Investment Director at HashKey Capital
Check size: No verified personal check-size range is published. HashKey Capital operates multiple venture, liquid, and multi-strategy vehicles; fund size and disclosed portfolio rounds should not be converted into Yerui's individual authority.
Yerui is a HashKey investment director with documented fund-committee responsibility and a contributor to the firm's technical sector research. The research evaluates infrastructure and applications across ZK, MEV, intents, account abstraction, data availability, Bitcoin, AI x crypto, DePIN, staking, and related Web3 layers. The consistent lens is whether technical design improves transaction flow, verifiability, capital efficiency, decentralization, and real demand.
Lead with the exact protocol or market failure and a diagram of actors, data flow, trust assumptions, and value capture. Bring benchmarks for throughput, latency, cost, decentralization, security, and capital efficiency; explain token necessity separately from product demand; and show live usage, developer adoption, or credible testnet-to-mainnet milestones.
Technical infrastructure with a clear place in the stack, measurable improvements to transaction or capital efficiency, real compute or storage demand, verifiable systems, open networks with sound incentives, and teams able to explain trust assumptions, decentralization tradeoffs, and production readiness.
No personal pass list is published. HashKey's coauthored research implies caution toward centralized relays or permissioned actors presented as decentralized without a migration path, crypto-AI projects without genuine compute demand, ZK components without a clear use case or performance path, and infrastructure whose token incentives do not create durable usage. These are research-based inferences.
Diagram every trusted party, relay, solver, builder, oracle, proving system, and governance key; distinguish current centralization from a credible decentralization path.
Locate value and failure modes from user intent through routing, ordering, building, settlement, and value recirculation, then identify where a new protocol improves outcomes.
Verify who pays for compute, storage, inference, verification, or agent services and whether blockchain coordination improves cost, access, incentives, or trust versus centralized alternatives.
Evaluate proving cost and latency, hardware path, developer tooling, testnet evidence, security assumptions, and the application that makes verifiable computation economically necessary.
Underwrite user demand and protocol utility independently from token narrative, then test whether the token is required for security, coordination, ownership, or value transfer.
AI x crypto, ZKVMs, intents, account abstraction, DePIN, and related infrastructure should be assessed through real demand, compute economics, technical maturity, and their role in a rapidly changing stack.
Investment opportunities span specialized ZK systems, earlier parts of the transaction supply chain, improved DEX and MEV design, privacy-preserving auctions, and emerging infrastructure across the Web3 stack.