Software developer, turned VC at @papervc. Helping build @AltitudeFi_. Member @daedalus_angels.

London, England
Joined November 2007
Gate Ventures Podcast | Episode 12 The Evolution of Crypto Capital Markets & Where DeFi is Today 🌟Guest: Ivailo Jordanov, Partner at Paper Ventures @ivailoj @Papervc 🎤Host: Jeremy Wallis, Partner at Gate Ventures @fintechblocks DeFi proved that markets can run without intermediaries. But execution, clearing, margin and collateral — the parts of capital markets that actually move size — are still mostly off-chain. So where does durable value really accrue as this stack migrates? Ivailo joins us to map where crypto capital markets are today, what's genuinely moving on-chain, and what stays hybrid for longer. We’ll discuss: 🔷 Where durable value accrues next — execution, settlement/clearing, or collateral & margin infrastructure 🔷 Pure on-chain venues vs. hybrid models that keep traditional rails for larger tickets 🔷 What's still blocking institutional order flow and bigger ticket sizes from moving on-chain 🔷 Structural gaps in institutional stablecoin liquidity, FX conversion & atomic settlement 🔷 Programmable markets: tighter spreads and capital efficiency, or new fragmentation and basis risk? August 20, 2026, 11 AM – 12 PM UTC | 7 – 8 PM GMT+8 LIVE on Gate Ventures' X Set your reminder 👇xitter.cf/i/spaces/1rGmqpV…
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Why issue a memecoin for your product when you can name your product after an existing memecoin 🫣
Replying to @OpenAI
Sol is our new flagship and a step function better than GPT-5.5. Terra delivers performance competitive to GPT-5.5 at 2x lower cost. Luna is our most cost-efficient model, delivering strong capability at our lowest cost. Together, the GPT-5.6 family gives people and developers more choice in how they balance intelligence, speed, and cost.
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The story of @Morpho is a great example of why investing should never be just based on the initial product. The @daedalus_angels team met @PaulFrambot and @MerlinEgalite during their pre-seed raise. Personally, I didn’t like the idea of the optimiser because i generally don’t like products built on top of/dependent on other products. Based on that this investment would have been a pass… However it was clear that the Morpho team was not going to just stop there and they were iterating and pushing code like crazy - their github was like a blinking Christmas tree - backing this team was a no brainer no matter what the initial product was going to be…
Oh wow, lots of memories from Morpho Optimizer. This made me want to share a few stories about the original story, vision, and name of Morpho. Morpho Optimizer was Morpho’s first version (now deprecated). It grew to $ 1B+ in deposits and kicked everything off for us. The idea was simple: we built a peer-to-peer matching layer on top of existing lending pools to optimize rates for lenders and borrowers, while piggybacking their liquidity. At the time, the vision was to progressively evolve the Morpho Optimizer matching engine so it would rely less and less on the pool model as a fallback, but on active participants, until one day it could metamorphose: from the little caterpillar living inside the apple into a beautiful independent butterfly flying on its own. That was already in the original 2021 whitepaper. And yes, that is why we are called Morpho (at least the main reason). That said, we had to pause that vision because we had one big realization: the biggest problem in lending markets was not just capital efficiency. It was resiliency. As one of the largest integrators of lending pools, we got to experience firsthand what it meant to build a multibillion-dollar integration on top of DeFi infrastructure. And honestly, it felt to risky to support global financial infra. That is why we built Morpho Blue: immutable and simple code, isolated lending markets, infrastructure that gives integrators control, and a lending stack that can actually scale safely. BUT: Morpho Midnight brings us back to the original vision of Morpho Optimizer: becoming fully free from legacy constraints and building a true market for credit. Midnight also has a very powerful feature called callbacks: it lets lenders and borrowers use pools "as they wait for a peer-to-peer match" This is what I was secretly most proud of in Morpho Midnight: it is both the ultimate vision of both Morpho Optimizer and Morpho Blue at the same time
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You can now borrow against SOL on @Coinbase, powered by @Morpho. Active crypto-backed loans on Coinbase also just hit ATH. DeFi mullet is just getting started.
Borrow against $SOL, now available via @coinbase. Powered by Morpho.
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Lido is the new hub for home stakers. CSM (Community Staking Module) now has 559 node operators and 558k ETH, making it one of the biggest permissionless staking protocols on Ethereum. CSM is for cat people, drunk serbs (me), ETH maxis, new dads and you. CSM is for everyone. 🥰
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Ivailo retweeted
The infrastructure designed to move money will soon put money to work. Morpho will be powering lending on @Tempo for humans and machines, across the world.
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While Aave eats itself from the inside, just use @Morpho
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I don't think @hosseeb's argument suggesting that since certain categories of products didn't work out in the past they are doomed and will never work holds up - in fact, this argument very much ignores history - the history of the internet and the world wide web... The initial uses of the web started out as a tool for academics to share research, and within a short period of time one of the major use cases was porn. During the late 90s (the dot-com bubble) pretty much everything that was tried on the web failed and a lot of ideas were even laughed at - Pets.com (pet food delivery), Boo (fashion shopping), Webvan (grocery deliveries) - the list goes on and on. These startups were well capitalised and a lot of them even went public, and yet most died out... Today we couldn't imagine life without ordering our groceries via the internet or getting our pet food delivered. Had entrepreneurs and investors simply taken these failures for granted, assuming these types of products will never work, we would still be lugging our pet food on our backs from the local mall.
With all due respect to Chris, I completely disagree with this take. Chris argues that "web3," particularly crypto-powered gaming and media, failed due to scams and regulation, and that better regulation will unlock these non-financial cases. OK, think about this for a second. Does this pass the smell test? Do you think web3 gaming failed because of Gary Gensler? Do you think web3 media plays failed because the scammers crowded out the honest media innovators? Really? If this is true, why didn't they kill financial crypto, which had WAY more of both? Financial use cases were right in the crosshairs of the regulatory harassment, and they also attracted way more scams. Why shouldn't we instead accept the more obvious answer: non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them. Let's just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test. It was not Gensler or SBF or Terra that caused these things to fail, it was that no one wanted any of it. Pretending otherwise is cope. Enormous sums of capital and talent explored these ideas, and we should acknowledge what we learned. That lesson is not "if we just had better laws, then finally people would finally be using decentralized Spotify" or whatever. Call a spade a spade. Every single use case in crypto that has worked at scale has been financial in nature. 2008: Bitcoin - non-sovereign store of value 2014: Tether - stablecoins 2015: Ethereum - programmable money 2017: ICOs - capital formation 2018: Prediction markets (Augur, later Polymarket) 2020: DeFi - literally finance is in the name 2021: NFTs - non-fungible financial assets (to the extent they worked) 2024: RWAs (the year BUIDL took off) All this stuff was adopted bottoms-up. We as investors discovered that people wanted to do these things with crypto. The web3 consumer stuff, on the other hand, was primarily conjured up by investors and pitch decks, ZIRP accelerationism, and "wouldn't it be crazy if" blog posts. This was the opposite of the "what smart people are doing on their weekends" thesis. In fact, if you go back to the Ethereum white paper from 2014, almost every single Ethereum use case Vitalik describes is financial in nature: token issuance, stablecoins, derivatives, on-chain treasuries/DAOs, on-chain savings, insurance, price feeds, escrow, gambling, prediction markets. It's all in there. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Finance is almost 10% of GDP. It's an enormous part of the world economy, and banks are some of the lowest NPS score companies in the world. People hate their banks and the outdated financial architectures their money runs on. It's literally why Bitcoin was created. There is so much to innovate in the realm of finance, and I truly believe we are only at the beginning of that displacement. You don't need to assume anything more to project the next 10x in crypto. The old saying goes "crypto will do to finance what the Internet did to every other industry." I respect Chris's optimism. But 18 years in, we should not be propagating this meme about consumer web3 use cases as though they're inevitable. If you are hanging around the rim hoping that crypto is going to disrupt media and gaming, you should know the history and look at it with clear eyes. Now if you as a founder believe that despite that, you know the secret to cracking this market--I respect that, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone to follow their convictions. But I think it's important that investors be honest that all the evidence points the other way.
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This is the thing with $SNX - it can be sleepy for a long time, but when it goes it really goes. @kain has baked it in the code during his dictatorship.
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Got our first @crunchlabs box. May i remind you @MarkRober a disk shooter in the hands of a 9 year old is effectively a weapon. We now have wear protective goggles and the cats are nowhere to be seen 🫣 On a serious note, what a fantastic concept. Can’t wait for the next box.
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Really enjoyed reading Never Enough by @awilkinson, found it hard to put down - highly recommend it.
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Someone wake @cz_binance up. The wait is over!
Waiting for the new headline: #Bitcoin "CRASHES" from $101,000 to $85,000. Save the tweet.
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ETH-backed loans on @coinbase, powered by Morpho The world's most iconic DeFi Mullet is ready for another expansion.
If you believe in somΞTHing, this one's for you. ETH-backed loans are here. You can borrow USDC against your Ethereum, unlocking liquidity without selling. Available now in the U.S. (ex. NY).
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Me using profits from this mini pump to fill the hole in my PnL
Me making first payment of 50-year mortgage
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New addition to the family meet Paper and Profit
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Interesting read. Not sure i fully agree - on the one hand it sort of makes sense, but it misses the major difference that pre-IPO early employees and investors (insiders) are unable to sell (excluding some secondaries which are a minority). So post IPO the distribution from insiders to public market investors is natural and well known. This of course is not the case with bitcoin as anyone has been able to sell all along, there is no lockup and while @jvisserlabs is right in pointing out the additional liquidity from ETFs and DATs liquidity was always available, so unsure while early large holders would have to have waited till now. Having said all that, i do also agree with the author that bitcoin is not really crashing in the way we have seen it crash before, yes the PA is boring, but definitely not crashing and the pattern does look like regular consolidation.
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Dare Market has raised $2M led by @Karatage_ and @Papervc to build the most unhinged platform on the internet. On Dare Market, anyone can accept, post, or fund dares with cash or crypto that turn internet culture into viral moments that pay.
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dont hold any snx currently but would be stoked for @kain if the new instance on ethereum becomes a hit the guy is the cockroach of DeFi - never quits, always in the arena trying things someone i really respect
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