Prediction Markets

a16z crypto

Check: No verified personal check-size range is publicly attributed to Jay. His disclosed work includes a16z crypto leading Kairos's $2.5M seed round; that round size is company financing, not Jay's individual allocation authority.

Jay backs consumer and application-layer crypto products that make onchain systems useful to mainstream users. His recent work centers on financial applications as crypto's adoption wedge: wallets becoming trusted consumer-finance super apps, perpetual futures expanding into a global trading primitive, and prediction markets gaining institutional-grade interfaces. He also sees decentralized proof of personhood as reusable, user-controlled infrastructure for distinguishing humans from agents and bots.

Kosmos Ventures

Check: No Lucas-specific check range is public. A current OpenVC search profile lists Kosmos at $100K–$1M, while Kosmos's own live material confirms Seed/Pre-Seed as its co-building focus but publishes no check size. Treat $100K–$1M as third-party firm guidance only; confirm allocation, instrument, ownership and decision-maker directly with Lucas and the team.

Lucas looks for early, non-consensus crypto opportunities through an active-user and market-structure lens. He believes decentralized markets can democratize finance and that money increasingly follows user attention into consumer applications; the strongest products earn the right to embed financial rails after establishing loyalty or differentiated utility. His research also emphasizes liquidity regimes, onchain evidence, derivatives market structure, security and Kosmos's broader ability to bootstrap durable network effects through product/token design, governance, community and quantified mechanism design.

Blockchain Capital

Check: No reliable personal check range or current Blockchain Capital authority is public. Third-party ranges are stale and were excluded. Historical work included consumer-crypto diligence and portfolio support; founders must contact a currently listed Blockchain Capital investor for live check size and sponsorship.

In his Blockchain Capital work, Sterling focused on the intersection of consumers and crypto. He saw gaming as a mass-onboarding path because persistent games, interoperable assets and player-owned economies can align users with the worlds they help create. For consumer brands, he looked for authentic cultural connection and utility across physical and digital experiences rather than an NFT bolted onto a legacy product. His later DeFi work favored high-performance, composable exchanges close to their native ecosystems, with real volume, adaptable teams and product expansion beyond a single wedge.

Varrock VC

Check: $600K–$900K at pre-seed and seed, published on Varrock's live website. The fund targets a small, concentrated portfolio, commonly 0–1 new investment per quarter, to maintain ownership and hands-on capacity rather than spray and pray.

Richard backs concentrated, contrarian pre-seed and seed bets in the future of finance. For crypto-native products, he looks for category creation, missionary founders, power-user retention and continuous zero-to-one product innovation. For crypto-adjacent companies, crypto should be an enabling feature inside a much larger industry, led by commercially strong domain experts with superior distribution and unit economics rather than recent crypto pivots.

a16z crypto

Check: No personal check-size range is published. Public seed, Series A, and later financing amounts are company-level transaction sizes and are not a defensible proxy for Guy's individual range or allocation authority.

Guy invests across the crypto stack with a technical focus on infrastructure, DeFi, and decentralized physical infrastructure. He looks for blockchains to coordinate markets that centralized intermediaries serve poorly—compute, energy, telecom, transportation, credit, and global finance—and for open protocols whose incentives unlock latent capacity, lower coordination costs, and compound through interoperability and composability.

RockawayX

Check: No Ryan-specific venture check range is public. For RockawayX's Catapult program, the firm says it writes first checks into RWA-yield founders and can add anchor TVL, liquidity, DeFi integrations and mentorship; founders should ask directly about round-specific sizing.

Ryan looks for crypto investments where differentiated, alpha-generative research reveals something the consensus has missed and where tokens or equities can be underwritten with traction and fundamentals. At RockawayX he invests around yield onchain, DeFi and RWA infrastructure while retaining a contrarian interest in experimental consumer finance and entertainment-finance products that can become sticky, high-margin categories.

Paradigm

Check: Paradigm says it backs founders at every stage from first check through public markets, but it does not publish Alpin's personal check range or decision authority. A 2024 firm filing described vehicle investments from $1M to $100M or more; that historical firm range is not treated as his current personal range.

Alpin partners with crypto founders and researchers who have strong instincts about the future and the courage to follow them. His work centers on protocol, market, and mechanism design—especially systems that take explicit architectural tradeoffs to improve a core product or maximize performance. He is interested in how specialized new networks exploit incumbent dogma, how markets can improve collective decisions, and how open benchmarks can safely accelerate AI-assisted smart-contract security.

1confirmation

Check: No personal check-size or allocation authority is published. 1confirmation describes itself as an early-stage venture fund; firm assets or round sizes should not be treated as Brett's personal range.

Brett focuses on crypto-native consumer products that bridge onchain ownership with mainstream culture. His published work looks for applications built around existing behaviors—playing games for money, collecting cards, following sports and culture, creating and trading media—where tokens, open markets, or verifiable ownership materially improve the product rather than merely decorate it.

Paradigm

Check: No personal check range or investment authority is published for Storm. Paradigm invests from first check through public markets, but Storm's official remit is frontier data-science and data-engineering research, not a stated personal allocation range.

Storm evaluates decentralized systems through high-resolution data, reproducible measurement, and open tooling. His work spans Ethereum state and history growth, node performance, market-volume accounting, prediction-market visualization, optimization, and forensic analysis. The recurring principle is to replace imprecise narratives with correctly defined metrics, controlled benchmarks, and accessible datasets before deciding where a system's real bottleneck or opportunity lies.

Colosseum

Check: Colosseum's published accelerator investment is $250K pre-seed for accepted teams; it is a program-level standard, not Michael's personal discretionary check. Current materials say hackathon winners are interviewed and considered, with accepted teams receiving capital, mentorship and network access. Earlier official content described 7% terms; founders must verify the current instrument, percentage and token/equity structure.

Michael's lens combines markets research with Colosseum's tournament-style venture funnel: use global hackathons and four-week build sprints to observe which founders ship, learn and attract users before investing. He is interested in Solana products that exploit crypto-native primitives rather than append tokens to conventional software—especially futarchy and market-protected capital formation, tokenized cash-flowing assets, sophisticated trading tools, privacy-enabled settlement and AI-enabled onchain agents. He treats tokens as useful when distribution, user alignment, liquidity and governance matter, but recognizes that early public prices can distract pre-product teams and that long-horizon capital-intensive companies fit equity better.

Pantera Capital

Check: No person-specific check size is publicly disclosed. Pantera's published venture approach typically invests from Seed through Series B and aims to lead or co-lead; founders should confirm fit rather than infer a check from third-party databases.

Mason is an application-layer investor looking for products that use crypto coordination and ownership to change how large groups of people interact. His work emphasizes stablecoins as global payment infrastructure, peer-to-peer market structures, programmable internet-native capital formation and blockchain becoming invisible infrastructure inside useful consumer and real-world applications.

ARK Invest

Check: Not applicable as a personal founder check. Raye is a digital-assets research associate supporting ARK's managed investment strategies; the cited sources do not establish personal venture check-writing authority or a standard startup ticket.

Raye analyzes how cryptoassets can disrupt legacy financial systems, with particular depth in stablecoin architecture and DeFi application economics. He evaluates networks and tokens through reserves, legal claims, peg resilience, governance, accessibility, incentives and value capture, while tracking the shift of economic activity from base layers toward applications such as exchanges, lending, cards, prediction markets and tokenized assets.

CoinFund

Check: No standard personal ticket is published. CoinFund's 2026 articles identify the firm as lead on Trace's $32M Series A and Edge Markets' $29M Series A, with George authoring or contributing to the theses; round size is not equivalent to CoinFund's check or George's authority.

George looks for open, permissionless systems that expand financial access and remove cost, delay and gatekeeping from payments and DeFi. His writing starts with sharp workflow pain—especially cross-border settlement, prefunding, last-mile liquidity and fragmented banking rails—then tests whether stablecoins and high-throughput networks produce a simpler product for non-crypto-native users. He also tracks financial rails for prediction markets and other emerging on-chain venues.

Collider Ventures

Check: No reliable official current check range was found. Collider publicly describes itself as an early-stage Web3 investor and accepts pitches at invest@collider.vc; third-party directory estimates conflict, so founders should confirm current vehicle, stage and sizing directly.

Eylon connects two decentralization theses: crypto-native individual sovereignty that minimizes centralized authority through technology, and Web3 collective empowerment that democratizes ownership and access. In practice he looks for non-consensus early-stage infrastructure capable of moving capital formation, markets and digital ownership onchain while remaining alert to the new choke points, governance hierarchies and risk created by ostensibly permissionless systems.

CoinFund

Check: No personal check range is disclosed. CoinFund's live profile explicitly says there are no investments led by Jonathan yet, while crediting him with establishing vault and new-markets theses and contributing to Irys research; do not present him as an independently proven deal lead.

Jonathan studies how better on-chain financial and data rails enable agents, vaults and new markets. His thesis work connects composable financial infrastructure to automated commerce, and programmable storage to verifiable AI training, licensing and intellectual-property workflows. His restructuring experience on Voyager and BlockFi also gives him a failure-oriented view of custody, leverage and financial architecture.

CoinFund

Check: No verified personal check-size range is published. CoinFund attributes pre-seed, seed, and Series A deals to Einar, but disclosed round totals are company financings and not his personal allocation authority.

Einar backs foundational technology that decentralizes scarce AI resources or rebuilds financial rails onchain. His portfolio connects open compute and model ownership, verifiable AI, permanent data, cross-chain liquidity, stablecoin payments, and institutional prediction-market infrastructure. He favors technically ambitious early teams addressing a structural bottleneck, with a credible path from an initial developer or institutional wedge to an open network that scales access, freedom, and knowledge.

Haun Ventures

Check: No reliable Mark-specific ticket range is public. Haun invests from seed through scale from two fund families and announced $1 billion of new early- and later-stage capital in May 2026; the firm does not publish a standard ticket on the cited first-party pages.

Mark combines a builder's understanding of smart contracts and token incentives with early-stage investing. Current evidence points to founders building useful crypto businesses rather than chasing market hype, especially institutional-grade market infrastructure where fragmented liquidity, execution, financing or coordination can be unified into a superior workflow.

Haun Ventures

Check: No reliable Mark-specific ticket range is public. Haun invests from seed through scale and announced $1 billion of new early- and later-stage capital in May 2026; the cited first-party pages do not state a standard check.

Mark combines smart-contract and token-incentive building experience with early-stage investing. Current evidence favors useful crypto businesses rather than hype, particularly institutional market infrastructure that resolves fragmented liquidity, execution, financing or coordination into a better workflow.

Collider Ventures

Collider says it is "shaping the future of the decentralized internet" through a contrarian, strictly non-consensus approach. The firm is doubling down on crypto and Israel while backing builders in Israel and globally across core web3 categories.

Pantera Capital

DeFi, prediction markets, protocol design. Creator of Augur.

1789 Capital

Palm Beach

AUM: $861M

Contribution Capital

AUM: $30M

DBA

New York

M77 Ventures

Palo Alto

Three Point Capital

Grand Cayman

5c(c) Capital

Chris Grove

Manhattan Beach

Geneva Trading

Chicago

SID Venture Partners

Kyiv

Shayne Coplan

New York

Tarek Mansour

New York

Bullpen Capital

Fireplace

Hong Kong (operated by Enclave HK Limited)

Humanity Investments

Vitalik Buterin

Will Ventures

Matt Liston