We’re getting closer to holiday season, and there’s a lot to be thankful for! We’re glad you’re with us and thank you for your support.

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

• Portfolio company of the month - Yanez

• Industry insights - Binance gets hacked, big banks love tokenization, and midterm results might be tough for crypto.

Let’s go!

Portfolio Company of the Month - Yanez (fund portco)

Yanez started as an AI-powered platform for detecting and correcting weaknesses of financial crime prevention systems, but has significantly expanded their product portfolio. We invested in their Bittensor subnet for synthetic identity data, the Yanez Multimodal Inorganic Identities (MIID) subnet.

Through their work with synthetic ID generation, the Yanez team realized a major problem - with the explosion of autonomous agents, how do you prove that the person you’re transacting with is 1) a real human, and 2) if so, is this human being duplicated?

So they built a Proof of Humanhood / Proof of Uniqueness product that is now live in production with two clients! The Yanez PoH / PoU app is available in both Apple App Store and Google Play. Check them out if you can.

The team recently launched the second product of their PoH / PoU suite: Pulse, bio- authorization for humans and their agents.

And they haven’t announced yet but the Yanez team is working closely with a couple of very large blockchain protocols to integrate their products.

Super excited for their progress!

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

Binance loses $6.3B in the biggest crypto hack ever

Prior to last month, September was crypto’s worst month for hacks in 2026, with $766 million in gross losses.

Binance said “hold my beer” and had $6.3B stolen on October 29.

The attack unfolded largely within about 20 minutes, and blockchain investigators attributed it to North Korea, as usual. Binance halted withdrawals and committed to covering customer losses. Its subsequent investigation described compromised employee computers, malicious software, and fake recruiting efforts that gave attackers access to internal systems.

This hack exposes a few of crypto’s catch-22s that I so often talk about:

1. The Censorship-Resistance / Emergency Intervention Catch-22: Everyone wants decentralization until a hack happens. Then we’re calling exchanges, token issuers, and law enforcement to freeze and recover stolen funds. The power to intervene can protect you or be used against you.

2. The Transparency / Privacy Catch-22: Public blockchains help investigators trace stolen money. They also let strangers analyze your financial activity. Transparency is great until you want some privacy.

3. The Self-custody / Convenience Catch-22: Self-custody means sovereignty, but securing your own keys can be a hassle. Exchanges make life easier, but you’re back to trusting someone else with your money.

I’m obviously still bullish on crypto. But we have to be honest about the drawbacks of being our own banks, and exchange hacks like these make this painfully obvious.

Big banks love tokenization

A DBS-commissioned survey of 422 leaders at companies with revenue above $500M determined that nearly 90% of large company finance execs have deployed or piloted tokenized money. That's huge!

Stablecoins were the instruments most adopted (63% of respondents), followed by tokenized deposits at 53%, and tokenized money market funds at 52%.

A couple of weeks later, 21 of the biggest financial firms in the world announced they are building a stablecoin together.

Project Faro has Goldman, Citi, Santander, Deutsche Bank, BofA, Wells Fargo, Fidelity, and more who have dedicated $270M to the initiative. The plan is a US dollar token in the first half of 2027, then euros.

Yes, they have the customers and the regulators on their side. But I'm curious whether these 21 firms can work through all the bureaucracy to make major decisions such as which blockchain to deploy on, who puts in how much, and how the funds are used.

Also, we need more decentralized stablecoins!

The midterms may make crypto’s legislative path harder

Democrats’ congressional wins may lay out a tougher path to comprehensive U.S. market structure legislation.

The CLARITY Act had already failed a September Senate procedural vote, 49-50, short of the 60 votes needed to advance. November’s election results further weakened the prospects for reviving the bill in its current form. As a result, Bitcoin and ETH touched two-month lows after the election as investors digested the political shift alongside the aforementioned Binance hack.

My hope is that we have enough educated members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to realize all of the benefits that blockchain can bring to our financial system. And it’s great to see the crypto-friendly guidance from enforcement agencies like the SEC and CFTC.

For blockchain startup founders, my advice would be to not build a business plan around Congress getting its act together. Founders still need a product and compliance strategy that works under the rules we have today.

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!