Hope you’ve been well!

Wow, July flew by! But it was a busy one - with our second fund investment, events in the Hamptons and Zurich, and much more!

In this edition of our newsletter, we talk about:

• Our most recent fund investment - the Yanez MIID Bittensor subnet!

• Syndicate portfolio highlights for Kraken, Gnosis Guild, and Panther Protocol

• Industry insights (new section!)

• Lots of new content and community events

This is a long one, but hang in there, it’ll be worth it.

Let’s go!

New fund investment - Yanez MIID Bittensor Subnet

We just made our second fund investment into Yanez Compliance’s Bittensor Subnet 54, Yanez MIID!

Now you may ask yourself - what the hell does that even mean?!?! 🤔

Stay with me here.

Yanez Compliance is building an AI-powered platform for detecting and correcting exposure, weaknesses, and configuration flaws of financial crime prevention systems, including sanctions evasion, identity fraud, money laundering, and more.

To power the data for this platform, Yanez has launched Bittensor Subnet 54, Yanez Multimodal Inorganic Identities (MIID), which is what we invested in.

This subnet will generate high-quality synthetic identities for testing and training anti-fraud models and identity recognition algorithms. These synthetic IDs mimic real ones by combining real-world and artificial attributes, enabling robust identity verification and fraud prevention. And these will be created in an open, permissionless, and meritocratic fashion - the traits that crypto is known for - on Bittensor.

Read about Yanez’ fundraise here.

We will publish a more in-depth post about why we love the Yanez team and how they’re leveraging Bittensor to revolutionize how AI apps are being built. Stay tuned.

Interested in investing with us? We’ve launched our 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!

Syndicate Portfolio Highlights

Kraken

Kraken is one of the leading centralized crypto exchanges, with over $1.1B in daily trading volume across 1100+ trading pairs. The Deep Ventures syndicate invested via a secondary equity deal in 2021.

Kraken has made major moves in recent months, including launching tokenized stocks and ETFs (xStocks) outside of the US; acquiring NinjaTrader to strengthen its US retail futures trading; launching Kraken Pay for instant, borderless payments across 300+ crypto and fiat currencies; and more.

And they recently announced that they plan to go public and raise $500M dollars in funding at a valuation of $15 billion!

It’s shaping up to be a big 2025 and 2026 for Kraken.

Gnosis Guild

Gnosis Guild builds open-source, modular tooling for DAOs to operate more efficiently and effectively.

They’ve recently hit some massive milestones:

• $4.6B total transacted value

• $635M total value secured

• 2.2M total transactions processed

Additionally, Railgun’s $RAIL community approved their integration with Mech and Pilot, enabling Railgun’s private 0zk addresses to execute non-atomic DeFi transactions across dapps, backed by 200K $RAIL in funding.

Awesome progress from the leaders in DAO tooling!

Panther Protocol

Panther Protocol is on-chain privacy infrastructure for VASP-licensed institutions.

With the privacy narrative getting stronger and stronger, Panther is gearing up for a mainnet launch very soon, as they:

• Completed the $ZKP airdrop to those who participated in their testnet,

• Passed DAO proposals to 1) revise snapshot authors and adjust voting quorum, and 2) create a DAO council and provide leadership funding,

• Are putting the finishing touches by minimizing blockchain requests, resolving issues with the transaction records displaying correctly, and ensuring synchronization to track network issues and states more efficiently.

More transactional privacy is coming soon!

Industry Insights

Check out this new section! Instead of just including links from the latest industry developments, we’ll provide some insight on them. Here goes!

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It’s an amazing time to build and invest in the crypto industry.

The government is fulfilling every promise they’ve made to support the space, there are more ways to access and use crypto than ever, and institutions are going big.

Regulatory Developments

The President signed the GENIUS Act into law on July 18, clarifying rules around stablecoins and cementing the first major crypto framework in US law.

The House of Representatives passed the Clarity Act, and the Senate is building on this.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins just announced Project Crypto, which 1) aims to clarify guidance on when a digital asset is considered a security or not, 2) introduces frameworks that allow crypto businesses, asset issuers, and trading venues to operate and innovate within the U.S., and 3) creates new grace periods for early-stage crypto projects to experiment without immediate regulatory burden.

The SEC also declared that liquid staking is outside of securities laws.

All of these are amazing developments that support the early-stage builders whom we invest in.

Access to and Use of Crypto Will Skyrocket

Coinbase has partnered with JPMorgan Chase to make it easier for their 80M+ customers to access crypto more easily. Access to this massive audience will accelerate crypto going mainstream to retail.

JP Morgan is also exploring crypto-backed loans.

And Christie’s has spun up a division that will allow buyers to purchase real estate with crypto.

We certainly are in the glory days of crypto, and it will only get better from here!

New Content and Community

Gate VC Twitter Space on July 30

I was a panelist on Gate VC’s Twitter Space titled “50 Investors Passed You By? What Kills Your Deal Before It Starts”.

I joined investors from Greenfield Capital, Bitkraft Ventures, JPMorgan’s Kinexys, and Kosmos Ventures to discuss:

1. What we look for in founders we invest in

2. Things founders should avoid when pitching VCs

3. How our theses have changed in the current environment

4. And more!

Check out the panel here.

Next Level Life Event Panel on July 26

I moderated a panel titled “Code to Consciousness: Living & Investing Smarter with Tech” at the Next Level Life event in Westhampton Beach, NY.

It was a fun conversation about how we can make sure technology products are built and used to improve our lives, and what the future may look like in a world of crypto, AI, and robotics.

Everyone looked great and had an awesome time in the Hamptons!

Deep Ventures Event in Zurich on July 16

We hosted a fun meetup at Kraftwerk in Zurich on July 16. There was a spectrum of attendees - from crypto natives to former Big 4 accounting firm executives.

Brian Laughlin, CEO and Co-Founder of portfolio company OrdinalsBot, was in attendance as well!

A great time was had by all!

Mik and Mike Crypto Cast

Check out the latest Mik and Mike Crypto Cast episodes below.

July 29 - Galaxy sells big batch of BTC, Injective tokenizing SBET, Christie’s allows real estate buys with crypto

July 24 - GENIUS Act is now law, Altcoin season coming?

July 14 - Bitcoin breaks ATH, Pump.fun raises $600M in 12 minutes, and other fundraises

July 7 - Big Beautiful Bill passes, Robinhood launches tokenized stocks, and more

Let us know what you think of these episodes!

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!