Welcome to the final Deep Ventures monthly newsletter of 2025!

We hope you had a great Thanksgiving and appreciate you hanging out with us this year!

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

• Portfolio company highlights from Cross the Ages, Gnosis Guild, and OrdinalsBot

• Market update - it’s still all about the institutions

• Other interesting stories

Let’s go!

Portfolio Highlights

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.

And they have been crushing it with live events and the continued rollout of their newest title, Arise!

During the weekend of November 8-9, CTA hosted a full-scale presence at HeroFestival in Marseille. The team hosted 43,000 visitors at their immersive stand, allowing attendees to meet the CTA team, try their games, and watch their competitions.

Also, for the first time, Arise was revealed to the public as a playable demo at HeroFestival. Over 1,000 players tried the demo during the weekend, covering a broad age range (from 7 to 77 years old), which highlights Arise’s accessibility and cross-generation appeal.

On November 26, CTA rolled out the third public, fully-open playtest for Arise, which emphasized its economic loop: resource gathering, crafting, trading, and item progression.

Overall, Web3 gaming is in a lull, but that’s not stopping CTA from growing!

Gnosis Guild (syndicate portco)

Gnosis Guild builds composable, modular tools to manage decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

They recently released the Roles SDK v3, which enforces granular, role-based permissions for attached modules. New features include added allowance control, better audit tooling, and multi-chain support.

They advanced their integration with Railgun for private DeFi, supporting DAMM Capital, Bitte, and Credit Coop on permissioned workflows.

Finally, they are also building for agentic finance, where they have developed a secure terminal for generating permissions and natural language task execution.

Lots going on at Gnosis Guild!

OrdinalsBot (syndicate portco)

OrdinalsBot allows anyone to easily mint, collect, and inscribe digital assets on Bitcoin.

They recently inscribed 30 of the largest files on Bitcoin for Pizza Ninjas, one of the most popular Ordinals collections. They also launched and sold out a few collections on their launchpad and rewards platform, Trio.

The big news are their plans for 2026:

• They’re focusing heavily on Bitcoin Yield and major Real World Asset issuance on Bitcoin and expect to tokenize millions of dollars of assets in 2026

• They’re also a native Bitcoin DEX/AMM to expand Bitcoin DeFi.

OrdinalsBot is becoming much more than just Ordinals!

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

It’s still all about the institutions right now.

Vanguard is on board with crypto!

The inventor of one of the most stable, conservative investment vehicles - the index fund - has long shunned crypto as speculative and volatile.

Now they allow their 50 million clients to trade third-party ETFs and mutual funds holding Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Solana. Everyone eventually comes around to crypto!

Tempo, the stablecoin-focused Layer 1 built by Stripe, just launched their public testnet.

They’ve worked with global partners to test cross-border remittances, agentic commerce features, and more. And what’s pretty cool is that you can launch your own stablecoin on Tempo from your browser.

Canton Network, the institution-focused Layer 1 with over $6T (yes, that’s a T) of real-world assets (RWAs) onchain, just raised $50M and partnered with Redstone to bridge the divide between traditional asset management and onchain liquidity tools, setting up the backend for regulated DeFi.

And RWA tokenization certainly has its supporters at the highest levels - SEC Chair Paul Atkins says “All U.S. markets will be on chain within two years”, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says that “Tokenization today is roughly where the internet was in 1996.”

Institutions will tokenize all the things.

Other Interesting Stories

Here are other stories that I’m tracking.

Are L1s overvalued?

Crypto investors Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly Capital and Santiago Santos of Inversion debated whether L1s are overvalued. Haseeb has a very optimistic, Silicon Valley-like outlook, while Santi takes a more Wall St. valuation approach. A great watch!

Watch the video here. 

Anthropic AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain exploits

Anthropic’s AI agents just proved they can autonomously find and exploit millions in crypto smart contracts, discovering $4.6M in new vulnerabilities.

AI will play a massive role in security audits moving forward.

Read more here.

November is the largest month in crypto fundraising ever

Despite the choppy public crypto markets, November 2025 was the largest month ever in crypto fundraising history.

This includes M&A deals such as Naver’s massive acquisition of Dunamu, Upbit’s parent company.

Prediction market Kalshi and Ripple had huge fundraises as well.

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!