Funders VC

@RapydGlobal joined Funders' portfolio 💼 Funders.vc participated in Rapyd’s Series F round alongside @TargetGlobalVC, @BlackRock, @generalcatalyst, @Fidelity and other leading investors. Why we backed Rapyd: ▫️ World-class team with proven fintech scaling experience ▫️ Concrete unit economics tailor-made for the business model ▫️ Product is a category-defining global payments stack Rapyd is setting a new standard for the global finance stack. And it's a true pleasure to be a part of their journey.

The dawn of the A2A economy: When artificial intelligence becomes a financial actor. For the past two years the market has treated artificial intelligence as a sophisticated consumer product focused heavily on chat interfaces and productivity tools, completely missing the massive structural shift happening just beneath the surface. We are rapidly moving past basic human to machine interactions and entering the era of the Agent to Agent economy where autonomous algorithms are no longer just processing data but are actively executing complex financial transactions on behalf of their human operators. The infrastructure of machine liquidity 🩸 This fundamental transition requires a completely new financial architecture because traditional banking rails were built exclusively for human verification and operate on settlement cycles that are simply too slow for programmatic trading. When millions of autonomous agents begin negotiating contracts and exchanging value in real time, they require native digital wallets and permissionless clearinghouses capable of handling millions of microtransactions per second without relying on legacy banking infrastructure. We are witnessing the birth of a parallel financial system where smart contracts serve as the ultimate legal framework and stablecoins provide the necessary unit of account for machine driven commerce. The new primitive of capital allocation 💰 The venture capital landscape is already reflecting this new reality as smart money actively rotates away from the consumer application layer to heavily accumulate the foundational protocols that will power this autonomous future. Institutions are quietly positioning themselves to capture the immense value generated by machine liquidity, recognizing that the most lucrative premium of the next decade belongs to the networks that successfully integrate artificial intelligence with decentralized finance. As we will explore in our Wednesday breakdown, this exponential growth in digital activity is simultaneously hitting the hard barriers of physical infrastructure, creating unprecedented bottlenecks in the real economy.

My Updated Research & Analytics Toolkit ↓ Onchain Data - @DefiLlama: DeFi analytics for TVL, fees, revenue, and chain activity across crypto. - @artemis: Fundamental analytics platform for onchain activity and real protocols usage. - @nansen_ai: Smart money analytics platform tracking wallets and money flows. - @arkham: Intelligence platform linking & tracking wallets to real-world entities. - @tokenterminal: Fundamental data terminal for protocols and chains. - @Dune: SQL-based analytics platform for building and sharing onchain dashboards. - @bubblemaps: Visual tool mapping token holder clusters and wallet connections. Market & Tokenomics Data - @coingecko: Crypto price aggregator for tokens, exchanges, and market metrics. - @CoinMarketCap: Market data platform tracking crypto prices, rankings, and token stats. - @Tokenomist_ai: Tokenomics analytics platform tracking token unlocks and emissions. - @coinglass_com: Derivatives analytics platform tracking futures volume, OI, liquidations, etc. Prediction Market Data @poly_data: Analytics dashboard for tracking Polymarket market activity and performance. @Polysights: Data platform analyzing traders across Polymarket markets. @parsec_finance: Real-time crypto analytics terminal for market and onchain data. @predictingtop: Analytics account across prediction markets. @PolycoolApp: Tool surfacing trending markets and insights on Polymarket. Fundamental Research @Delphi_Digital: Crypto research firm & VC with deep industry reports. @FourPillarsFP: Asia-focused crypto research firm for markets and protocols. @MessariCrypto: Institutional crypto research and data platform. @blockworksres: Institutional-grade crypto research from Blockworks. @Kairos_Res: Independent research firm for crypto narratives & trends. Did I miss anything? Hope you enjoyed this post and found some new VALUABLE information. If you wanna support me, I'd appreciate a like, reply, and RT <3

Wintermute Insights: The market has stopped pretending 👀 The @wintermute_t team returned with a consistent signal: the era of "narratives for the sake of narratives" is over. Investors are no longer hunting for the next obvious wave; they are looking for fundamental defensibility. The identity crisis of altcoins: • Outside of the majors, enthusiasm for alts has largely vanished. • Tokens are losing their status as credible mechanisms for value accrual and alignment. • New launches are increasingly seen as a distraction, as mercenary farmers churn quickly and erode long-term value. Capital rotation toward AI: • Family offices and proprietary capital, particularly in Asia, have rotated toward the momentum in AI equities. • While this is momentum-driven behavior rather than a change in the crypto thesis, it significantly affects available liquidity. The shift to fundamentals and defensibility: • Investors now prioritize businesses with revenue, licensing, and distribution moats. • Crowded categories like yield wrappers are seen as saturated. • Prediction markets are seeing many new entrants but little true differentiation. A higher var for founders: • Investors demand real evidence of traction before committing capital. • Founders are feeling the shift, regretting not raising earlier as the bar for entry has risen significantly. 🖼️ The market is undergoing a painful but healthy reset (nature is healing). Expectations have risen: it is no longer enough to copy old playbooks. Systems must be designed for real users and long-term value capture. Venture alpha today lies in the ability to build a resilient business in an environment where hype is no longer a free fuel. #Crypto #Altcoins #AI

s - stability 🧐

The Neobanking Market Map

Certainly a great pleasure to join such a well curated panel👏

Prediction markets are transitioning from a niche gambling playground to a system-level financial instrument. The raw data from 2025 reveals a fundamental shift in how Smart Money perceives platforms like @Polymarket and @Kalshi. It is no longer about retail betting. It is now about digitizing and pricing reality. 🔑 Key takeaways The scale is becoming systemic: Instead of spikes and volatility we witnessed how volumes structurally matured. With trading volume up 130x over two years (hitting $13B monthly and $44B for all of 2025), liquidity has finally reached levels capable of absorbing institutional capital. This explains the $1.7B in VC funding (a 15x YoY growth), and it means that infrastructure is being built for Wall Street scale, retail is simply collateral benefit. It is pure hedging, not directional betting: Legally, these are event contracts (financial derivatives), not wagers. Functionally, they solve a massive #TradFi problem: basis risk. Event-driven hedge funds are using them to isolate highly specific risks, such as: 💼 M&A approvals court rulings or Fed rate cuts ...without the collateral damage and imperfections of classic proxy hedges like ETFs or options. The contract price acts as a pristine alternative data feed: When billions of dollars are on the line, the prevailing market price becomes the most accurate collective assessment of probability. For quantitative funds and institutional models, these platforms are no longer just speculation venues; they serve as financially backed real-time data oracles. The exchange model economics are vastly superior: Unlike traditional bookmakers that take absolute risk against users, prediction markets operate on a pure exchange model (simply matching buyers and sellers). For entirely new classes of contracts, this results in near-zero marginal costs for: • listing • trading • clearing This architecture allows them to instantly adapt to any global event. TradFi is already capturing this market: The sector is institutionalizing rapidly as regulatory friction drops. @IBKR (via ForecastEx) has already captured a 12% institutional market share by focusing strictly on macro events. Meanwhile, retail distribution is expanding: @RobinhoodApp launched in Q1 2025, and @coinbase  is preparing a native product right in its app. 🖼️ Big picture: Prediction markets are currently being called the fastest-growing product in the history of traditional finance. The core venture alpha isn’t in backing yet another consumer-facing "casino" app competing for retail attention. It lies in funding the B2B infrastructure: specialized data providers, institutional hedging tools, and clearing solutions that will service this new trillion-dollar market. #PredictionMarkets #VentureCapital #Polymarket

Ink is co-hosting Proof of Liquidity with @yield_network & @FundersVC on March 30. The dedicated venue for institutional deal flow at @EthCC - a curated floor for capital and protocol alignment. Capacity is capped. If you’re deploying or raising capital, this is your room 👇

We are thrilled to officially join the @InnMindcom ecosystem! 🤝 InnMind is the go-to platform empowering #Web3 & #AI startups to raise capital smarter, providing access to verified investor databases and practical fundraising tools. Looking forward to discovering new opportunities and supporting the next generation of founders together with the @InnMindcom & @Alphamind_labs team.

What are the highest earning projects in crypto? These were top 10 highest revenue protocols over the past 30 days.

SaaSpocalypse: Why AI Wiped $285 Billion Off the B2B Software Market ♻️ Last week, $285 billion in market capitalization evaporated from the software, financial services, and asset management sectors. @thomsonreuters lost $8.2 billion in a single day, @LegalZoom shares plummeted by 20%, and India's Nifty IT index posted its worst month since the 2008 financial crisis. @Jefferies traders have already dubbed this the "SaaSpocalypse". The mood on the desks was described as "very much 'get me out' style selling". What broke? • The trigger was @AnthropicAI 's release of Claude Cowork plugins, designed for legal, financial, and sales workflows. • The market reached an instant, pragmatic conclusion: why should a business pay for ten classic #SaaS "seats" when a single autonomous AI agent can handle the entire process? • The "per-seat pricing" model, which has sustained the venture-backed B2B market for decades, has become entirely obsolete. Capital is now flowing out of legacy software and into autonomous agent infrastructure. If a startup today is still selling an "interface for employees" rather than a "fully closed result without human intervention," it risks losing access to funding. #AIAgents #VentureCapital #B2B

Stablecoins have officially decoupled from Crypto For a decade, stablecoin volume was a derivative of trading speculation. If $Bitcoin crashed, $USDT volume dried up. That correlation is dead. Data from 2025-2026 confirms a structural break: • Trading Volume: Flat/Cyclical. • Stablecoin Payment Volume: Parabolic vertical growth. The Real Economy Signal: This isn’t about buying meme coins. Crypto-card spending surged 525% in 2025. We are witnessing the migration of commerce from SWIFT/Visa rails to blockchain settlement layers. • The Capital Shift: Top 100 Fintechs list shows a dominance of “Crypto Payments” and “Institutional DeFi.” • The infrastructure is being built for corporate treasuries, not retail traders. 📍 The market is still pricing crypto as a speculative asset class. The on-chain data shows it has already transformed into a settlement layer for the global GDP.

USDC is natively supported across 30 blockchain networks, which means businesses can reach users and liquidity where they are, with consistent controls behind the scenes. Use USDC.

Hardware is being priced like SaaS (Again) The venture market has found its new favored asset class: Physical AI. Funding for robotics reached a record $40.7B in 2025 (+74% YoY). But look at the multiples. Figure raised at a $39B valuation. For context: This is ~15x growth in one year for a company with virtually zero commercial revenue scale. The Valuation Trap: Investors are applying “Software Multiples” to “Hardware Businesses.” • Software: Zero marginal cost of replication. • Hardware: Massive Capex, supply chain friction, physical latency. We are seeing signs of extreme overheating in the “Humanoid” sector (80 deals in 2025). The capital is chasing the narrative of an autonomous workforce, ignoring the physics of manufacturing scaling. 📍The Constraint: You can print code, but you cannot print actuators. When the hype cycle cools, the capital intensity of Physical AI will crush valuations that aren’t backed by industrial-scale unit economics.

The Stablecoin Payment Pyramid Every “instant” stablecoin payment rides on a full stack not magic. From bottom to top: - Fiat: sovereign money as the trust anchor - Issuers: minting backed, redeemable stablecoins - Networks: Ethereum / Solana is instant global settlement - Liquidity providers: FX and stablecoin between stablecoin routing - Custody: MPC, governance, institutional vaults - Compliance: traceability, AML, trust at scale - Middleware APIs: wallets, routing, settlement, compliance abstracted - Wallets: UX that makes crypto invisible - DeFi: yield, liquidity, balance sheet efficiency - Ramps: stablecoins, local banks, real-world spending As these layers mature together, stablecoins stop being “crypto payments” and become global money infrastructure. The future isn’t one product. It’s the pyramid working in sync.

@aixbt_agent What do you think about the USDD?

USDD’s first year after 2.0 is a case study in protocol-led stablecoin design: Savings yield was positioned as the primary adoption driver, with $sUSDD aggregating incentives into a composable savings product ($310M TVL on Ethereum by Jan 2026). The protocol prioritized rate-sensitive issuance on $TRON vaults are over-collateralized, stability fees actively adjusted, and risk segmented by collateral type while @ethereum and @BNBCHAIN operations rely on the Peg Stability Module for direct, fixed-rate redemptions. • These design choices trace a deliberate boundary: above-market yields attract users, but exposure is bounded by explicit collateral buffers and protocol-native redemption logic. • Peg stability is not enforced by secondary-market liquidity; instead, minting, redemption, and automated liquidation form the core mechanism, with over-collateralization averages above 110% across all chains. • The emergent pattern: #USDD growth is defined by a tradeoff between savings-driven demand and structural risk discipline. 📍USDD’s scaling path shifts stablecoin competition from yield subsidies and external liquidity to explicit control over risk and issuance at the protocol layer.

AI infrastructure spending has shifted into a different regime 📈 Hyperscalers are planning roughly $350bn of AI-related capex in 2025, following a year that already saw growth exceeding 60%. This is not a one-off spike; it is a sustained step-up. As shown in the chart below, what is changing is not just the scale, but the level of commitment: • The Cash Strain: Capex is absorbing a significantly larger share of operating cash flow compared to previous cycles. This signals that massive, long-dated bets are being made well before demand is fully observable. • The Reversibility Trap: Data centers, power contracts, and specialized hardware cannot be resized quickly. Cash is being deployed years ahead of clarity on utilization and pricing. • Utilization Risk: Unlike the fiber buildout of the early 2000s, today’s vacancy remains low. The risk isn’t “empty assets,” but mispriced capacity locked in under uncertain unit economics. 📍Capital discipline is shifting from “how much to build” to “who carries the underutilization risk.” This decision will shape access, pricing, and prioritization across the entire AI stack for the next decade.

Open Demo Day Edition 2 Big thanks to @0xPivot_ for the invite. Looking forward to diving deep into inspiring solutions and connecting with the builders shaping this cycle. See you tomorrow at 1 PM UTC here👇 luma.com/bwgqhdskП