#Blockchain #crypto VC - Founder & Managing Partner @bcap. 13 years of building an industry, 1 founder at a time. Legal disclaimer: Views are my own.

Joined January 2010
Bart Stephens retweeted
An exciting new chapter added to the @Anchorage Digital and @Securitize partnership! Now they can mint and redeem any of the Anchorage Digital issued stablecoins directly with us.
Anchorage Digital Bank is bringing federally regulated stablecoins to @Securitize, the world's largest tokenization platform. Securitize mints and redeems directly with Anchorage Digital Bank, which also handles custody and settlement. One federally chartered bank, from mint to redemption. 🔗okt.to/2PLhOS
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Bart Stephens retweeted
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!
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Just 3 years ago, deepfakes on a single call could cost a company millions in losses. Today, @world_id allows human Zoom call participants to prove they are human as well as agents to carry Proofs delegated by a person. Excited for this team!
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Bart Stephens 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"
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Bart Stephens retweeted
By 2030, Gen Z is expected to account for 1/3 of Brazil's GDP, and NG.CASH is building a platform for these users. We're excited to announce our $15M investment in NG.CASH and proud to support them as they build financial rails in Latin America.
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Bart Stephens retweeted
We’re thrilled to sponsor The Free Toaster's inaugural Affiliate Marketing Summit for Lenders & Publishers in San Francisco this Wednesday, September 23. The Summit will bring together 150 of the top affiliate marketing leaders in consumer lending, and we’re looking forward to being part of the conversation. At Tare, we’re building credit market infrastructure to better connect originators with investors, and make it simpler to raise, deploy, and manage capital. We created our own first customer, a personal loan originator, to prove out the model and demonstrate gains across the end-to-end loan lifecycle. @humancapitol @keerthimoudgal & our head of Credit & Analytics, Jason Kremer will be there to share more on our vision, learn from operators how AI is reshaping acquisition and explore what those shifts could mean for turning borrower demand into funded loans. See you soon, SF! events.thefreetoaster.com/
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Bart Stephens retweeted
Thrilled to back the @tarecredit team helping build a better experience for credit borrowing and lending.
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.
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Investor @jonah_b @bcap makes some great points on the similarities (and differences) between new tech industries of crypto & AI. AI is higher stakes, and has some difficult PR challenges to overcome. Like crypto did in the early days.
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Incredible partnership for @krakenfx ! Nice work @arjunsethi @DavidLRipley @jespow and the entire team 💪🏻. It has been awesome watching u grow over a decade from the @bcap seed round investment to today 🙏🏻
Nasdaq Ventures is investing $100M in Payward as we advance tokenization together with the @Nasdaq Equity Token (NET) framework. Equities on-chain only works if it's built to institutional standard from day one. We're building it with the company that's run public market infrastructure for decades. → payward.com/press-release/pa…
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Bart Stephens retweeted
Some dogs just know how to hunt Quite literally in the case of TRM which is one of a very small handful of companies that actually knows how to identify, track and disrupt criminal activity. They’ve now packaged that expertise into an operating system for crimefighters to combat criminal activity at scale and that solution is resonating with the market. But also figuratively - over the past 8 years, @estebancastano, @rahulr0609 and the TRM team have repeatedly navigated their way to bigger and better opportunities because they genuinely care about actually solving their customers problems It’s awesome to see a company succeed consistently and repeatedly over several years but it’s even better when they hit *another* major inflection point in year 8. That made it really easy for us to back them for the third (!) time as a lead investor
Today, we are at a crossroads. As I write this, AI is saving lives by helping doctors identify diseases faster, and making education more accessible to people everywhere. It’s also being used to inflict harm on a global scale. TRM’s AI-in-Crime Adoption Index found that, in 2026, criminal adoption of AI rose 40% year over year. Today’s threat actors are using AI to execute scams, cyber attacks, and other forms of digital crime at unprecedented speed and scale. In the last 90 days, we’ve also seen a growing number of incidents where AI agents themselves have gone rogue. Business titans and religious leaders are sounding the same alarm: to realize AI’s promise, we need to protect people from its harms. The first line of defense is prevention. Model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are building stronger guardrails, and governments are exploring rules for how AI can be safely used. We call this the prevention layer. At TRM, we’ve spent nearly a decade fighting crime, from fraud and cybercrime to human and wildlife trafficking. That experience has taught us one thing, if nothing else: the prevention layer is essential, but never enough. Criminals will break through. When they do, it’s critical that crimefighters can identify the harm done, find the people and machines behind it, and take action: support the victim, freeze the funds, take down the infrastructure, arrest the offender, disable the agent, dismantle the network. The world needs a new layer of protection. We call it the disruption layer—and it's what we're building, right now. The operating system for crimefighters In 2018, we founded TRM to help crimefighters map how threat actors were using cryptocurrency. We analyzed petabytes of data, mapping over a 100 types of crime. Government agencies and financial institutions worldwide now use TRM to investigate complex criminal networks and combat financial crime. The more cases we supported, however, the more we realized: if we were going to equip crimefighters to disrupt AI-scale crime, crypto would be 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 of the story, but not the 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 story. To build a successful case, investigators must source intelligence not just from the blockchain, but also corporate records, cyber threat data, the dark web, and dozens of other domains. Today’s crimefighters need to use natural language to search across siloed domains, connect the dots and unearth buried insights, automate the rote work, and coordinate with partners across public and private sectors—all while preserving auditability and human judgment. In short, crimefighters need an operating system for the AI era. So we built it. For years, we’ve been developing this OS alongside the investigators who use it. Now, we’ve just announced a new round of funding, valuing TRM at $2 billion, to propel our work—and this fall, we’ll unveil the OS publicly, for the first time. If your organization needs to fight AI-scale crime, please reach out. We want to work with you.
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A great post by @_kinjalbshah, GP @bcap exploring some real world tensions and advantages of trustless networks like blockchains. The novel financial services built on them, thrive with human judgment augmenting the tech.
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Bart Stephens retweeted
Ads are cooked, open the internet to agents
"The old business model for the internet was a distraction" @samrags_ worked on Google Ads, a business that generates $300 billion a year. Every dollar of an ads business depends on getting a person to look at an ad shown to them while they are shopping for something else, whereas an agent doing the same shopping doesn't care for ads. Checkouts, flight bookings and product searches were never designed for agents to use in the first place. "It was actually built to block bots." He and his co-founder @rsproule started @merit_systems two years ago, after a stretch at Google and a16z. Merit built x402scan on top of Coinbase's x402 payment standard. It is a directory of what an AI agent can buy on its own. Sales teams can pull contact details through it, hedge funds can buy satellite imagery, and developers can even rent GPUs. It launched with about 100 items and now has close to 50,000. They then built AgentCash, the wallet the agent can pay from. The same balance on AgentCash works on both of the available machine payments standards - x402 and MPP. "The universe of agent payments today is very, very small. We're in the first inning, and we're talking 100 to 1000x growth in the next five years." Sam's full conversation with @_zacharyhughes: 2:46 - Choosing software over mechanical engineering 4:27 - How the internet got built in 1997 5:20 - How the web almost charged for every page 6:29 - Working on Google Ads, and the 2016 report 7:41 - Why the old internet ran on distraction 8:56 - Why agents will not use browsers or websites 9:35 - Why Instagram and TikTok are safer than Google 13:48 - What agents still cannot buy 15:49 - Where AI money went before ChatGPT 17:02 - Why your agent should answer to you 20:31 - Launching x402scan, and the boom that followed 22:32 - Inside AgentCash 24:12 - Buying data that only coders could reach 25:05 - Why checkouts block agents 27:35 - The business model for agent payments 32:21 - Why stablecoins fit agent payments 34:38 - What is holding stablecoins back 37:02 - Who Amazon's shopping assistant works for 38:00 - Open checkouts or private platform deals Episode 0056. Presented to you by @altitude
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Bart Stephens retweeted
A rare treat: 3 of 4 companies on stage were BCAP seed investments, 2 now publicly traded: @Securitize and @BitGo. Great panel at @SALTConference with @Securitize, @BitGo, @raincards, and @Paxos moderated by @pbartstephens covering tokenization, RWAs, stablecoins, and capital markets sentiment.
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Bart Stephens retweeted
The era of high-limit frontier model subscriptions is ending. Anthropic is cutting limits by 33% tomorrow. OpenAI's limits cratered after the 5.6 release. This has been obscured by semi-regular free resets, but those are soon to be phased out in favor of $80 paid resets.
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Bart Stephens retweeted
Ro, that’s insane. You want the state to loan money to the founder, who will then immediately give it back to the state as a wealth tax ? Meaning the state has not received any incremental receipts? What’s the point of that ? Unless of course you want the gov to own shares (something I thought you criticized) and possibly have control, of companies who underperformed, (or the funding market changed), and couldn’t pay back their loans over those 10 years ? And I’m sure the investors in those companies will be thrilled about their new partners. That will make for interesting board meetings. “Today’s first topic is trying to figure out how to motivate the founder(s). They just lost $250m of their shares in the company they founded, to the state of California. Anyone got any ideas ? “ But at least it’s amazing for state’s brand. “Cali, You make it. We take it !” Come on Ro. Ideology is not a strategy. @GavinNewsom
Replying to @RoKhanna @mcuban
Allow illiquid founders to pledge shares with a loan from the government to pay tax. The loan period is long but not infinite (e.g. 10 years). The loan is non-resource: at the end of the period, the loan is either paid back in cash, or the government assumes the shares.
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Congratulations to @bcap portfolio company @yellowcard_app. @chrismaurice is an excellent operator. They bring financial services to small businesses in Africa and elsewhere using stablecoins. Well done ser 🫡
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Over the last 14 years we have seen many crypto VC’s come & go, or pivot. There are others that excellent self-promoters on X. That has never been @bcap culture. We practice humility and want our founders in the spotlight . Not the VC firm. This @Bankless episode is a rare & timely glimpse behind our curtain, discussing contrarian views during a turbulent time for our industry.
Before 'the container', ships spent more time docked than at sea. Our GPs @CremeDeLaCrypto and @alekslarsen joined @TrustlessState on @Bankless to discuss the power of standardization. What the container did for supply chains, the token aims to do for global markets.
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