Crypto Fundamentals #104

1. Market Update

It’s worth noting that Gold is outperforming all the major assets on a 1 year time frame.

Everything is basically down over the last month other than the RWA basket driven by MANTRA, a RWA blockchain that trades ~$175k of volume in a given day. Which basically means the overall market is down.

Most risk on assets are generally down on the last month except Gold which means 1) BTC is not yet quite a risk off asset 2) we’ll be searching for assets with great fundamentals as there could be an interesting opportunity.

2. Fundamentals Update

Let’s go back to our trusty fundamentals comp table for digital finance.

Our DeFi revenue multiples reached 2.5x versus for Fintechs / CEX at 5.9x. It’s interesting to see Fintech multiples be >2x that of DeFi.

What’s potentially misleading is the YoY revenue growth which includes a lot of the memecoin trading that happened between March ‘24 and March ‘25.

Taking a step back, in DeFi trading volumes are down post $LIBRA but with still some volume — on March 2nd we saw $3.5B of perp DEX trading volume and $6.5b of spot DEX volume for a combined $11B. I’m still of the camp we need to believe that onchain FX swaps and tokenized equities drives more of these recurring volume.

What’s been fascinating to watch is as the market has been selling off 20%+ for most assets in the last 24 hours, assets like Geodnet which just raised a $8m strategic round from Multicoin, is down 0.28% in the last 24 hours.

Geodnet is roughly ~$3m ARR growing 4x YoY so on a circulating marketcap of ~$104m perspective its not cheap at ~35x and widely held my liquid token funds like VanEck, Coinfund, Pantera, Modular, etc

But the fact that Geodnet is growing its business, leveragine DePin to have much better supply side with over 13k base stations and able to outperform when the markets are down suggest institutional held tokens fair drawdowns better than retail held tokens.

Look, DePin is still early as the largest ARR business is Akash at $4m ARR followed by Geodnet

As we stated last week, as fundamentals improve, revenue or earnings multiples will be the price floor for digital assets during drawdowns which will make it easier for more institutions to deploy dollars into digital assets.

3. Stablecoin Update

Stablecoins are up again week on week crossing $225B of supply.

Bank of America CEO said they would launch their own stablecoin and Tether appointed a CFO ahead of a full audit.

I was surprised how negative sentiment was about ETH Denver as I left a lot more positive particularly on onchain finance. There was a lot of discussions from folks at on how stablecoins are increasingly being used for cross border payments, foreign exchange swaps, receiving global payments by merchants.

In my opinion, there are 3 different “financial systems”

1. Onchain Finance: crypto-native individuals that have wallets and take advantage of onchain yields on say Morpho or Drift where users can earn more than the say 4-4.5% in treasuries from Robinhood Gold, Wealthfront, checkings, etc.

• Traditional Finance: putting money into your Chase or Bank of America savings account or putting dollars into buying US treasuries. Buying and swapping equities in your TD Ameritrade account.
• Digital Finance: Products that merge traditional finance and onchain finance rails. Uniswap (DEX) selling their crypto and off ramping into Robinhood (Fintech). Bridget at Founders Fund does a great summary of how fintechs like Nubank, Yellow Card, Dolar App build on top of DeFi protocols like Aave or pass stablecoin yield to end consumers.

We believe digital finance is the convergence of Tradfi + onchain finance and a long term secular trend. My friend Denney at Mento Labs put it well: Bank of America (traditional bank with >$2T of assets) is looking to launch their own stablecoin which could 10x stablecoin supply.

I personally think what’s been holding back the space is the lack of a global Venmo that’s blockchain-native other than Binance Pay. Sling is tackling this with availability in 70+ countries but suffers from the constraint of having end users to KYC and having to spend marketing to acquire users.

My challenge for the industry is why doesn’t Coinbase Wallet, Phantom Wallet or one of the large wallet providers focus singularly on integrating every on / off ramp and exchange and allow seamless money movement as their maniacal and core focus?

How come we haven’t had a break out P2P payment app outside of centralized products like Binance?

My co-founder Anthony was an early engineer at Venmo and he would always talk about the early days of Venmo and the network effects that kicked off tremendous growth: https://x.com/anthonyyim/status/1807847396002652438

What’s stopping our industry from prioritizing money movement across borders, across chains and making it dead simple to move money?

That break out crypto app or wallet or fintech that enables the world to move money seamlessly, isn’t just a $1B or $100B a year volume business. It’s arguably in the >$1T — just look at Zelle which did $1T in volume in the last year:

Cheers,

Jon