__|__|| __||_||_| ||||_ _|_|||| |_|__ |||_

A single spark of curiosity can set off a chain reaction that quietly reshapes the rest of your life. The moment rarely feels consequential at the time. Usually it's just an innocent question, or an accident whose significance only becomes clear in hindsight.

For me, that moment came during my freshman year at NYU in 2016, when I was trying to sell RSGP, the in-game currency from RuneScape, for real money. That rabbit hole led me to a peer-to-peer exchange where the only practical way to cash out was through Bitcoin, so I bought BTC as a bridge to dollars, then forgot to sell what was left over. A few months later, I checked my wallet and found it had nearly tripled. What began as a way to offload virtual gold became my first encounter with a technology that would shape my career and worldview.

I was still putting together my own belief system back then, and the instinct that individuals should have more agency over their own money, identity, and labor was the thread that pulled hardest. Bitcoin gave that instinct technical form. Economics, game theory, and cryptography all seemed to converge on one idea: that consensus mechanisms were the strongest expression of objective truth humans had built. Thousands of independent, self-interested machines racing each other out in the open, somehow agreeing on one shared reality. I hadn't come across anything like it before or since.

After graduating from NYU, I spent the next few years looking for my way in: hackathons, conferences, founder gatherings, meeting builders and allocators across the space. The more time I spent in the industry, the more it clarified that this was a system that needed rails and legitimacy, and that I wanted to help build both. Through some serendipity, I joined a deep tech fund anchored by Eric Schmidt, where I led investments in novel stores of value, real-world asset tokenization, and consumer crypto adoption. Working that closely with founders building in those categories, I kept coming back to an idea of my own, and the fund backed me to go build it.

That idea became an agentic Web3 WeChat: a decentralized messaging protocol built at the intersection of consumer social and decentralized AI, back in 2022 when neither was really a category yet. Today it's close to consensus. Building it meant a lot of things nobody warns you about: constructing core infrastructure myself because the tooling didn't exist yet, learning just how hard distribution is for any consumer product, and keeping a team's head down and focused on the roadmap while the assets underneath the business were volatile. I never landed on a sustainable business model, and I wound the company down in late 2025. I know what it costs to build something real, and what it costs to end it.

If anything, that experience taught me more about being a founder than it did about crypto itself. A thesis can be right and still be early. A product can be technically ambitious and still fail to find its market. Being a founder gave me a deeper respect for timing, for capital formation, and for the distance between a good idea and a durable business. It's the kind of respect you only get from living it.

Along the way, I met Jake Brukhman, CoinFund's founder, through a Miami group chat of crypto enthusiasts. We bonded over a shared belief in sovereign capital and open source AI. Not your keys, not your crypto; not your weights, not your model. If you don't control the infrastructure, you don't really own what it produces.

Why CoinFund?

CoinFund's whole model has been to back the founder, not just the thesis. It started in 2015, before Ethereum even had a mainnet, as a small group of researchers who wanted to work alongside the earliest builders in the space, not just underwrite them from a distance. That same instinct is why they backed Prime Intellect, Pluralis, and Gensyn before decentralized AI had a name, back when the only thing anyone could actually evaluate was the team in front of them, not the market.

I recognize that kind of early conviction, because it's what carried me through building something of my own for the last few years, long before anyone agreed it would work. I know what it's like to decide whether to keep pushing on a channel that isn't converting yet or cut it, to keep a team's head down and focused while the market around them is doing backflips, to choose between waiting on infrastructure that doesn't exist yet and just building it yourself. I've made those calls badly, and I've made them well, and now I want to help the founders I back make them a little faster, and a little less alone, than I did.

At CoinFund, our mission is to be the best company building partner to founders creating decentralization and efficiency across the tech stack. As I join the CoinFund investment team, I am excited to bring the scar tissue of having been a founder to that mission now, along with the conviction of someone who's already lived through this industry's worst and came back anyway.

For me, joining CoinFund is the next stage of the same journey, one that started with a RuneScape trade, a forgotten Bitcoin balance, and a rabbit hole I never really climbed out of.

If you're building something in the crypto, blockchain, and decentralization tech space, or you know someone who is, I'd love to meet them.

__

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the individual CoinFund Management LLC (“CoinFund”) personnel quoted and are not the views of CoinFund or its affiliates. Certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources, which may include portfolio companies of funds managed by CoinFund. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, CoinFund has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.

Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. This presentation contains “forward-looking statements,” which can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “may”, “will”, “should”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “project”, “estimate”, “intend”, “continue” or “believe” or the negatives thereof or other variations thereon or comparable terminology. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events or results may differ materially and adversely from those reflected or contemplated in the forward-looking statements.This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by CoinFund. An offer to invest in a CoinFund fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by CoinFund, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by CoinFund (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for CoinFund to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://coinfund.io/portfolio.