lamp

@suraj_sharma14 @paradigm + @Taisu_Ventures

If you're building in Web3 & hunting for your funding round. Here are the VCs actively writing cheques in 2026: 1.) Paradigm (@paradigm) Raising a fresh $1.5B fund right now. Backed Uniswap, Optimism and Monad. Focus: AI x crypto, DeFi infrastructure, stablecoins, autonomous payments. Early stage. Research driven. Most selective fund in Web3. ➾ paradigm.xyz 2.) a16z Crypto (@a16zcrypto) $7.6B raised across four funds. Most active crypto VC globally. Backed Compound, Dapper Labs, Yuga Labs. Focus: L1s, DeFi, consumer crypto, AI agents, Web3 infrastructure. Pre-seed to growth stage. ➾ a16zcrypto.com 3.) Pantera Capital (@PanteraCapital) First US crypto VC. Investing since 2013. $1B fund with $200M+ allocated for AI x crypto. Backs both tokens and equity. Focus: AI infrastructure, DePIN, decentralized networks, L1s. ➾ panteracapital.com 4.) Binance Labs (@BinanceLabs) Venture and incubation arm of Binance. Chain agnostic. Multi-stage. 900+ applications last season. Less than 2% accepted. Focus: AI applications, DeFi, Web3 infrastructure, consumer apps. ➾ labs.binance.com 5.) Coinbase Ventures (@cbventures) Most active crypto investor in 2025. 87 deals closed in one year alone. No fixed check size. Backs anything growing crypto adoption. Focus: Base ecosystem, stablecoins, AI agent payments, infrastructure. ➾ ventures.coinbase.com 6.) Hack VC Built by developers for developers. Team includes builders and quant researchers not just investors. Focus: AI applications, on-chain infrastructure, early stage crypto. Pre-seed and seed specialist. ➾ hack.vc 7.) Polychain Capital (@polychain) One of the most active early stage crypto funds in the world. Focus: decentralized AI networks, GPU tokenization, AI data infrastructure. Known for deep technical due diligence. ➾ polychain.capital 8.) Dragonfly Capital (@dragonfly_xyz) Top tier crypto only fund. Multi-stage. Global focus. Strong presence in Asia + US. Backed dYdX, Compound, Optimism. Focus: DeFi, infrastructure, consumer crypto, AI x blockchain. ➾ dragonfly.xyz 9.) DWF Labs (@DWFLabs) One of the most active investors in Web3 globally right now. Multi-stage. Backs tokens and equity. Fast decisions. High velocity. Best for founders who need a quick answer. ➾ dwf-labs.com What VCs actually want in 2026: Not hype. Not whitepapers. - Working code - Real users or traction - Clear answer to "why blockchain" - Team with skin in the game - AI x crypto angle is a major plus Crypto VC funding surged 433% in 2025 to $49.75 billion total. The money is there. The bar is just higher now. Build something real. Then go find your round. Save this. Share it with a founder hunting for funding right now.

@llamaonthebrink @VitalikButerin @rstormsf Knew a company that was looking into privacy chain and their own wallet, strong team confident in their PMF. as soon as this news about his arrest popped they immediately cut operations.

The entire industry should be rallying behind @rstormsf and praying that he wins his Tornado Cash case. He built an honest privacy tool, and he was punished for it. That’s unacceptable. But from a different perspective, our industry also NEEDS him to win. We need it because otherwise none of the new privacy protocols will dare to build something truly empowering without ultra backdoor cucking and self imposed limitations. Today we have tons of new “privacy” products that are utterly scared to open the flood gates. Not a single good tool exists. Aztec V1 was the second best after TC and they sunsetted it. We need PrivacyPunk to come back. And for that, we all need Roman Storm to win. Free Roman ✊

@BetterCallMedhi China didn’t “accidentally” 😂

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

2026 is the year we take back lost ground in computing self-sovereignty. But this applies far beyond the blockchain world. In 2025, I made two major changes to the software I use: * Switched almost fully to fileverse.io (open source encrypted decentralized docs) * Switched decisively to Signal as primary messenger (away from Telegram). Also installed Simplex and Session. This year changes I've made are: * Google Maps -> OpenStreetMap openstreetmap.org, OrganicMaps organicmaps.app is the best mobile app I've seen for it. Not just open source but also privacy-preserving because local, which is important because it's good to reduce the number of apps/places/people who know anything about your physical location * Gmail -> Protonmail (though ultimately, the best thing is to use proper encrypted messengers outright) * Prioritizing decentralized social media (see my previous post) Also continuing to explore local LLM setups. This is one area that still needs a lot of work in "the last mile": lots of amazing local models, including CPU and even phone-friendly ones, exist, but they're not well-integrated, eg. there isn't a good "google translate equivalent" UI that plugs into local LLMs, transcription / audio input, search over personal docs, comfyui is great but we need photoshop-style UX (I'm sure for each of those items people will link me to various github repos in the replies, but *the whole problem* is that it's "various github repos" and not one-stop-shop). Also I don't want to keep ollama always running because that makes my laptop consume 35 W. So still a way to go, but it's made huge progress - a year ago even most of the local models did not yet exist! Ideally we push as far as we can with local LLMs, using specialized fine-tuned models to make up for small param count where possible, and then for the heavy-usage stuff we can stack (i) per-query zkp payment, (ii) TEEs, (iii) local query filtering (eg. have a small model automatically remove sensitive details from docs before you push them up to big models), basically combine all the imperfect things to do a best-effort, though ultimately ideally we figure out ultra-efficient FHE. Sending all your data to third party centralized services is unnecessary. We have the tools to do much less of that. We should continue to build and improve, and much more actively use them. (btw I really think @SimpleXChat should lowercase the X in their name. An N-dimensional triangle is a much cooler thing to be named after than "simple twitter")

I don’t think yall understand the gravity of what you’re looking at in this picture. This should infuriate every single one of us.

Ethereum is scaling.

CT watching the first dead body from the 10/10 liquidation cascade wash up, not knowing what comes next.

NEW: 🇰🇵DPRK has begun hiding malware on blockchain. Result, decentralized, immutable malware. Nearly impossible to remove. Research by @Mandiant

Are these the same Citi analyst that reported stablecoins underperforming the rest of the crypto market in 2023

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview in March 2025 with the understanding it would only be released after her death. This is her final message from it.

Rescued chimpanzee thanks Jane Goodall by giving her a hug

@c0xswain Haha nawww I wish but hopefully I can snag some next year

@0xStew yessir, are u in town

jk guys not for sale FOC for f8 frens iykyk

E-mode has landed on Venus 🚀 With frens @pendle_fi @ethena @SolvProtocol @Aster_DEX @lista_dao, experience a supercharged yield strategy on @BNBCHAIN, starting with stablecoins. BTC and BNB groups to follow. Venus is the way.

wtf is the new defillama UI

🚨 There’s a large-scale supply chain attack in progress: the NPM account of a reputable developer has been compromised. The affected packages have already been downloaded over 1 billion times, meaning the entire JavaScript ecosystem may be at risk. The malicious payload works by silently swapping crypto addresses on the fly to steal funds. If you use a hardware wallet, pay attention to every transaction before signing and you're safe. If you don’t use a hardware wallet, refrain from making any on-chain transactions for now. It’s still unclear whether the attacker is also stealing seeds from software wallets directly at this stage. Excellent report here: jdstaerk.substack.com/p/we-just-foun…

Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre previously said "in no way, shape or form am I suicidal…" "Too many evil people want to see me quieted." Today, her death was ruled a suicide.

We went from extremely high tariff rates across the board to 10% tariffs and now tariff exclusions in less than 2 weeks. But yeah, it’s not because of the bond market