# Crypto VC Shifts to Founders, Privacy, and Agentic Economy

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-05-22

## Transcript

The activity and like, you know, a lot of the asset issuance is still on Ethereum.
I think if I had to like sort of pick one, I mean, I think all of them will matter.
The question is which one ends up being the.
The Clarity Act seems like it is on track to finally become a law.
Venture capital is pouring back into crypto in size for the first time in a while.
But where is it going and what should investors know about this?
Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that when your wallet gets too hot, it's time to vent your capital.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Thursday, May 21st.
And today we are joined by Min Teo.
Min is the co-founder and managing partner of Ethereum.
ventures a crypto startup focused venture capital firm which she launched in 2021 with ethereum co-founder joe lubin Min previously led investments at ConsenSys, and she has been making some big moves in crypto lately.
She's going to give us an inside look at all the alpha you need to know about where VCs are finding opportunities in crypto today.
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Make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
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And without further ado, welcome to The Milk Road Show, Min.
How are you?
Thank you, John.
I appreciate you having me on.
I'm really glad to talk to you today.
I think there's a lot of cool things you guys are working on.
But then before we get into Ethereal Ventures, I thought it would be a good place to start with you just telling us a bit about yourself and about Ethereal Ventures and what you all focus on in terms of venture capital investing in the digital asset space.
Absolutely.
So I'm originally Singaporean, grew up in Canada, have sort of lived in the US and in the UK for a lot of my life.
I started my career in 2008, so in the heart of the last financial crisis, which was a very interesting time to be doing investments.
I learned a lot about how things can go wrong and how not to catch a falling knife.
I did private equity and private credit for seven years and then helped build a fintech business in the UK.
that was focused at the intersection of payments and loyalty.
And that was actually my come to crypto moment.
You know, a lot of people talk about when they first bought Bitcoin or Ethereum.
You know, I bought it early, but sold it too early.
So it wasn't really meaningful to me, aside from a lot of FOMO.
But, you know, when I was actually working with our engineers to reduce our cost of payments, you know, I had this moment where I thought...
It's crazy that, you know, trying to work on new payments for your consumers, we can't actually deliver payments with a positive gross margin at the time.
Now that's definitely changed because of all the amazing regulatory capital that has been placed over the last decade.
By the time it just wasn't possible.
Because, you know, all the banks at the end of the day want to protect their business.
The backend is antiquated.
They know that the value chain is getting squeezed, but they're not going anywhere.
And my aha moment was, wow, we put all payments on, you know, you know, after reading Bitcoin, Ethereum, white paper, we put all payments on blockchain reels like users get.
Instant settlement, global by design, 24-7.
That's what the consumer wants.
And that's what really inspired me to move to the crypto space full-time.
I was fortunate enough to meet my now co-founder, Joe Lubin, and was leading strategic acquisitions and investments for him.
Eventually helped to sort of institutionalize the investment arm at ConsenSys.
And one of the companies at ConsenSys...
incubated early in the day was MetaMask.
And as MetaMask, you know, grew to beyond our wildest dreams when we incubated it, it became very clear that consensus also needed a proper corporate VC because every time I was talking to companies, they thought they would get a MetaMask integration, which was problematic.
So, you know, I think this was also coming on the back of many of our founders telling us that, hey, you guys should actually do this as a proper fund, as a proper team.
Like, we really like working with you.
You are very differentiated investors.
We also wanted to invest more cross-chain.
Consensus was very Ethereum-focused at the time.
And this gave us an opportunity to actually work with a broader group of founders, broader group of investors, and really fill a gap where we saw CryptoVC wasn't really delivering to founders.
So in 2021, we launched Ethereum Ventures.
So most of the team have been working together since 2018, doing exactly like, you know, what we're doing today, which is working with technical founders, being day one partners to them, meeting them where they are, wherever they are in the world.
You know, our team is also remote.
So we do have, we do cover a lot of ground and acting as co-builders to them, not just passive capital in their earliest inception and helping them scale their businesses.
So that's a bit about Therial.
You know, we are generalists.
We are very thesis driven.
So, you know, we try to sort of switch.
drop our theses every six months or so.
We just published our thesis document on our Twitter last week, if anyone would like to see it.
And that has led us to invest in companies such as Eigenlayer, Aztec Protocol, USDAI, and many other great DeFi protocols.
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Okay, thank you so much, Ben, for that context.
I think you guys have been very active in investing in digital assets, but some people may not know you, so I just wanted to give that context before we go further here.
And I saw an interview you'd done in...
for Fortune magazine recently, where you talked about how you guys have been outperforming a lot of other VC shops.
And I'm curious about what you look for in terms of finding opportunities for these outsized returns and lessons learned over five years of doing VC in crypto, which has been, you know, it's a long five years in crypto.
And just, yeah, how you go about finding this outperformance at a time when so many other VC peers have been sort of struggling in this space.
Yeah, I think crypto has been a roller coaster over the last decade and, you know, a team having worked together for...
mostly like the last eight years, I think we've seen sort of bull markets, bear markets.
We've learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way and try to integrate them as much into our process as quickly as we can.
You know, I think our performance has really come from having high conviction bets in people, underwriting theses for each investment, being early, also being patient and being willing to look stupid for a long period of time often.
You know, I truly believe that the key to success in crypto and more broadly in VC is about picking the right founders inside the narratives that will compound.
The thing that we try to avoid at Therial is to fall in love with a thesis or idea.
And when you're at the early stage, you do have to daydream about what the sci-fi, what the future can look like.
However, if you fall...
too attached to a certain idea, you sacrifice founder equality in order to have exposure to it.
And building a successful company from the ground up is an odds-defying feat.
A founder has to be somewhat maniacal to pull it off.
They're also the best arbiters of their time because that's the opportunity cost that hits them the most.
So if you backsmart people, you kind of got to follow what they have conviction in and support what they're building.
On the flip side, if you have a really interesting idea about the the founder is unable to execute on it.
The best you can do is get a middling outcome.
And that's not the business we're in.
We're really looking for venture-style outcomes where we can sort of return the portfolio with a single investment.
So I think staying founder first has really helped to keep us out of trouble because crypto in particular has a reflexivity that is very dangerous.
It makes a narrative chasing look like alpha for a short period of time.
And then you see a sharp mean reversion that's very, very brutal.
And I think many of us have learned that the hardware in the early days and we try to avoid it.
it.
You know, specifically on our performance, I think a lot of it, as I mentioned, is being early in a handful of names that we had general technical conviction and sizing up appropriately.
You know, Mark Andreessen has famously said that as VCs, the failure mode is not a failure of commission, but a failure of omission.
So we've had...
We've been fortunate to have had good exposure to our winners such as Eigenlayer and USDAI.
These were long-term bets that compiled over time and they weren't really driven by FOMO at the time.
They weren't very popular bets that other VCs wanted to take.
I think another differentiator is we really embrace liquidity as a feature, not a bug in crypto.
The ability to harvest returns through tokens, the ability to recycle capital into token positions.
This allows us to return capital LPs without waiting for traditional M&A or IPO windows.
I think crypto native fund construction really gives you flexibility.
to structure around liquidity.
So you aren't subject to deaf knowledge, just being stuck with high markups that you ultimately can't realize.
And finally, we avoid investing heavily in categories where we don't have a firm thesis.
This has helped us avoiding passing narratives such as, you know, play to earn and some of the gaming NFT things that sort of pervaded 2021.
And also some of the larger crypto blowups like, you know, Terra and FTX.
I think like, you know, crypto really rewards being early, but also.
rewards being right on timeline.
So it's not to say a lot of these ideas won't work out on the long term, but I do have to assess whether or not it will work out within the fun life cycle, which is capped at 10 years.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So you're focused on fundamentals.
You're focused on things that have a broad thesis behind them and not just pump chasing, narrative chasing, like you're saying, which is, I think, something all of us struggle with a bit in crypto.
You said you just published an updated thesis for ethereal ventures could you tell us just a little bit about what is in that updated thesis and and sort of like what sectors you guys are focused on right now in this market in crypto yeah we do have a lot of great ideas for founders in, you know, that we kind of group in three categories, new markets, TAM overhauls, and blue ocean categories.
It's quite dense document.
I recommend people go check it out.
But I do think we, you know, we see a few sort of shifts happening, you know, from user behavior, really optimizing for convenience and usability, sometimes sacrificing decentralization as part of it.
We see a lot of institutional adoption.
coming to the fore.
And we also see like, you know, AI and just generally changing how we see the world and overhauling like, you know, entire TAMs.
For example, we have Claude's release of Mythos.
I think a lot of people in crypto are quite scared from a security perspective and thinking about like how they can actually shore up defenses on that.
So, you know.
I think our thesis document will span lots of different markets like the intersection of on-chain credit with TradFi, which is something that is close to my heart as a former credit investor.
We also talk a lot about new markets, say new compute markets on chain that will allow people to transact for scarce resources in a decentralized manner.
There's also a lot on agentic commerce, agentic payments.
I do encourage people to take a look at that.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So there's a lot in there.
Min, I wanted to ask you specifically about something that's gotten a lot of attention here, a narrative that's really taking off, which is privacy.
And I know you guys have some portfolio companies that are focused on this, but I just want to kind of start with your high-level outlook on this.
Zcash has seen this enormous pump.
It's running up towards $700.
But we've also seen a lot of capital raises from other VC funds going into things like Circles Arc and Canton Network and Tempo, the Midnight Sidechain.
It just seems like there's a lot of privacy solutions coming to market right now.
Why has privacy become so important for crypto at this moment?
And just what's your outlook on this landscape of privacy solutions that are coming?
to the market.
Yeah, as you mentioned, you know, it's been a wild ride for Zcash, up more than a thousand percent year on year.
And I think, you know, our tempo canton raised more than a billion dollars, which is a lot of money.
There are three reasons for this.
One is structural, one is technological, and one is philosophical.
I think privacy is really getting its time in the sun because institutional adoption is real.
Banks are no longer just doing POCs.
They're actually really figuring out how to roll this out as soon as possible because the cost savings for them are real.
What the competitors are doing is also real.
So there is a real...
race to deploy.
And however, institutional build out is somewhat incompatible with full transparency.
That's something that institutions cannot accept.
So, you know, a salary that's being paid on Solana is probably a hedge fund that's building position on Ethereum can be front run.
Corporate treasury, like, you know, can be moving funds that's visible for everyone to see.
So until you fix that, you can't really get.
banks, asset managers, Fortune 500, Treasuries fully on-chain.
They'll maybe dabble a little bit, but until they actually get the privacy that they require, be it confidentiality, the full shielding of all details, I think it really varies by institution and by use case.
This is really what's stopping institutions from deploying at the moment.
The technological reason is I think thanks to a lot of great teams, Aztec Protocol included, cryptography now works at production scale.
So ZK technology is fully baked.
The technology is on power of demand.
This is, you know, with many different proving systems such as PLONG, ZKVMs.
And it actually works.
And it took many years of research and testing to ensure that it can work at this scale.
And these are very complex systems.
And, you know, it did take, I know sometimes people say like, well, why?
did it take so long like you know and i think sometimes people don't understand the magnitude of like you know when we think about things that are actually like transacting on chain in a very independent manner and to actually shield it properly and not leak any details like this is not a simple feat like when you actually do think about it at visa level level scale which is what we're really contending in the last piece i think is um There's a lot of regulatory and geopolitical pressures that's bringing up the original libertarian purpose of crypto, which is censorship resistant internet money.
And this is also like, you know, something, a dream that brought me to crypto.
I'm sure, you know, there's some part of you that came to crypto for it too.
And there's a lot of wealth seizures happening.
There's a lot of, you know, sort of data infringement that's happening.
So I think everyone sort of wants the real Swiss bank account.
And, you know, there's a multi-coin, Naval.
all biology have been positioning Zcash as like, you know, like how Bitcoin should have been, which is privacy preserving.
So ultimately, I think, you know, that's really driving like, you know, Zcash is being used as this next level sort of store of value that is privacy preserving and like, you know, in a lot of ways advantageous for like wealth preservation.
So I think, you know.
In short, the users of the technology and the capability of the technology are actually converging, and it's a really exciting time for privacy.
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Gotcha.
Okay, so there's the three pieces, financial, technology, philosophy.
They're converging for a lot of market participants at this.
particular moment in the market.
I want to ask you about some, you touched on this a bit, but I want to ask a little bit more about this.
Aztec Network is a portfolio company of yours you've been invested in.
And as you said, this uses some very complicated, well, not complicated, but advanced ZK, zero knowledge technology to bring this privacy solution to market.
Could you help differentiate this for me from other privacy solutions that are on the market?
Because there's Monero, there's Zcash, there's so many other ones.
What is unique about Aztec that got you guys interested specifically in this company?
in this solution?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, the way to think about a lot of privacy solutions such as Zcash and Nero is they're very useful.
It allows you to do private send and receive private payments.
What Aztec delivers is actual programmable privacy.
So you have private smart contracts and, you know, the differentiations are immense.
I think aside from that, they're Ethereum native.
They're fully different.
decentralized and there's real differentiation between them and permission environments, you know, where I think there's like.
a big reason for permission environments like Kenton and Tempo and other sort of bank-deploy blockchains.
However, I do think that some issuers will also prefer something that is broadly decentralized and more censorship-resistant for trusted issuance and settlement, and also composability with the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
Something that we hear...
quite frequently is a lot of institutions want to deploy on Ethereum for that reason, but there is no privacy and Aztec delivers that privacy.
And if you ask me, well, why hasn't Aztec deployed that yet?
Well, they're still quite new.
They're actually rolling out a product.
two weeks or so, which will be called Aztec Money, which I encourage everyone to check out.
And, you know, they're in a lot of institutional conversations that I think will progress quite nicely over the year.
The whole differentiation that, you know, at the mental model, I want people to take away with that is you do settlement on decentralized ledgers and you do execution on privacy technology.
And that's really what Aztec delivers.
That's truly differentiated.
I'm glad you brought up the different layers and levels of this product and of these solutions, because I think a lot of people are wondering, where does the value accrue?
Because you're bringing these products to market.
The idea, I understand it, is to bring a lot of not just retail capital, but institutional capital into the digital asset ecosystem and bring a lot of value, a lot of capital in for the first time.
Where does the value for them accrue?
Is it on the L1?
Is it on the L2s?
Is it just businesses that are leveraging these things?
How do you think about that in terms of of where the value accrues and how to capture that as an investor?
Yes.
So for, I do think like, you know, ultimately for a lot of these application, institutional applications, my personal view is that they will accrue to the application layer.
And if you sort of look at like the way that a lot of, and Specifically, I think what we're talking about is tokens.
A lot of these L1 and L2 platforms are measured by tokens.
I do think tokens are going through a bit of a moment where there's a bit of a shift to where investors value them like tokenized equity.
part of the issue that you see is that oftentimes these have very, very high multiples that they're trading at, right?
So it definitely fluctuates depending on like, you know, sort of activity on the chain.
But with that, like, you know, I, it does make me wonder, like, you know, how much further this can go.
Don't get me wrong.
Like, you know, Ethereum is, you know, ultimately hundreds of billions in terms of like, you know, value that is massive, more massive than any other company.
Right.
So I think you also have layer twos that are still like in depressed, like valuations valued at like one or two billion dollars.
That is also massive for any company.
But I think in the future, like what we are interested in seeing is, hey, all the underlying foundation is built now, like let's create really interesting crypto, like, you know, first companies on top of all these substrates that can do businesses in a very different way and capture value and unit economics in a way that, you know, the old, old organizational structures are not able to replicate, particularly in this agentic world.
I think it's very interesting, right, where you can kind of create new finance platform.
platforms that don't have the huge operations and customer support teams and still deliver fantastic products to users.
I think with something like Aztec, you also have native privacy attached to your product.
This is something that doesn't really exist in a lot of applications in Web2.
There's always a centralized entity that holds your data.
So I think there's a different way that we can build application-first businesses.
And I also think there is...
You know, there is a value from being application first as, you know, Hyperliquid is showing as well.
You know, I think they just eclipsed Solana in terms of, you know, value.
So it'll be an interesting race to watch.
Yes, there's going to be a lot of interesting races to watch.
And yes, you're right.
Hyperliquid is pumping its brains out right now.
It's like over 60 bucks just won't slow down.
Okay, I want to ask you, you've talked a little bit on the agentic economy and this intersection of AI and crypto.
I want to ask some questions about that.
But before we move on from this, I want to give the audience a sense and for myself to a sense of like the.
the products, the services, the businesses that you talked about that are unlocked by this and what that means in real world use cases for this.
Is this for individuals?
Is it for businesses?
Is it for governments?
You made a comment earlier about people paying payroll on chain.
Is that something that could happen here?
How do you think about this in terms of businesses on chain that are going to be unlocked by this and what that looks like?
Yeah, so interestingly, actually, Aztec has had a lot of inbound from governments, which is, you know, not something I personally would have expected.
I think everyone is, you know, but I do think everyone is realizing that this combined desire for online identity and digital sovereignty requires these neutral privacy enabling platforms, which is, you know, a fantastic thing to see.
You know, more recently, for example, Aztec's was used to ship the EU's example digital app.
So I do think we'll see a lot more of this over the next few years.
I think broadly speaking, businesses are the ones that have the most need for privacy.
you know, ultimately they are the ones who have the most liability from having sort of cookie crumbs on chain, which is the current status quo today.
For users, for the most part, Aztec will be in the background.
You know, they will use apps, which will look like traditional web apps.
Sometimes these will be built by startups, sometimes by big businesses.
I do think there's an open question.
How much do like end users and consumers pay for privacy?
I think, you know, in this paradigm, this agentic paradigm, that will really be tested.
But historically, the answer is not for you.
very much.
Right.
So, you know, I don't think that Aztec is really banking on that to change.
And this is why Aztec made the choice to be.
fully general and also permissionless.
So serving all of these users by providing them a platform which is neutral and which people can use without thinking about counterparty risk and building tooling that's well adapted to individual use cases, some built by Aztecs, some built by the developer community.
I think that really demonstrates the power of being open source and obsessed with developer experience.
So you can really run the full gamut of serving whatever use case you want.
Okay, so there's a huge galaxy of possibilities and everyone from governments to individuals is going to have some measure of interest here.
Yeah, we'll see how that race plays out.
I do want to ask some questions about AI and crypto.
And, you know, we at Milk Road have been very focused on this.
We have a whole nother brand at Milk Road AI.
We try to cover that industry.
But something I've seen you say in comments is that this huge rapid investment in AI has sort of made the investment of capital in...
crypto a little bit more measured, let's say.
But this intersection between AI and crypto, I think is something that there's a lot of attention and prototyping happening in.
And just love to hear your outlook for what this intersection looks like, specifically around agents, privacy, on-chain activity, and just what you're seeing at that space.
Yeah, I think there's almost a few questions imbued in that one.
So in terms of how...
like sort of the advancements in AI have changed how we work.
I think certainly from an underwriting perspective, we are very careful and sensitive to any sort of, you know, defensibility that might come from any sort of AI induced, like, you know, sort of releases, if you will.
Like, so will this actually be?
Could Claude or OpenAI release something that actually renders this completely useless?
And I think that can be said for a lot of different things.
It really is something that founders should think about before they spend their time on it.
I think it also changes how we think about modes.
Technological modes are maybe less valuable than they were before.
And it's more about distribution, business development, regulatory modes in today's day and age.
I think specifically for AI and crypto.
You know, there's so many possibilities there.
I think, you know, you have agentic payments.
You also have inference requiring verifiable, you know, compute.
You also have machine to machine commerce that also requires stable coins.
So there's.
Lots of intersections that we're keenly watching.
You know, one of our portfolio companies, Eigenlayer, is working at this intersection.
They're releasing new products and, you know, their current suite also allows for a lot of verification of inference, which I think is highly useful.
I do think that, you know, the Gentic payments is one that like is...
a lot of people are spending time now, I would kind of like break that down into three categories, right?
Which is, you have agent to, human to agent payments, meaning I'm instructing my agent.
And, you know, big question, when will we give like, you know, our agent, our credit cards to like book stuff?
You know, I have not yet, but maybe, you know, that might change very quickly in the next 12 months.
Then there's sort of agent.
to web like sort of payments ultimately you know if an agent is somewhat a bit more autonomous how do they actually like make these bookings would they prefer like stable coins would they prefer like credit cards um i think for these two categories it's going to be a mix like you know in payments we have this concept of share wallet and you could see like stable coins increase versus other categories for sure but um Because payments has so much regional and regulatory overlays to them, I think you'll really see a huge dispersion depending on the region, the use case, and it's ultimately going to be share of wallet.
The real interesting price is agent-to-agent payments.
And that's not really happening in size, and we don't really know what the requirements of that really look like.
I personally think it's actually like...
like one of the things that I've discussed with my team is how interesting would it be if like you know agents actually create their own like payments blockchain they're like oh it's so cute like you know like humans are trying to create something for us we can just build this ourselves and they built their own agentic block bitcoin that requires a proof of agent to mine it like you know I personally would love to see like sci-fi ideas like that even though I can't make money from it That's just you just opened like an entire dystopian future where the agents lock us out of our own value.
But we'll just assume that won't happen.
But so I do want to ask you about where you think the value from all this settles, because the agentic economy is something a lot of people are speculating about.
But as you said.
We still don't really know exactly what this is going to look like, where this value settles.
A lot of people think that it settles down to some version of Ethereum.
And I know that, you know, Ethereum and ConsenSys, you know, you work with Joe Lubin, you guys have kind of come out of the Ethereum ecosystem.
How do you think about that value capture and where that settles?
And do you think that that...
ultimately comes back to ETH in some way?
Or what is your outlook on that?
Yeah, you know, honestly, I don't spend too much time thinking about that.
Like, you know, we're a cross-chain firm at the end of the day, and we see a lot of advantages in multiple platforms.
So, you know, I think that we have teams building on Hyperliquid, on Solana, and there are unique reasons why they chose that platform to build their businesses on that make a lot of sense to us.
Like, I think...
a lot of the sort of tribalism on like where something settles.
I think this is something that we probably like, you know, don't think about as much because we think it's less relevant in today's world.
Like ultimately everyone is sort of like pushing to be better, faster, cheaper so that we can increase adoption and gain more relevance in the real world.
And I think that's what matters.
I mean, I do think that obviously there's a lot happening on Ethereum.
Like, you know, we have, you know, ERC 8004.
They have like, you know, Coinbase X402, which is technically on base.
And, you know, you have still 60% of stable coins on Ethereum, 33% of RWA.
So the activity and like, you know, a lot of the asset issuance is still on Ethereum.
I think if I had to like sort of pick one, I mean, I think all of them will matter.
The question is which one ends up being the...
default.
Ethereum probably does have a structural lead.
Can they defend it?
We'll see.
I think a lot of teams are pushing really hard to actually capture the price.
Trillions of dollars in real world assets are stuck off chain.
Real estate, commodities, private credit, all locked behind outdated systems that weren't built for a global 24-7 economy.
The fix?
Bring those assets on chain.
Problem is, most blockchains weren't designed for that either.
Yeah.
And there's, like you said, there's a, pretty intense race and competition around this.
But I agree with you.
I don't think that needs to be a winner take all.
And I think that the increasing...
development and expansion of all of these chains kind of helps all of them in different ways.
And so it doesn't have to be so adversarial.
So I appreciate that outlook.
And thanks for sharing that.
I want to ask a question about this.
Regulatory clarity has been something that digital assets have been seeking for a really long time.
And you've been investing in this space for a really long time without that.
But now we've seen the SEC, the CFTC collaborating on giving guidelines for this industry.
The Clarity Act seems like it might finally come through and give us a market structure bill on the books.
How big of a deal is this from your perspective and what do you think this unlocks for the next stage of innovation and investment in digital assets?
Yeah, you know, there I think regulatory clarity has really changed where a lot of the alpha lives.
Like, you know, when we think about like pre 2025, we were.
betting whether or not crypto would survive regulatory pressure.
It wasn't too long ago that, you know, we were the industry was just trying to hide from SEC enforcement's operation choke point.
We had a lot of founders like actually leave the US and build it.
businesses overseas because they were just scared to be a crypto founder in the US.
And that has, you know, how rapidly that has changed since like January 2025, regardless of anyone's thoughts on the current administration, I think has really been.
remarkable.
And as such, the game has changed.
Like now the alpha is batting on what gets built because the regulatory question has largely been settled, at least in the US and increasingly in the EU.
And that opens up entire categories that were very uninvestable two years ago.
I think there's like, you know, crypto now today is graduating from a very...
close ecosystem of crypto native users to a substrate on which AI and web infrastructure, institutional finance, consumer fintech apps will all build on.
And it's a very exciting time.
When I think about regulation, I think it kind of, I think it makes sense for us to sort of focus on like, you know, creating the aperture with, in which product companies with product market fit can actually build in one thing that you know and we talked about this and like you know earlier is i do think that the last few years we have been very focused on pushing blockchain platforms as general computing platforms And they certainly are that, right?
They have the ability to serve lots of different use cases and allow this fantastic tapestry for developers to build on.
However, if you look at a lot of, you know, other technologies such as computers, right, computers basically start to have like more of a military background.
Then after that, sort of like, you know, the science industry and then the business industry.
And it wasn't until they really nailed those use cases that, you know, they became smaller, faster, cheaper to be put in people's houses with like microprocessors and like graphical user interfaces and then became personal computers.
crypto, you know, we have to actually nail a use case really well.
And right now, what's been presented to us is payments and tokenization.
So payments for users, tokenization for institutions.
And what the regulatory clarity, like, you know, stuff like the Genius Act, stuff like a lot of like, you know, the ETFs being cleared, you know, we're crossing our fingers for clarity.
These ultimately, like, you know, even though some founders might say, well, I'm not.
building in that?
How does that really impact me?
But I think it allows us to really show that now that we have, you know, the regulatory question is settled, what can we actually build?
And I think it's really interesting to see the industry really just aggregating around these specific use cases, because we want to create that like magical aha moment for users, for like institutions, the same way that other technologies such as AI have.
And I have really enjoyed this conversation.
You have a wealth of experience and wisdom to share.
So I'm really glad you came on the Milk Road Show to share all this with our audience today.
I want to end with one question here.
I usually like to ask people near the end of the interview, what are you most bullish on?
What's your price prediction for things?
I'm not going to force you to give that kind of an answer.
I want to ask a different one here.
You have raised a lot of capital to deploy into crypto.
As my understanding is, your fund, too, is still a bit less than 25% deployed.
So you actively have capital to send out into the market here.
Where are you looking for the rest of 2026?
Is it privacy?
Is it payments?
Is it tokenization?
Is it something else?
Where's the bulk of your attention?
And where do you think you're going to be deploying some of the rest of this capital you've got raised here?
Yeah, it's an interesting question because, you know, as much as we are thesis driven, We basically have to look at what the market serves up to us and what the market serves up to us is what our founders like, you know, smart founders spending their time on daydreaming about.
What we've noticed is a lot of people are building on AI and crypto.
They're building in payments.
They are building in.
tokenization use cases.
Some of them are also building the supporting infrastructure of privacy, security, and identity.
And I would say that runs a gamut and we have interest in all of them.
We have theses in terms of what shape and company we would be excited about in each category.
I do want to mention one other piece that we remain to be excited about, but I do think has some stuff to figure out.
We still are very excited about DeFi.
we do think there are some security issues that need to be figured out.
I think it's so powerful where you have, you know, global access, you are delivering products to people who don't have them.
You have, you know, global pool liquidity, composability, interoperability.
And it is such a shame that like there are, we can't sort of figure out the like security piece yet.
And I think it is very solvable, but we need to sort of rebuild that trust.
for sort of more people and more institutions to actually deposit more capital on chain.
That is like, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking about a lot personally.
How do we ensure that more people, you know, develop more trust for DeFi so that that category continues to grow?
If you are building in crypto or in digital assets, get in touch with Min because she's got capital to spend on that point.
Min, where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Absolutely.
So, you know, I'm, my Twitter handle is underscore Mintio.
Our Ethereal's Twitter is etherealvc and our website is ethereal.xyz.
We are reachable at hello at ethereal.xyz.
We read every email.
And if you're building in any of the categories or just building something that you're really passionate about, please reach out to us.
We're always happy to chat.
Like we also chat to what we call proto-founders, which is...
people who don't really quite have an idea yet, but, you know, are very excited about the idea of being a founder.
And we spend time, you know, brainstorming with them on, you know, directions that they can actually do, you know, tunnel into to get inspiration from.
So please reach out to us.
Well, man, I hope you all keep building as well.
Really appreciate you coming on the show today.
Thanks for being on the Milk Road Show.
Thank you so much, John.
It was great chatting with you.
You too.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
Until next time, as I always say, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
And we will see you all in the next episode of the Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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