they've used MetaMask or any dApp, the user experience is pretty clunky.

So how do we solve that UX problem? I think we had really good examples of people looking to solve that last year (in Techstars Web3), like TrustWare. But there are so many UX areas to focus on, whether they're B2B or B2C, so this for me is still a key one. 

Linked to that (UX) pretty clearly is identity, because if you have a self-sovereign identity or some form of a verified credential across different chains and different ecosystems, that's going to be a good way to connect and ensure that the UX isn't clunky going from Algorand into ETH, into Solana, and back into another chain. So identity, which can be cross-chain, would be a really interesting problem to solve as well.

And then I feel like we've gone from private chains to public chains, and we're noticing a lot of private chains again, and now we're seeing people building across different ecosystems. Fundamentally for things like central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins to take off, we need to have a level of interoperability across different blockchain ecosystems. 

Those who are looking to solve that (interoperability) by bridging or other mechanisms like minting and burning would be interesting to me.”

Arry Yu is the Co-Founder and Co-Chair at the U.S. Blockchain Coalition, a coalition of state blockchain associations, organizations and influencers across the country cooperating to ensure the United States is a leader in blockchain, web3, and distributed ledger technologies (DLT).  Arry Yu originally appeared in episode 235.

Arry is also a startup founder, venture investor, and entrepreneur in residence, and by all means, she can command the room.

“So far it's all about digital identity. I've seen lots of digital identity solutions and we've talked about the trust over IP frameworks and there's W3C and DIDS, but I haven't really seen a good thing that brings everything together and solves this idea of digital identity across borders, across organizations, across cities.

I think that's really important, and then there's the idea of DAOs. Conceptually, it makes a lot of sense, but when you apply it practically, it's still a mess, and we need something that allows us to coordinate as people and as jurisdictions and as organizations and as regimes more eloquently, and we just don't have a good way of doing that right now.

It's just a patchwork of random working groups and people getting together.
Are these the right people that are in these working groups in the first place? Do they even know what they're doing? I'd say like 90 percent of them know. This is just a lot of burning hours and pomp and circumstance and resources being created that aren't ready for showtime.

When I look at web3 founders, I ask, do they have all the ingredients or the capability to be the adult in the room, whether it's with their startup or a room full of lawyers, because they're going to have a room full of lawyers.

Are they able to be the adult in the room and command attention and respect? I’d say 90 percent of founders that I meet in the web3 space, I say, no, I don't believe that you were going to be able to command attention and respect from all the lawyers and the accountants and the government people and the letters from the three-letter agencies that are coming your way.

Eventually, are you going to be able to command attention and respect? No. And then are you going to be able to command attention and respect from adults that you may hire? Like you want to be always hiring better than yourself, but are they going to respect you or are they going to walk all over you?”

Hesus Inoma is the Head of Strategy & Innovation at i13 Ventures, whose purpose is to co-create and back products and services grounded on first design principles for the new era of the web.

Hesus and I first met back in 2018 when he was a startup founder in Insurtech, shortly before he fell in love with DeFi. You can listen to Hesus’s founder story way back on episode 10.

”My top three things I would like to be solved in web3 over the next few years haven't changed that much, to be honest. I think the initial one will be founders in the web3 space falling in love with the problem and not the technology.

I know there has been some evolution on that, but does the founder truly understand the problem they’re solving, the opportunity in solving that problem and have they done their research on their go-to-market strategy?

The second one is that I think we have to see more web3 founders becoming more design-led, user experience-led companies, and the backend is what it is. We need to make beautiful, simple user experiences to be able to onboard more customers to web3.

The third one is from left field, but very close to my heart, as I'd love to see more insurance capacity coming into this space. By having more insurance capacity in web3, founders could unlock more innovation and educate a new vertical: institutional clients from the insurance and reinsurance space.  These players could potentially trial more products in a growing web3 ecosystem as well.

I’ll keep an eye out for that insurance capacity because we badly need it for DeFi projects.  This (insurance) needs to be solved to scale DeFi at the enterprise level.” 

Niamh O’Connell is the Enterprise & Partnerships Lead (U.S) at CasperLabs, the first blockchain built specifically for business adoption. 

Niamh is also one of the co-founders of BlockW, which is focused on fostering inclusivity and creating awareness of blockchain and other emerging technologies. Niamh was one of the original team at ConsenSys in Dublin in 2018 before she moved to the US with Casper Labs in 2021.

”Self-sovereign identity is hands down without any doubt at the top of my list. There are billions of people around the world without a formal identity, and so having a solution like this would be absolutely life-changing for these individuals. Having access to essential services like banking and healthcare, which weren’t possible for these individuals before, would just be huge.

We're making progress when it comes to the number of solutions that are under development. But I do think we are a couple of years out before we're going to have solutions that we're able to use daily. It's not an easy task. What's at hand here? We need solutions that are not only secure, user friendly, and scalable, but also accessible across different devices and systems that we're using today.

What's linked to that then is around regulation. Particularly when it comes to identity as well. It's a particularly sensitive subject, but regulatory bodies are grappling with how to approach blockchain. We're seeing a lot of progress made on the crypto asset regulation side of things, which is great, but in some places more than others. 

With blockchain in general for governments, it’s naturally taking time for them to establish regulations to balance innovation with user protection of different applications that are outside financial services. This is going to affect the timeline of identity solutions that are widespread and available. 

The last point is around open standards. We need open standards to enable developers to build more interoperable applications that are more user-friendly.

It would be awesome to have these applications that are so easy to use and set up and download just like it is, for example, with Apple products today. If we're able to get to that level of UX when it comes to these types of dApps, that would be amazing, as we’re also able to safeguard our digital assets with that dApp.”

Prashanth Swaminathan is a Partner at Woodstock Fund, a thesis and research-driven fund, investing in early and growth stage Web 3.0 companies and protocols.

I met Prashanth recently thanks to an intro from the force of nature that is Techstars Web3 mentor JD Salbego (thanks JD!). Prashanth is also jumping in as a mentor for Techstars Web3 in 2024.

”I'm just thinking of areas which have large addressable markets where there is potential for 10x improvement on the incumbents, that is true to the ethos of web3 and also does add real value to the user base, whether retail or institutional.

So my first theme here would be the intersection of AI and web3. So as we have seen, OpenAI has taken off massively, but it's also obviously quite centralized. If we can use web3 in AI models going forward, where we use crowdsourced data sets with an incentive layer and where we can use blockchain for authentication of data and also the outputs, it will just make these elements and models much more secure. It will also be easier to identify the ownership and authenticity of the outputs as well. 

This is one area that really could be worked on because AI is not going anywhere, and AI overlapping with web3 makes it a lot more powerful than AI as a stand-alone.

The second area is the overlap of DeFi, which is decentralized finance and RWA, which is real-world assets. So we know that DeFi as a technology has proven itself to limit the necessity of intermediaries in financial instruments and it's highly programmable.

If you can combine that with real-world assets and provide real-world use cases, such as using stablecoins and last-mile ramps to provide on-chain credit to small and medium businesses and enterprises or provide on-chain credit or investment opportunities to the gig economy, that just makes the technology so much more powerful in addressing real-world cases.

Everyone knows that the credit crunch for SMEs or SMBs is a multi-trillion dollar industry and the gig economy is also at least a billion-plus people in the world. So these are large addressable markets to be built upon. SMEs/SMBs and gig economy workers struggle to find credit and investment products in the real world. So, DeFi as a technology and using stablecoins and on/off ramps can provide a massive (boost) to these parts of society.

DeFi allows for transferring capital on-chain, which is 10x faster and cheaper than incumbent TradFi methods. So I think this is the second opportunity that we can look upon.

The third and final one is slightly more generic, but something I like to call the application layer. We see a lot of applications already in web3, but I think most of them serve very small communities.

What we should be focusing on are areas where there are a significant amount of users, and where a web3 application can provide a meaningful improvement over its web2 incumbent applications, not just existing web3 apps.

‘Meaningful’, at least in my mind, is a 10x improvement, either in cost or service or experience or a similar type of metric that the users would appreciate. The sectors I'm thinking of here are GambleFi, SocialFi or gaming, right? All of these three sectors, gambling, social interactions/ social media, and gaming are all huge ‘hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-worth’ industries globally.

They can all go on-chain and users across the globe can participate in these networks like they do with their web2 equivalents. But web3 versions of these apps, if created with easy UX and a strong go-to-market, can provide the type of incentives that can help users move from web2 onto web3. 

Applications in these sectors can do well in the next cycle. To summarize my top three areas, number one is the intersection of AI and Web3, number two is the intersection of DeFi and real-world assets, and number three is an application layer focused on GambleFi, SocialFi, or gaming.”

Sean Lee is the Senior Advisor and APAC Policy Lead at the Crypto Council for Innovation, a global alliance of crypto industry leaders that are advocating for responsible and healthy regulations in the digital asset industry. Sean Lee originally appeared in episodes 201, 207 and 238. 

The one and only Niall Dennehy, who is a Techstars alum, co founder of AidTech, Techstars Web3 mentor, a super-connector, our 11th MoneyNeverSleeps guest, and our number one fan, introduced Sean and me last year.

Sean is also the former head of Algorand, and one of the most helpful and energetic Techstars Web3 mentors we've got.

“Building a Web3 business does not mean you have to launch a token. I don't know why there's this misconception that there has to be a token and that token is going to drive a community ownership mentality and this and that.

If you're building a blockchain network, it makes sense (to have a token), because you are creating almost like your own economy, and within your own economy, you need a unit of transfer that allows you to facilitate value transfers. But that doesn't mean you need a token for every web3 project, and I think there's a misconception out there that you need to do so.

So I consistently tell people now, if you're going to create a token, you better be darn sure that you can explain exactly what that token is for - that’s number one.  Number two, you better be sure that you do not explain to people that your business model is only hinging on the token going in one direction. That is not a business model. It doesn't matter what it is, that is not a business model.

So if you don't need to create a token, but you're creating a Web3 business, and you don't necessarily need the token, why create it? I understand the allure of doing it, we've all seen the last four or five years of all of these crazy projects, and if it goes well, what it could mean for the founders. That's not sustainable. Time and time again, don't create something for the sake of creating it. Because that is not the right way to do it.”

Clarisse Hagege is the founder & CEO at Dfns, providing web3 wallets as APIs and wallet-as-a-service infrastructure that enables crypto developers to forget about private key management so they can focus on building what matters most — their applications.  Clarisse Hagege originally appeared in episodes 202 and 207.

“What we need in web3 is real-life use cases. Today, there are quite a bit of infrastructure solutions for engineers to build. What we're missing is use cases where you don't talk about web3 or NFTs or crypto. The tech is here and it's completely possible to build an embedded web3 app to solve real problems. Remittance, banking the unbanked, cash trapped for large corporations, product passports, tokenization use cases with new distribution channels, amongst others.”

Lou Kerner is the founder of the Crypto Oracle Collective, a decentralized web3 advisory firm, and also the DAO for Crypto Mondays, which is the largest crypto meetup in the world with active chapters in 54 cities. Lou Kerner originally appeared in episode 237

“I always joke that I think that the most important word in the English language is balance, and I don't think you can ever get balance. So I think more about where I want to be out of balance. One of those places I want to be out of balance is I want to make too many mistakes. I think that the vast majority of people massively overestimate the cost of making mistakes and they're scared of making mistakes.

Mistakes are how you do your best learning. When you make mistakes you learn what not to do. I think more founders (and not just web3 founders) could benefit from making more mistakes.”

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