Game Plan for 2026
Key Themes and Internal Priorities
Hello,
In the three years that we have been writing this newsletter, we have never encountered a moment where so many disruptive factors converged simultaneously.
On one hand, everything is being financialised. Pokemon cards? There’s a market for it. There’s one for betting on where Bitcoin’s price will be 15 minutes from now. There’s even one to bet on whether Jesus Christ will return this year. On the other, we are seeing a rapid decline in the accrual of value to tokens. The marginal bids from retail participants on exchanges are now with equities, ETFs, and meme assets. This shift changes how we as an industry think of business models and value capture.
We are also witnessing the rise of AI-induced slop taking over feeds at a pace like never before. When the cost of expression is low and the medium for doing so is easily game-able, everything said becomes a (growth) hack. Open your X feeds, and you’ll see countless views on how anything should be done. The means to produce noise have evolved, but the ability to filter signals has been on the decline. Our brains were never equipped to consume so much and understand so little.
Human attention has never been under attack more than it is now.
How does this translate to our work? Internally, we have identified three seismic shifts:
We will be tinkering with briefer articles with dense insights where the message is better served in a short form. Not everything has to be a 40-minute long read. Early on, it made sense to invest in long forms as it helped differentiate. We now have a critical mass of audience that allows us to tinker with briefer, quick snippets from founders.
We will be more explicit with our commercial investments. We have been committed to being the best partners to our portfolio of companies as narrative builders and strategic partners. Now that we are moving towards capital allocation, you will see more of our investments being covered on the newsletter. That involves communicating with our audience about where we deploy our capital and why. It is a natural evolution.
There will be a renewed focus on community. Our Telegram community is now close to ±5000 members strong. Our venture network is close to 100 firms. In this age of AI slop, communities that capture the attention of real humans, with reputations tied to them, will continue to stand out. Our in person events in 2025 were an effective way for us to meet and learn from many of you. Expect more of that. More real humans. Real. And human.
With that out of the way, I wanted to share what the focus areas for us internally look like over the coming year. In 2025, we mostly focused on the emergence of revenue in crypto and its economic ripple effects within the industry. In 2026, that equation inverts.
We believe that the crypto industry has reached a point of maturity where it is able to produce tangible impact on the broader economy. Firms that are able to integrate crypto into its operational flows will scale faster or see operational efficiencies that improvise unit economics. We see this playing out in three forms
The Stable-coinisation of Everything
Blockchains are structurally money movement technologies. Stablecoins are the most preferred form of moving money with this technology. With an entrenched duopoly of Tether and Circle, the sector is likely to start seeping into conventional business models requiring capital flow. The lowest hanging fruit here is micro-incentivising individuals with stablecoins. EarnOS rewards users in stablecoins for engaging with brands. The stables can then be used directly through Apple Pay.
Similarly, Architect Exchange allows traders to build exposure to currency markets (like USDEUR) and settle in stablecoins. Such models of value transfer cut down on conventional pay-out periods for traders and consumers alike. We anticipate more web2-esque businesses that benefit from faster money movement through stablecoin integration to emerge this year. In emerging markets, an inbound wire can take up to 60 days to clear. A stablecoin transfer takes two minutes on Ethereum and even lesser on other EVM and non-EVM chains. That is tangible progress. That is time the money could be reinvested into more productive use.
Enterprises Using Blockchains
Much like the internet, blockchains will go through phases of bundling and unbundling. In the last two years, everything had to be bundled onto singular networks as that is where (trader) liquidity lay. Capital formation through meme-like assets on Solana or Base determined where users went. In the next few years, we will see a period of unbundling where enterprise blockchains see more inbound liquidity. It is not so much about enterprise blockchains, but more about enterprises using blockchains to expedite functions that took forever.
Zk Sync’s Prividium allows enterprises to have customisable networks deployed with privacy. The Depository Trust Company is now moving towards tokenising assets on-chain. Nasdaq joined Canton recently as a validator. Each of these are moves that indicate that more traditional, institutional allocators will use blockchains albeit with trade offs. For founders, the choice is between the permissionless of a public blockchain or building the future of fintech with an extremely regulated partner that sees blockchains merely as infrastructure. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) backing Polymarket is an extension of this phenomenon
The focus on revenue in 2025 was a precursor to where crypto is headed. DATs were a way for large capital allocators (like venture funds) to access public market liquidity. For founders, the mechanism of doing the same would be to partner with enterprise blockchains, and avoiding tokenisation altogether. Instead, their margins will come from the take rates on individual products that are sold through institutional outlets.
Will this be the antithesis of open money? Yes but it is also a direction towards scale. Ultimately, many talented founders may lean towards enterprise blockchain ecosystems in the coming years as scale is more valuable for them than idealism.
New Market Primitives
Up until last year what could be done on-chain was throttled by limits of scale. Transactions were limited and fees would escalate if the number of users on a product surged past a point. This is not taking into account the lack of on-ramps and clarity around stablecoins in multiple jurisdictions. But with the Genius Act passed we might see more unique instruments coming on-chain.
This will play out in two forms. First is niche-specific financialisation. USDAI enables the issuance of loans against GPUs. Glow uses game theory to incentivise solar farms. We will see founders with deep knowledge of individual sectors leveraging blockchains as a mechanism to raise capital and deploy them in productive ways that were previously not done.
The second is geo-specific financialisation. Aspora - powers 4% of global remittance volume with a focus on 700k Non-Residential Indians. Understanding cultural nuances and regulatory structures will be key for such businesses to scale. They could expand into being a neo-bank that plugs into DeFi markets for yield and offers commodities, currencies, and equities by using perpetuals (perps) as a settlement market.
This also explains why we have been looking at perpetual exchanges. One of the means through which non-conventional financial products like energy markets could find avenues to hedge, trade or settle on would be perpetual exchanges. Currently, players like Hyperliquid and Lighter are focused on commodities and currencies. The extension of asset types to new ones that are not readily accessible in traditional markets is what will help them scale.
The next phase for crypto will involve more boring things that scale exponentially while building moats.
In many ways, this part of crypto rhymes a lot with the internet. But unlike what most VCs suggest ,we don’t think it’s closer to 1998. We think it is 2004. Firms have bundled and begun tapping into public market liquidity through IPOs. More institutional allocators are looking at the industry whilst demanding clear growth metrics. Early entrants have either booked profits and left, or lost it at the casino. New ones want more tangible measures of value generated.
Every industry has a phase where it goes from pursuing idealism solely to economic value creation because capitalism demands that sooner or later - we generate value that is worth paying for.
Crypto is currently undergoing that transition. From a cluster driven by idealism to one earning its keep amongst technologies that have matured enough to matter.
As for us, what it means is we have begun filtering ideas and our pursuits a bit more harshly. The tolerance for hypothetical business models have now been replaced with curiosity for what makes systems scale. The real and tangible. As storytellers, you can live in the hypotheticals. As capital allocators, you cannot. There is a thin line between conviction and blindness. If the market is an objective measure of truth, you want the stories you tell to be as close to the truth as possible to be able to weave both storytelling and capital allocation properly.
In some sense, that sums up where our focus lies for the year.
On finding and sharing more truths about systems that scale efficiently.
We will be back to regular programming on Monday with a breakdown of how RFQ systems work..
Sliding into the weekend,
Siddharth Jain