Hope you’ve been well!

Can’t believe it’s April already. 2026 is moving fast, as are things in crypto, as usual!

Here’s the latest in the world of Deep Ventures:

• Portfolio company highlights from Bitflow, Load Network, and Numbers Protocol

• Industry insights - SEC provides a token safe harbor, institutions want more crypto, and is Adam Back Satoshi?

Let’s go!

Portfolio Highlights

Bitflow Finance

Bitflow Finance is the #1 decentralized exchange aggregator on Stacks.

In March, they launched their HODLMM concentrated liquidity pools, which concentrates capital within active trading ranges instead of spreading it across an infinite price curve. Liquidity Providers earn 3-5x more per dollar deployed, and traders get better execution with zero price impact within active bids.

And HODLMM has been crushing it! It has achieved $740M in total transaction volume within five weeks, and Bitflow has fully onboarded their first professional onchain market maker shop for critical pairs such as BTC/USD, STX/USD, and more.

This is a huge development for the institutional onchain BTC economy.

Read more here.

Load Network

Load Network is the first high performance EVM storage chain, allowing developers to store, verify, and compute with any data at any scale.

And they’ve been acquired by KYVE Network!

The Load EVM L1 will remain live, and preparation for the launch of Load mainnet is underway.

Part of the Load engineering team will join KYVE to make sure migrations and future upgrades go smoothly.

Support for KYVE's Trustless API was already embedded at the Load protocol level in 2024, so there are plenty of synergies here.

Numbers Protocol

Numbers Protocol is blockchain infrastructure focused on creating verifiable and authentic digital provenance for media, assets, and content created by both humans and AI.

First off, they opened the new NUM Mainnet bridge and listed NUM Mainnet on KuCoin.

And they were busy on the partnership front!

They onboarded four new collaborators building AI with verifiable context from the start - Ephyra AI, OptimAI, MWX AI, and Tearline AI.

Numbers Protocol was also listed as an official x402 partner, allowing users to acquire content licenses and Receipt NFTs directly from their crypto wallets.

Furthermore, they announced an x402-based partnership with Bella Protocol. The x402 micropayment layer handles automated licensing and settlement of verifiable media on Numbers; Bella Protocol provides the DeFi infrastructure where these on-chain economies settle and compound.

Numbers is becoming increasingly important in the age of AI content!

Interested in investing with us? We’ve launched Deep Ventures Fund 1 and we’d love for you to be involved. Please take a look at our deck, ping me at [email protected], and schedule a chat!

Industry Insights

SEC releases guidance on token safe harbor

The SEC’s new “Regulation Crypto Assets: A Token Safe Harbor” framework is a massive step forward for US-based crypto startups.

For the first time, founders have a clearer regulatory pathway to build in the US. This guidance:

• Distinguishes between digital securities and other crypto assets (such as payment tokens, utility tokens, and collectibles), so not every token is presumed to be a security.

• Introduces a startup-oriented safe harbor that provides a defined, time-limited window for projects to raise capital and build toward network maturity with tailored disclosure requirements, rather than full public-company treatment from day one.

• Clarifies how and when a token associated with an “investment contract” can transition out of securities status once core development milestones and decentralization objectives are achieved.

For US crypto entrepreneurs, this reduces regulatory uncertainty, enables onshore fundraising and experimentation, and should make it easier to attract institutional capital that has been waiting for clearer rules.

Sure, the crypto market kinda sucks now. But with this much-needed guidance, there has never been a better time to build a crypto startup in the US!

Read the guidance here.

Morgan Stanley launches Bitcoin ETF; institutions want more crypto

Morgan Stanley joined the ranks of Bitcoin ETF providers when they launched the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), a spot bitcoin exchange‑traded product that trades on NYSE Arca. MSBT makes Morgan Stanley the first U.S. bank‑affiliated asset manager to bring a crypto ETP to the domestic market. Morgan Stanley also filed for Ethereum and Solana trusts in January.

This continues the trend of institutions’ increasing interest in crypto. According to a recent Coinbase survey, 73% of institutional investors “intend to increase their digital asset allocations in 2026, driven by greater regulatory clarity, expanded availability of regulated products and improved infrastructure.”

Institutions are just getting started in crypto.

Is Adam Back Satoshi Nakamoto?

The NY Times just released an article building a case that Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.

3 reasons Back could be Satoshi:

• He invented Hashcash, the PoW primitive Bitcoin is built on, and sat at the center of the early cypherpunk movement.

• Stylometric fingerprints and ideological tells (British spellings, “also” endings, Napster vs. Gnutella analogies, libertarian framing) line up with Satoshi’s writing.

• Back was of the first people Satoshi emailed in 2008 to vet the Bitcoin white paper, which you might expect if Back authored it.

3 reasons Back probably isn’t Satoshi:

• While the stylometric analysis showed consistencies, even the experts the NYT used describe the writing analysis as “closest match but inconclusive." And stylometry is notorious for false positives in small, technical samples.

• His 2008–2013 emails and IRC logs show him as an external correspondent who didn’t understand or stack BTC early.

• Why would Satoshi start a DAT? That makes no sense.

This was a much better investigation than that trash HBO show, but still inconclusive.

We are all Satoshi!

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed this edition of the DV monthly newsletter!

Hit me up at [email protected] or @mikewchan on Telegram with your thoughts about the newsletter, what’s happening in crypto, or anything else!

Talk soon!