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Deep Ventures Monthly Newsletter - September 2025

Deep Ventures Monthly Newsletter - September 2025

Recap of Token2049, portfolio updates for Enclave, Torram, and Cookbook, and more!

Mike Chan
October 14, 2025

Hope you’re having a good October! Sorry for this newsletter being a little late, but better late than never!

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

Portfolio highlights for Enclave, Torram, and Cookbook
Latest industry insights - October crypto dump and perp DEX wars
Recap of Token2049
And more!

Let’s go!

Portfolio Highlights

Enclave (syndicate portfolio company)

Enclave is a protocol for verifiable, private compute that allows developers to run programs on encrypted data from multiple sources without exposing inputs or relying on trusted hardware.

They recently launched their hackathon-ready devnet with encrypted execution, ZK output proofs, and a secret voting app called CRISP.

Pilots are underway with CowSwap, Legion, Snapshot, and many others.

They’ve expanded their team across design, cryptography, engineering, and BD. And they continue to recruit for Socials & Growth, Design Lead, and a DevRel Lead, so if you know anyone on the market for these roles, let me know!

Privacy is making a comeback, and we’re excited to see all of the progress from the Enclave team!

Torram (syndicate portfolio company)

Torram is Bitcoin’s first complete middleware stack built for institutions natively on Bitcoin L1.

Torram is exploring and building out a new primary use case that brings native yield-generating opportunities for Bitcoin corporate treasuries without leaving the Bitcoin network. With all the activity around Bitcoin Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs), this could be massive!

They’ve also updated their oracle with 60+ price feeds and enhanced indexing features to access Bitcoin UTXO & transactional states.

And they officially announced Pranav Jyoti as their new Co-Founder and Chief Revenue & Commercial Officer. Pranav is a veteran in venture capital and strategic investments and brings strong connections from the Asia-Pacific region and access to new potential business partners.

Big moves from Torram!

Cookbook (DV Fund 1 portfolio company)

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 achieved awesome traction, with over 15,000 weekly queries.

They’ve integrated their agents with more than 85 of the most popular protocols including SUI, Monad, Polygon, LayerZero, and many others.

With all of this query insight, they are building out crypto’s most valuable data layer - pre-chain intelligence that predicts market behavior weeks in advance.

This is a super exciting vision that Cookbook is pursuing!

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

One of the worst days in the history of the crypto market just happened. And there’s a new battle brewing in the perp DEX space.

The crypto market crashes hard

The cryptocurrency market suffered a massive wipeout during the weekend of October 10, erasing nearly $800B in value within 24 hours. $19.2B in leveraged positions were liquidated as panic spread across exchanges.

This crash was triggered by President Trump's announcement of 100% tariffs on Chinese tech imports. Majors like Bitcoin and Ethereum saw sharp declines, with Bitcoin dropping from over $123,000 to below $107,000 and Ethereum falling more than 11% in hours.

We hope that your liquid portfolios didn’t take too much of a hit.

Regardless of the volatility due to ongoing geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty, we firmly believe that the fundamentals have not changed at all and crypto will continue to transform industries for the better.

Now let’s resume Uptober!

Perp DEX wars

Hyperliquid vs. Aster - fight!

Aster is a perp DEX on BNB Chain that launched on September 17. It is backed by YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs), and CZ chimed in with his support, leading to a +2200% surge in the ASTER token price in just one week.

Aster claimed unbelievable activity metrics - in just two weeks of existence, the protocol generated nearly $366 billion in trading volume, more than any other perps DEX this month - including Hyperliquid.

But these volumes appear to be questionable, as trades are executed off-chain and cannot be verified.

Regardless, Aster’s impact on the perp DEX space is undeniable, and there’s surely more to come in the perp DEX wars.

New Content and Community

Recap of Token2049

I traveled to Singapore to attend Token2049!

While I didn’t attend the main conference (who does anymore?), I went to a bunch of great side events and had some interesting conversations.

First, I spoke on a panel with other VCs titled “From Tokenization to AI: Where Venture Capital is Betting in Onchain Finance” at R2’s side event.

We talked about where VC dollars are going with respect to RWAs and AI, what we look for in founders, whether value will accrue to the infra or app layer, and much more!

I also had many conversations with founders, VCs, and community members, and the key insights I extracted were:

There is still a lot of interest in DATs from VCs but the amount of legit opportunities is waning.
Everyone is trying to build a perp DEX.
The adoption of RWAs will continue to grow but VCs believe that investment opportunities into RWA platforms have largely passed.
Lots of people are bullish on Bittensor.

And I met a Women’s F1 driver on my way home!

It was a fun and productive few days in Singapore!