Partners to crypto builders since 2013
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Blockchain Capital retweeted
This was a fun convo at @money2020 on the future of prediction markets.
The real innovation of prediction markets is using markets to improve our ability to understand the future.
Sports has driven a lot of volume so far bc there's a big existing market for it, but the whitespace that I'm personally excited about is new event markets like company KPIs, macro indicators, clinical trials etc, where the markets can aggregate new and better information than what we currently have.
What is next for prediction markets?
Our GP @alekslarsen took the stage at @money2020 to discuss the opportunities ahead with @RobinhoodApp VP and General Manager of Futures and Prediction Markets @JBMackenzie_.
Thank you, @PulchraMens, for moderating the conversation!
Blockchain Capital retweeted
Called it...
On the one hand, this is amazing. On the other, history suggests that meme-driven revenue tends not to be durable long term. Ethereum went through this, and so did Solana.
The test for Robinhood Chain is whether it can turn this burst of speculative activity into something that lasts after the frenzy fades. And now is a great time to prepare for that transition. Attention is on the chain, the community is excited, and users are showing up.
Robinhood is also in a uniquely strong position given how central tokenized equities are to the current activity. There is still a lot of white space to build durable use cases around those assets.
It will be an interesting saga to follow.
Blockchain Capital retweeted
Welcome to the World One residency!
Welcoming @MattHoerl & @anshchopra_ as they start the World One residency today!
Recommend following them as they will be building in public around proof of human!
Thank you to the many people who applied so far! We have 3 remaining spots, can find more info here: world.org/one
Blockchain Capital retweeted
One of my bull cases for AI is that it will make uniquely human interactions 100X more valuable.
- Ithaca acquiring Bumble
- Longtime Endeavor/WME talent agency leader Ari Emanuel going "all in on live" with his new company, MARI
- Rise of experiential retail
The list goes on...
Today we announced an agreement to acquire Bumble.
Over the past six months, we’ve looked at hundreds of companies, asking which businesses would become more valuable as AI advances.
Bumble stood out.
As intelligence becomes more abundant, we believe connecting with the right person and forming meaningful relationships will become even more precious. And frontier technology can help more people find and build those relationships.
Our purpose at Ithaca is to apply frontier technology to things that matter. We acquire enduring businesses, transform them with technology, and hold for the long term. We focus on businesses not only for their financial potential but their ability to enrich lives.
Whitney and her team have built something extraordinary. Millions of relationships began on Bumble, and we’re honored to help take it into its next era. Together we intend to build the best company in the world for helping people find each other.
Let’s get to work.
Blockchain Capital retweeted
Anchorage Digital is expanding its global footprint.
USD accounts, available to eligible institutional clients through Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., are now also available through Anchorage Digital Singapore.
It’s time to upgrade how you bank.
We bring USD accounts, digital asset custody, global SWIFT wires, and 24/7 settlement onto a single platform.
More ⬇️
okt.to/Sl4mOW
Open an account: okt.to/Vvcr4K
Blockchain Capital retweeted
yes - the onchain gravity well is absorbing all assets xitter.cf/jonah_b/status/2048837…
Blockchain Capital retweeted
One argument for these expert data markets being somewhat durable is that there’s a lot of really niche knowledge in the world. There are so many professions and specialties, like certain areas of medicine, where much of what you learn on the job is not yet written down.
As a result, there may be a last-mile problem. Maybe we get the models 90% of the way there for some proffessions, but the last 10% is as hard as the first 90%. Then the same may be true for the next 1%, and the 0.1% after that. There will always be surface area the model hasn’t touched.
So, in the limit, yes, the waterline on these models could be better than humans, but this regime where there is still useful data on the margins may persist.
FWIW, I’m not taking a side yet on the durability of these markets. I’m more just thinking out loud. What do others think?
One question I have about the RL space: how durable are businesses built around expert-generated training data?
There’s a strange dynamic here. If you recruit experts to train a model in a niche legal domain and the RL works, you may eventually no longer need those experts. In that sense, you’re effectively churning through your own supply side: you spend money finding and onboarding expertise, use it to train the model, then have to move on and acquire a new pool of experts in another domain.
That feels different from a traditional marketplace. An Uber driver getting you from point A to point B doesn’t make that driver less useful to Uber. Another rider will still need a ride tomorrow. The act of providing the service doesn’t reduce the future need for the supply side.
With RL, the opposite may be true. The better the expert does their job, and the better the model learns from them, the less valuable that same expert may become to the platform over time.
There seems to be a few ways to think about this...
The bearish view is that these businesses are structurally working through their own TAM. As models improve within a domain, the marginal value of additional expert training falls, while the company has to keep spending to recruit experts in new domains.
The bullish view is that this dynamic may be true in the limit, but the limit is a long way away. Models may keep needing new environments, harder tasks, better feedback, and expertise across an expanding set of domains for many years.
Curious how people building in the space think about the durability of these businesses. My DMs are open as well.
Blockchain Capital retweeted
Part of why crypto gaming hasn't taken off yet is the difficulty of developing great games, meaning you really needed to win the hearts of great game developers. Now that AI lets smaller teams build increasingly ambitious games at lower cost, it feels like a great time to build at that intersection.
People are quick to write off entire categories in bear markets, but stronger property rights are a natural fit for games
Blockchain Capital retweeted
It’s no secret that AI is getting really good at hacking, and financial infrastructure is the obvious target. Why? Because the purpose of most hacks is ultimately to steal money. So why not cut to the chase?
One of the most obvious attack surfaces is agentic commerce. It’s still incredibly new, and unlike traditional software, AI is non-deterministic and vulnerable to things like prompt injection, hallucinations, etc. There’s a huge opportunity to build the security layer around it.
Importantly, solving the security problem is probably a gating condition for agentic commerce adoption. People are not going to hand agents meaningful financial authority if hacks are happening everywhere. In that sense, the companies solving security are also expanding their own TAM by making the market itself viable.
There’s plenty of historical precedent. Every major financial innovation, from credit cards to online banking, created new security risks and, in turn, new security companies and infrastructure to address them.
And who better to take on this problem than the leaders in blockchain security? Crypto has been one of the most adversarial financial environments in the world, where the code you’re securing is often literally open source to attackers and successful exploits can directly unlock money.
Awesome to see the leading crypto security team, @blockaid_, thinking about this problem. This will be an exciting one to follow.
1/ As consumer agents start to take off with Muse, Instinct, and others to come
We wanted to build a tool that would help researchers understand what’s actually happening under the hood
We were especially motivated by reports of Instinct losing users’ money
Here’s a demo of our Interceptor tool with Muse:
Blockchain Capital retweeted
if anyone has experience “working full time” with any training data collection platform for RL (eg. Mercor, Handshake, AfterQuery), would love to chat with you!
Just read this piece from my alma mater about a post-training startup that a lot of students have been working for to make side money.
I found it interesting. In some sense there's a dystopian element to it: students training their replacements. There's also an eerie similarity to gig work like Uber and DoorDash. This time it's for true knowledge work, which reinforces a lot of the fears people have about the future of whitecollar work, especially entry-level work.
On the other hand, is it crazy to believe data annotation is a category that gets a lot bigger from here? That a big portion of our economy will be focused on training LLMs? As long as there's interesting stuff to measure and things humans know that AI doesn't, there should be demand for this kind of data. This could be a growth category. Plus, I'm not convinced that the "AI takes all jobs" narrative is correct, and if anything, gaining fluency in working with LLMs could be an advantage for going into the workplace.
For a student, a lot of these roles pay pretty good money. Plus, you can do it from your bedroom.
Interesting category of companies to keep track of.
h/t @zile_cao for sharing this article with me.
Blockchain Capital retweeted
Great write-up on why and how the winning payment rails of the future may be determined by adoption in the densest and most global trading regions
"The core insight here is that payment rails spread from counterparty to counterparty, and so I’d expect them to spread faster through industries and businesses with many trading relationships across different markets"
Blockchain Capital retweeted
Why might the Pearl River Delta become an important node for stablecoin adoption?
@yuan_han_li’s premise is that, like other network-effect businesses, payment rails spread through their users, so he expects them “to spread faster through industries and businesses with many trading relationships across different markets.”
He goes on to explain why the Pearl River Delta, in particular, is an interesting geo to watch.
Blockchain Capital retweeted
start with someone’s first account and earn the right to be there for everything after. that’s what excites me about what NG.CASH is building. Mario and team have the right DNA to build for this next generation of Brazilian consumers
incredibly excited to invest as they lean into their crypto product roadmap 🔥
Blockchain Capital retweeted
really excited to finally announce our lead investment in @tarecredit!
we've spent a lot of time thinking about which assets actually make sense to tokenize next, and consumer credit is one of the more interesting candidates. consumer loans are standardized enough to price at scale, but the infrastructure around them is still incredibly fragmented.
tare is trying to give every party around a loan one shared record to work from, and rebuild a lot of the expensive plumbing sitting between borrowers and lenders.
great piece from @alekslarsen and @jonah_b on why we led the round:
Blockchain Capital retweeted
We're backing @tarecredit because the credit system is old, expensive, and ready for an upgrade.
Credit is heavily intermediated with slow and opaque manual processes and the plumbing alone costs borrowers and investors north of $100B a year.
It's finally become possible to rebuild the entire value chain around a single source of truth, using stablecoins, smart contracts and AI.
Led by co-founders @humancapitol @lucasvo and @keerthimoudgal, Tare is the perfect team for the job. Kevin helped build one of the first onchain private credit funds at Blocktower Credit after an extensive career in credit before, Lucas co-founded Centrifuge and is a pioneer in RWAs, and Keerthi was Head of Product at JP Morgan's institutional blockchain platform Kinexys.
We're thrilled to announce that we led their seed round alongside a great group of funds and angels including leading private credit firms like Apollo and Janus Henderson and founders like @StaniKulechov of Aave.
@jonah_b and I wrote more about our thesis below.