“It’s not a shift. It’s picking where you want to focus.” BR ran two books from day one: venture and liquid trading. Both worked. Liquid worked better. - Liquid means you can buy and sell at any moment, 24/7, no weekend, no closing bell. - Venture was successful. They were simply better at liquid. - CoinFund made the opposite call: stay in VC and exit liquid. The constraint is still the market itself: - Outside the top coins, size is hard. Liquidity stays thin. - Strategies have capacity. Too much capital and performance drops. - The focus on liquid didn’t happen in one meeting. It accumulated through 2025 as venture deals slowed and the liquid book kept winning. BR Labs founder @rezosh on why they doubled down on liquid markets, not because venture failed, but because they were better there. nitter.cf/brlabsxyz/status/20994…

Stablecoins: A Financial Product That's Becoming Commonplace Stablecoins are becoming easier to use through products that already make sense to their customers: a dollar balance, a payment card, a business account, or a payout. The blockchain can perform part of the financial operation while the service provider handles the details that most customers have little reason to manage themselves. Western Union’s Stablecard launch in August is a useful example. The product combines a USDPT wallet with a Visa-secured credit card powered by Rain, initially available in 37 markets. USDPT is issued on Solana by Anchorage Digital Bank. The customer proposition is the ability to receive, retain, and spend dollar value through a familiar payment experience. That structure also shows why a stablecoin-linked card must be distinguished from a merchant accepting tokens directly. The card supplies access to the existing acceptance network. Its use does not establish that every merchant receives USDPT or that every authorization and settlement message is recorded on Solana. Different parts of the payment can use different systems while still forming one service for the customer. Stripe provides another example. Its stablecoin-payment documentation describes a customer paying with stablecoins while the payment settles into the merchant’s Stripe balance in local currency. The merchant can offer an additional payment method without choosing to hold the asset the customer used. Behind that experience, someone must manage conversion, custody or wallet infrastructure, liquidity and the connection to the merchant’s account. These arrangements widen the audience for stablecoins because the user can buy an outcome: receive a payment, hold a dollar balance, pay a supplier or spend at a store. The service provider takes responsibility for combining the necessary components. At its April Sessions event, Stripe expanded tools covering multichain balances, stablecoin issuance and cards, illustrating how much of the product work sits around the token transfer itself. For an infrastructure business, this shifts the competitive question toward the entire service. - What does a successful payment cost after conversion and withdrawal? - How long until the recipient has usable funds? - How often do transactions need manual intervention? - How are refunds, account restrictions, and failed payouts handled? A cheap onchain transfer can be valuable within that process, but the customer experiences the full journey. Our expectation is that durable adoption will follow providers that make the journey dependable across the corridors they actually serve. The more those providers absorb network complexity into ordinary financial products, the less stablecoin usage depends on customers identifying themselves as crypto users.

“The things we backed became some of the biggest in their category.” The portfolio pattern is simple, and it shows up in the names: - @1inch sits in the top three of intents. @CoWSwap is a leader in intents and DEXes. - Lido became one of the largest users of the neutral layer everything else is built on. - Nansen is what they call the Bloomberg of crypto inside the company. - Consensus is one of Ethereum’s core builders. - Solana is another one they remain proud of. What matters more than the multiple: - The premise was right. - Those companies became category leaders. - A few of them even changed what BR Labs does now. BR Labs founder @rezosh on why the proudest part of the book is not just the return, it’s who they backed.

Solana: Tokenized money should function between payments An institution choosing blockchain infrastructure needs somewhere to hold liquidity between payments. Settlement speed matters, but so does the ability to earn a return on temporarily idle funds, recover spendable cash when an obligation arrives, and reconcile the entire process with the institution’s own books. @solana is beginning to assemble more of that financial lifecycle. In December 2025, J.P. Morgan arranged a commercial-paper issuance for Galaxy Digital Holdings on the network, with Coinbase and Franklin Templeton as investors and USDC specified for issuance and redemption proceeds. This connected a short-term financing instrument with a blockchain-based cash leg. The value of that arrangement is that investment and payment operations can potentially share infrastructure. In May 2026, State Street Investment Management and Galaxy Asset Management launched the State Street Galaxy Onchain Liquidity Sweep Fund (SWEEP) on Solana. The private liquidity fund allows qualified purchasers to subscribe and redeem using PYUSD, subject to stablecoin availability in the portfolio. The product creates a way to move between a digital-dollar balance and an investment intended for cash management, with established institutions performing custody and fund-administration functions. That availability condition is central to the economics. A token can circulate around the clock while the assets behind it follow different market hours and liquidity constraints. Providing redemptions outside those hours requires available cash, inventory or another funding arrangement. Someone must carry the cost of making a continuously tradable claim usable when the underlying market is less accessible. The next stage is therefore about how well these components work together. A treasury team might want to receive stablecoins, invest an available surplus, and later recover the currency needed for settlement. Whether it can complete that sequence depends on investor eligibility, redemption terms, liquidity and integration between providers. The existence of each component does not yet prove an uninterrupted end-to-end process. This creates concrete engineering work: reliable pricing, execution across venues, inventory management, transaction monitoring, and reconciliation between onchain records and offchain obligations. Where assets or counterparties sit on different networks, moving between them adds further timing and liquidity dependencies. Those dependencies need to be priced and managed rather than hidden behind a fast block time.

BR Labs Ep. 09: Early Bets, Liquid vs Venture & Why Math Is Honest BR Labs founder @rezosh on launching the fund in 2018 when Bitcoin was $4k, the bets that became category leaders, why @CoWSwap and @pave_bank stopped being “just investments,” and why they doubled down on liquid markets, not because venture failed, but because liquid was where they were better. - (00:57) Fund launched in 2018 pitching when Bitcoin was $4k after the $20k rally. - (03:32) Proud bets that became category leaders: 1inch, CoW Swap, Lido, Nansen, Consensys, Solana. - (04:36) Latest example: Pave Bank. Founder-first, developer-first. 18 months later Axel led the Series A. - (05:21) CoW is no longer just an investment, they now run one of the top solvers on it. - (06:37) Not a pivot away from VC. Two tracks from day one. They focused on liquid because they were better at it. - (09:30) Venture tells you years later. Liquid tells you the same evening. Math is honest. Full episode is live now.