Happy Autumn!

The leaves are falling and the weather is getting cooler, but the crypto industry might be heating up!

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

• Portfolio company of the month - Panther Protocol

• Industry insights - hacks, hacks, and more hacks; Circle’s Arc chain launches with memes, and CLARITY will have to wait.

Let’s go!

Portfolio Company of the Month - Panther Protocol

Panther Protocol is building confidential on-chain DeFi infrastructure that allows for private transactions across multiple chains.

Panther is now live on Base, marking its first multichain deployment!

Like its launch on Polygon, Panther connects privacy infrastructure to established decentralized liquidity protocols (such as Uniswap) and enables confidential interactions through the Panther interface.

For users, this means confidential swaps on Base while retaining self-custody and control. Users can privately interact with the following assets:

• ZKP

• cbBTC

• ETH

• USDC

• AERO

• ZORA

• VIRTUAL

• MORPHO

• AAVE

The importance of privacy in crypto is growing, and Panther is extending its infrastructure to multiple chains to arm users with the ability to interact with DeFi confidentially.

Congrats to the Panther DAO on deploying on Base!

Read more about the launch here.

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

Another expensive month for security

September was crypto’s worst month for hacks in 2026. PeckShield tracked 55 incidents and $766 million in gross losses, up 462% from August.

Bitget and Liquid Network accounted for roughly 92% of that total.

Bitget lost approximately $387.5 million on September 24 after an attacker exploited a vulnerability in a third-party security product to obtain internal credentials and issue fraudulent withdrawals.

Earlier in the month, an Elements software bug allowed an attacker to create unbacked L-BTC and withdraw roughly 4,000 BTC from Liquid. ~3,400 BTC was subsequently returned, but the weak security issue still stands.

MetaMask closed out the month with its own infrastructure incident, announcing precautionary exits from affected staking validators on September 30. The company said it had identified no immediate threat to MetaMask wallets.

Yikes.

Crypto is building for Wall Street but can’t get away from the memes

Circle launched Arc’s public mainnet on September 16 with a very institutional pitch - an open Layer 1 for payments, financial markets, and AI agents, with fees paid in USDC. Its founding validator cohort includes BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, and DTCC.

Then, as always for a new chain, the memecoins showed up.

Memecoin launchpads generated more than $336 million in trading volume on Arc’s first day. Even Circle employees promoted dog coins.

Never change, crypto, never change.

Clarity will have to wait

The CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate on September 15 after failing to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to advance. To be clear (pun intended), this was a procedural vote on whether to take up the bill, rather than a vote on final passage. The legislation remains alive, but chances of becoming law this year are slim to none.

My thoughts:

1. We build on.

Crypto has never had regulatory clarity in the US and we have gotten this far - significant onchain activity, unprecedented institutional demand, $3T in market cap, and more. Yes, it would be ideal to have clear rules written into law. But for now, we continue to build with the hopes that the regulators will treat the industry more logically and fairly.

2. This is yet another Catch-22 of crypto (I am seriously considering writing a book about this).

Crypto was created to work outside of governmental boundaries, yet we are on pins and needles any time the government tries to make rules. It is what it is.

3. So much of this failed vote can be attributed to our "Crypto President".

You can't expect a bill for market integrity to be approved while the president and his family are extracting billions from meme coins and other crypto projects. It's just such an abuse of power.

I think we will eventually get clear regulations written into law. But for now, we continue to build. Not much else we can do.

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!