Hope you’re staying cool in the heat!

The war with Iran may be coming to an end, which should help risk-on assets. Builders are still building and adoption continues to grow. All is good right now!

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

• Portfolio company highlights from Yanez, Cross the Ages, and Numbers Protocol.

• Industry insights - Zcash finds a vulnerability, incumbents are building a new stablecoin platform, and quantum makes strides

• I got some publicity in The New Yorker!

Let’s go!

Portfolio Highlights

Yanez (fund portco)

Yanez is an AI-powered platform for detecting and correcting exposure, weaknesses, and configuration flaws of financial crime prevention systems. We invested in their Bittensor subnet for synthetic identity data, the Yanez Multimodal Inorganic Identities (MIID) subnet.

In addition to their SaaS platform and Bittensor subnet, they have made rapid progress on their Proof of Humanhood / Proof of Uniqueness (PoH/PoU) product, which launched in alpha in April with biometric capture on both iOS and Android. The company is currently in advanced stages with six projects, two of which are expected to sign within weeks - one involving a platform with over 400K active users, and another with a major digital currency broker-dealer. Boom.

Across all products, they have garnered $300K+ in sales up to May 2026 and an active pipeline of over $2M. The company now counts 11 active clients spanning proof-of-concept engagements and larger enterprise relationships.

On the Bittensor side, Yanez has established itself among the top 40 subnets on the network (and has reached top 30), and currently ranks in the top 5 on the new "Conviction" metric, which measures long-term subnet credibility - a positioning that should resonate with retail investors.

Lots of progress at Yanez!

Cross the Ages (syndicate portco)

Cross the Ages (CTA) is a blockchain-based transmedia ecosystem that blends fantasy and sci-fi storytelling with gaming, NFTs, and real-world collectibles.

They’ve made a ton of progress on their two primary titles, Arise and Blast.

They have concluded Alpha Playtest 4 for Arise and are now soliciting feedback from their testers.

For Blast, they:

• Celebrated the game’s three-year anniversary by giving players the opportunity to win exclusive Special Rare cards.

• Launched new biomes with new puzzles, tougher encounters, and increasing difficulty that will test players’ strategies at every step.

It’s a tough market for blockchain gaming right now, but CTA continues to delight their players!

Numbers Protocol (syndicate portco)

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

One of Taiwan's oldest media organizations, China Times, has made its entire archive agent-readable using Numbers’ tech! Every article carries a NID, signed with C2PA credentials and licensable via USDC on Numbers Mainnet. The publisher sets the terms once. Autonomous agents handle discovery, verification, and payment at scale, with no newsroom contact required.

Numbers has forged a couple of other very cool partnerships as well.

They announced a collaboration with LimeWire, combining private file handling with verifiable provenance. And new partner LinkLayer AI is bringing content provenance into AI-powered live trading infrastructure.

Trust, but verify. That’s what Numbers does for digital media.

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

Zcash finds vulnerability in Orchard shielded pool

Zcash recently disclosed and patched a critical vulnerability in its Orchard shielded pool, the privacy pool introduced in 2022.

The flaw was a “soundness bug” in the zero‑knowledge proof circuit, where, under specific conditions, an attacker could construct invalid proofs that the protocol would accept as valid, effectively allowing the creation of counterfeit ZEC inside Orchard.

The vulnerability had been present since Orchard went live and was discovered under test conditions by an independent researcher using Anthropic’s Claude.

Once the researcher confirmed the issue, he privately disclosed it to the Zcash team, triggering an emergency response. The team first coordinated a temporary network rule change that effectively disabled all Orchard transactions at a specific block height, freezing the vulnerable pool while they prepared a fix. They then shipped a network upgrade with a corrected Orchard circuit, which re‑enabled shielded transactions after activation.

Zcash’s “turnstile” accounting - which tracks value moving between transparent and shielded pools - has not shown clear evidence of ZEC inflation, but by design no one can fully reconstruct what might have happened entirely inside a privacy pool before the fix.

The public disclosure of the bug led to a sharp sell‑off in ZEC and reignited debate around the trade‑off between powerful privacy guarantees and the difficulty of auditing complex zero‑knowledge systems.

Read more here.

Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are working on a new stablecoin platform

Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are reportedly working toward a shared stablecoin platform that standardizes how digital dollars plug into existing card and merchant rails. The goal is to make stablecoin payments look and feel like any other card or wallet transaction - merchants get clean settlement in fiat or stablecoins, while fraud, risk, and compliance still run through the incumbents’ existing pipes.

In parallel, Stripe has been expanding support for USDC payments and payouts and investing in multi-chain orchestration infrastructure, while Visa and Mastercard continue to widen their own stablecoin settlement pilots and issuer integrations.

The interesting issue is that no single incumbent can nor should own all of the relevant rails in a multi-chain, multi-wallet, agentic world. You have different blockchains, different stablecoins, different issuers, and a fragmented set of merchant and wallet endpoints, all evolving faster than any one network can vertically integrate.

That creates a natural role for a neutral payment coordination layer that can sit in the middle of individual cards, chains, and stablecoins - routing, netting, and risk-scoring flows across networks while remaining agnostic to whose logo is on the front of the card or which stablecoin backs a payment.

In our view, this is the real opportunity: not just stablecoins as assets, but an interoperable coordination fabric that connects banks, payment networks, wallets, and onchain treasuries without forcing the whole ecosystem to live inside a single incumbent’s moat or standard.

We are working on an investment deal right now that solves this problem. Watch this space!

Quantum is moving fast and crypto needs to adapt now

Bitcoin researcher Justin Drake put 50% odds on Q-Day - the day a quantum computer can crack the encryption protecting your crypto private keys - arriving by 2032.

This was driven by the Google Quantum AI team’s publishing of a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography - a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art.

Let's see what's at risk here:

• Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, and many other L1s all use elliptic curve cryptography, which is the technology most at risk for quantum attacks

• Up to 40% of all BTC is in wallets with already exposed public keys

• "Harvest now, decrypt later" - where sensitive encrypted data is being collecting to unlock once quantum breakthroughs arrive - is already happening

The threat isn't imminent, and there is no need to panic.

But with the advances that are happening everyday in quantum, the time for blockchain teams to begin migration to quantum-resistant tech is now.

Media Coverage in The New Yorker

I spoke with The New Yorker columnist Kyle Chayka about the crazy AI secondary markets, where multi-layer SPVs for secondary sales of Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX equity resemble Russian nesting dolls.

We talk about the insane fee structures, how random brokers from all over the world have reached out to us, why Anthropic is clamping down on these sales, and how investors are getting screwed.

Check out Kyle’s article with your boy!

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!