Hope you’re having a great summer so far!

Crypto prices are ticking up slowly! Regardless, real products are launching and getting adopted quickly, and that’s what matters.

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

• Portfolio company of the month - The Interfold

• Industry insights - Robinhood Chain launches, OUSD announced, and Venice AI fundraises.

Let’s go!

Portfolio Company of the Month - The Interfold

The Interfold, formerly Enclave, is a protocol for verifiable, private compute that allows developers to run programs on encrypted data from multiple sources without exposing inputs or relying on trusted hardware. The Deep Ventures syndicate invested in The Interfold in April 2024.

They ran their FOLD token auction from July 8-10 on Uniswap via a Continuous Clearing Auction (CCA) and surpassed their goal of raising 400 ETH with a committed volume of 524 ETH!

This auction was the first public milestone in their phased launch sequence toward "Network Alpha" - a staged rollout of its privacy infrastructure for confidential coordination.

Vitalik Buterin endorsed Interfold in May 2026, noting it combines threshold encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to achieve voter anonymity, censorship resistance, and verifiable correctness in on-chain voting and sealed-bid auctions.

With need more privacy in crypto. If the Interfold delivers on its roadmap, it could become foundational infrastructure for private governance, institutional data collaboration, and AI agent coordination.

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

Robinhood launches Robinhood Chain

Robinhood has officially launched Robinhood Chain, its own Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain built on Arbitrum.

The mainnet went live July 1 and achieved immediate scale: 27.4 million funded accounts now have access to 95 tokenized stocks (including Nvidia, Alphabet, and Apple) trading 24/7 across 120+ countries.

Within its first week, the network recorded 17+ million onchain transactions, 350,000+ addresses, $1 billion in DEX volume, and $240 million in TVL, with 65,000 users already holding $13 million in tokenized equities and $300 million in stablecoins.

Robinhood is bringing unmatched retail distribution to the crypto sector, which has historically struggled with user acquisition. If the early traction holds, Robinhood Chain could become the dominant distribution channel for tokenized real-world assets and potentially siphon DeFi activity from other L2s and force brokerages to accelerate their own onchain strategies.

And maaaaaaybe kick off a bull run?

A development to watch, for sure.

Read more about the launch here.

140 companies partner for new stablecoin OUSD

More than 140 companies, including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock and Coinbase, have joined Open Standard to launch Open USD (OUSD), a new dollar-backed stablecoin that shares most of the earnings from its reserves.

Unlike existing stablecoins controlled by single issuers such as Tether or Circle, OUSD is designed as a shared infrastructure where partner companies collectively govern the token and receive the economic benefits of its adoption.

A few thoughts about this:

1. The GENIUS Act won't allow stablecoin issuers to share yield with retail holders, but Open Standard is allowed to share earnings with their business partners who use OUSD. This is a great circumvention of the regs and adds a lot of value.

2. It's good that the duopoly of USDT and USDC have more competition…

3. …But TradFi is again co-opting crypto. We need more decentralized stablecoins.

4. We will continue to see increased fragmentation in the payments space, especially with many companies launching agentic payment standards. Stay tuned for our latest investment, which will solve this fragmentation problem!

Read more here.

Venice AI raises $65M Series A…with some controversy

Venice AI recently raised $65 million in a Series A led by Dragonfly at a $1 billion valuation. Investors received 8.98% equity plus VVV token grants and warrants - a hybrid structure that gave VCs both legal ownership of the company and upside exposure to its publicly traded token.

This arrangement sparked immediate criticism from crypto observers who noted the fundamental asymmetry: equity holders enjoy legal protections and governance rights, while VVV holders rely entirely on Venice's discretionary buy-and-burn program (not claims to revenue) to capture value.

Here are my thoughts:

1. Erik Voorhees and team have thoughtfully designed a system where the token has strong utility in the product, a portion of revenue is allocated to token buybacks, and emissions are reduced over time. IMO that is a pretty good token design.

2. At the same time, there is no set, automated buyback schedule, so there is a semblance of "trust me, bro".

3. No matter what, Venice would have gotten crap for their fundraise. If they sold the token to investors, token holders would have cried "VCs aRE gOinG to EvEnTuaLLY dUmP oN uS". Founders just can't win in crypto.

I wrote about the long-running debate of tokens vs. equity. Many point to the poor performance of tokens as proof that this dual equity+token model won't work. I don't know if it will or will not work.

But the crypto industry has built a culture of experimentation and pushed the boundaries of what financial instruments look like and how they can be used to coordinate and access resources across the globe.

Venice is a great product that has hit mainstream adoption and continues to grow. They are focusing on privacy and sovereignty - aspects that are important to everyone in the crypto space. They have been thoughtful and forthright about balancing the desires of everyone in their ecosystem.

I think they have earned the right to see this dual equity+token experiment through.

Read Erik Voorhees’ fundraise announcement on Twitter here.

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!