Spring has sprung!

While it’s getting warmer outside, things are really heating up in the Middle East, and Bitcoin has held up amid the geopolitical uncertainty.

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

• Portfolio company highlights from Yanez, Demether, and Cookbook

• Industry insights - Bitcoin holds up during war, NYSE invests in OKX, and more

Let’s go!

Portfolio Highlights

Yanez Compliance (fund portco)

Yanez Compliance 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.

There has been lots of progress across all fronts for Yanez!

They have expanded their financial crime prevention vulnerability scanner to test identity verification, specifically for deepfakes in face images and documents.

They are in Beta testing for a new product on Agentic PEP (Politically Exposed Persons) decisioning, and have already scored a few great partnerships for this product.

And they are are building a whole new, extremely ambitious product: a Proof of Humanhood and Uniqueness protocol. This provides the ability to attest that the remote interaction is with a human instead of an AI agent. Yanez is targeting Q2 for a beta release and has proof of concepts lined up already.

The Yanez MIID subnet plays a huge role in all of this, developing the adversarial data needed to support all products across their portfolio.

Demether (syndicate portco)

Demether simplifies and automates access to real yield opportunities onchain, with a focus on real world assets.

The Alpha version of their flagship product, DemAI, is now live!

All you have to do is sign up, fund your account with dollar-based stablecoins or via debit card, select the assets you want to hold, and DemAI searches for the best yields for you.

Check out the product here, the Demether team would love your feedback.

Cookbook (fund portco)

Cookbook captures high-intent LLM query data across crypto and helps onboard Web3 devs and users with AI agents integrated into projects’ documentation, website, Discord, and Telegram.

They’ve recently integrated their agents with Polygon’s Agglayer, ENS, Sentient, and Miden. They’re in talks with Gaia, Kaito, Degents, and several others for integration as well.

And they’re pushing monetization with their current customers. Given that they have nearly 100 clients, this could be a significant revenue stream.

On the LLM query data front, they have letters of intent from two companies looking to leverage their data.

Finally, the Cookbook team is discussing launching their token on the Virtuals platform!

Lots cookin’ at Cookbook!

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

Bitcoin has been resilient during the war

Bitcoin and the broader crypto market have been volatile but resilient over the last month, especially given the backdrop of the Iran War and a broader risk-off stance in global assets.

As expected, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a sell-off, with stocks down and Bitcoin briefly dropping close to $60K alongside a broader crypto drawdown.

BTC has recovered nicely above $70K (as of March 13) while stock indices were slower to recover.

Still, BTC is being treated more as a tech stock as opposed to a pure hedge, like gold.

How will BTC be treated if the war continues? And when it ends, will we see a big pop in the crypto market overall?

NYSE invests in OKX

Global crypto exchange OKX received strategic funding from Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the NY Stock Exchange, valuing the company at $25B. The investment was reportedly around $200M.

As part of the investment, OKX will provide crypto price feeds for U.S.-regulated futures and distribute NYSE tokenized equities and derivatives to its 120 million users starting H2 2026.

This is another big win for the adoption of crypto by major US financial institutions.

The tough part is that while the price of OKX’s token, $OKB, jumped a bit, its market cap is still only $2B, peanuts compared to the $25B equity valuation.

The debate about tokens vs. equity rages on.

L1s are focusing on AI

We're seeing lots of big L1s focus more of their efforts on AI.

Ethereum's roadmap explicitly targets being the foundational settlement layer for decentralized commerce between AI agents, with Vitalik framing this as building the “machine economy”.

Solana aims to be the execution layer for AI‑driven DeFi, with the speed to support high‑frequency agent activity. AI agents on Solana generated ~$31B in trading volume in 2025.

NEAR has been working on AI for a while, and Aptos, ICP, and others are positioning themselves to take a share of the AI pie as well.

Add this to some of the relatively newer AI ecosystems like Bittensor, Fetch, Virtuals, and others, and we are seeing a resurgence of the Crypto x AI narrative that will focus more on utility than the hype we saw in the last cycle.

Love to see it.

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!