Investment thesis
DeFi protocols are financial services rebuilt as open software with no staff, no branches, and no middlemen.
Everything you can do with money inside the traditional financial system, you can now do on-chain. Borrow against your assets. Earn yield on your capital. Trade any asset, any time, against deep liquidity. Manage a portfolio. Take a derivative position. None of it requires a bank account, a broker, or a restriction to business hours. These protocols run continuously, settle instantly, and generate real revenue, with fees captured programmatically and recycled back into the system. The institution has been replaced by code. The middleman has been replaced by a smart contract. What remains is pure financial utility at a fraction of the cost.
Evidence locker
9 pieces
Research & commentary
Chain Street is the financial centre of cyberspace, a collection of DeFi protocols dismantling traditional finance by replacing trust manufacturing costs with code.
Part 2 of the Chain Street series confronts the dragons guarding DeFi’s promise, from technical risk and hyper competition to misaligned token holder rights, the asset problem, and the open challenges of privacy and identity.
Part 3 of the Chain Street series argues that history’s long battle between open and closed systems always ends the same way, and finance is next.
Part 4 of the Chain Street series introduces the DeFi Mullet, fintech in the front and Chain Street in the back, as the trojan horse that brings open finance to billions of normal humans.
Part 5 of the Chain Street series breaks down what you’re actually buying when you hold a protocol token, with a framework for assessing token rights, holder revenue, and the multiples that matter.
Etherbridge
Q2 2026 Outlook covers the big picture, bitcoin onchain data, ethereum onchain data and the five forces transforming the industry from cyclical growth to secular growth.
Crypto’s Underpants Gnomes era is over, and the painful transition into adulthood, anchored by institutional adoption, regulatory clarity, and trillions in real-world assets coming onchain, is just beginning.
Six months into a brutal drawdown, with crypto obituaries everywhere and the fear and greed index at all-time lows, the indicators say the bottom is in or close to it and the next bull market’s narratives are already taking shape.
Crypto enters 2026 hated, dismissed, and contrarian, but the macro setup, network fundamentals, and DeFi multiples all argue the four-year cycle is dead and the bull thesis has never been stronger.
Further reading
Book
The full Etherbridge framework for valuing crypto assets, contextualized around all four themes.
Read the ebookWhere the thesis leads, the fund follows.
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