Uniform Labs is rebuilding that plumbing onchain. We invested alongside CMT Digital, Metalayer Ventures, The Venture Department and Generative Ventures to bring the Multiliquid protocol to life and accelerate its development.

What Uniform Labs is building

Uniform Labs is developing the Multiliquid Protocol, a decentralized financial base layer enabling instant convertibility between tokenized securities (RWAs) and tokenized money
(stablecoins). The protocol functions as an onchain equivalent to the traditional repo market, which is the $2T - $4T daily volume backbone of wholesale banking that most people never see but that makes modern finance work. Additionally, the team is also building the protocol’s first applications, focusing on 24/7 sweeps, instant RWA redemptions and institutional MMF swaps and repos.

Here's the core insight: tokenized Treasurys and money market funds are proliferating rapidly, but they remain trapped by the same friction that plagues traditional finance – slow redemptions, fragmented liquidity and siloed access (even if a bit less slow, less fragmented and less siloed). Meanwhile, stablecoins are now a $300B asset class and the tokenized asset market is valued at $35B, and the majority of the former offer instant settlement but no yield. With the GENIUS Act now law and issuers barred from paying interest directly, that dynamic likely isn't changing anytime soon. Multiliquid bridges these worlds by allowing tokenized assets to flow directly into stablecoin reserves, and vice versa, settling at NAV rather than through slippage-inducing trading mechanisms and other friction.

The team has already secured tier 1 partnerships with leading institutional counterparties (both stablecoin and asset issuers), and is in active discussions with many others.

Why we led this round

1. Exceptional founder market fit

Will Beeson is one of the most thoughtful, well-connected operators we've encountered in the digital assets space. This is his fourth startup as a co-founder in fintech and crypto.

At Standard Chartered, Will spent two years building Libeara, where he shipped the first investment grade-rated tokenized fund on a public blockchain. He didn't just observe the pain points of institutional tokenization, he lived them. The product gaps, the compliance hurdles, the clunky redemption processes – these are problems he encountered daily while trying to make tokenized assets work for institutional clients.

Before that, Will co-founded Allica Bank in the UK, which is one of the most heavily regulated banking environments globally. He raised £70M, built a 100-person team, obtained a full banking charter and launched a profitable institution that now ranks among the UK's fastest-growing tech companies. Building a bank from scratch teaches you things about money movement and regulatory navigation that you simply cannot learn any other way.

This combination of deep institutional finance experience, hands-on blockchain expertise and a track record of building regulated financial products is precisely what's needed to build infrastructure that bridges traditional finance and crypto.

2. We're at an inflection point

Over the past twelve months, we've watched institutional sentiment toward tokenization shift from skepticism to inevitability to active acceleration. Our diligence conversations with digital asset leads at top 10 global asset managers confirmed what we suspected: major allocators are no longer asking whether to tokenize, but how fast they can move.

BlackRock's BUIDL fund crossed $1B in AUM faster than almost anyone anticipated. Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, WisdomTree and Janus Henderson have all launched or announced tokenized Treasury products. The infrastructure demand is real and immediate, but scaled solutions don't yet exist.

We believe Uniform Labs is entering at precisely the right moment: when the market need is crystallizing but before any protocol has established itself as the default layer.

3. Credible neutrality as competitive advantage

This is where the 0→1 opportunity lives. In financial infrastructure, neutrality is what enables scale, and Multiliquid is architected from the ground up to be a credibly neutral layer.

Consider the alternative: proprietary solutions where a single issuer or platform controls the liquidity. BlackRock and Circle's BUIDL-USDC facility was useful, but it's fundamentally the same model as traditional finance: walled gardens, bilateral relationships, fragmented access. You've tokenized the asset but replicated the structure.

Multiliquid takes a different approach. Any whitelisted tokenized asset issuer can plug in. Any compliant stablecoin can integrate. The protocol aggregates liquidity across the ecosystem rather than competing for it. This is what crypto actually enables that legacy systems cannot: permissionless composability on neutral infrastructure.

The use cases this unlocks are substantial: fully onchain repo markets, automated cash sweeps for corporate treasuries, collateral optimization for exchanges seeking yield on idle balances and reserve diversification for stablecoin issuers. Each represents a multi-billion dollar opportunity, and Multiliquid is positioned as the common layer connecting them all.

4. Network effects compound over time

Multiliquid benefits from network effects that will create significant barriers to entry as the protocol scales.

Every new integration amplifies value for all existing participants. Asset issuers gain access to more stablecoin liquidity. Stablecoin issuers gain access to more reserve assets. Holders gain flexibility and optionality. Each additional blockchain deployment multiplies these benefits across ecosystems.

The first protocol to achieve critical mass becomes the default, and defaults in financial infrastructure tend to persist for decades.

5. The market opportunity Is massive

We sized this opportunity multiple ways and kept arriving at the same conclusion: the addressable market is measured in trillions.

The traditional repo market alone processes trillions daily. Even capturing a fraction of this activity onchain represents an enormous opportunity. Beyond repo, the broader convergence of tokenized assets ($35B and accelerating) with stablecoins (now a major asset class in its own right) creates the foundation for an entirely new financial infrastructure stack.

Multiliquid isn't competing for a slice of existing crypto markets – it's building the rails for institutional capital to arrive onchain in size. Multiliquid is a core bet on a high-conviction Strobe thesis around the next era of crypto markets: convergence.

Our conviction

While we’d back Will in anything he does (the micro thesis), the macro timing couldn't be better. Unprecedented demand from traditional finance leaders, stablecoin proliferation and a regulatory environment growing more constructive by the month – the conditions are set for exponential growth in tokenized financial infrastructure.

Multiliquid will deliver the functionality that actually drives order-of-magnitude improvements over legacy rails. It gives institutions both the means and the reason to move onchain.

We're thrilled to partner with Will and the Uniform Labs team on this journey.

However, historically, art and technology have mixed just about as well as do oil and water. This disconnect stems from several factors: 1) data in the art world is highly fragmented, yet comprehensive and reliable data is essential for building effective technology; 2) deliberate opacity gives certain market participants a competitive edge; and 3) historically, art entrepreneurs have lacked expertise in tech and finance, while tech and finance entrepreneurs have struggled due to a lack of understanding of art. Further, more than most industries, the global art market is built on and fueled by trust. It takes a uniquely specialized team and DNA to build a breakthrough business at the intersection of art and technology — something the world had never seen until Winston Artory Group.

Formed in 2025 through the merger of Winston Art Group and Artory, the company provides independent appraisals, data-backed advisory services and secure portfolio management solutions. Winston Artory Group champions innovation, security and objectivity to meet the complex needs of collectors, fiduciaries and institutions worldwide. WAG was founded by Elizabeth von Habsburg and Nanne Dekking, who combined bring more than 50 years of experience in art and tech and rank among the upper echelon of global art industry leaders. Elizabeth founded Winston Art Group, the largest independent art advisory and appraisal firm in the U.S. and was named one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Private Wealth. Nanne founded Artory and formerly was Vice Chairman and Worldwide Head of Private Sales for Sotheby’s. They’re among the most knowledgeable, connected and reputed art stewards in the world.

To start, one might ask: Why does art need blockchain? For us, the answer couldn’t be more obvious – provenance. Few things are more critical to a work of art’s value than its history: when it was created, who owned it and where it was shown – whether at The Met or in a Lower East Side gallery in the 1960s. These data points aren’t just details; they’re central to how art is valued over time.

The global art market is estimated to reach nearly $3 trillion by the end of 20261. Not only is the value of the market growing on an absolute basis, but the proportion of that wealth that is becoming financialized is also growing. More specifically: As luxury assets become part of the art and finance landscape, a larger portion of wealth will be managed by the sector. Approximately 63% of surveyed wealth managers [according to a 2022 report by Deloitte] have already integrated art into their wealth management offering. Put differently, wealth that has historically been passive - as a store of value or for entertainment - is becoming more active in nature. The simplest example of this is the rapid growth in recent years of art-backed lending (a core growth vertical for WAG), which has doubled in size over the last decade ($15bn —> $30bn in outstanding loans). This makes it all the more shocking when we consider the lack of technology adoption within the art world.

The most prominent success story at the intersection of art and technology is arguably Masterworks, which - with all due respect - sets a relatively low bar. For the global art market to achieve meaningful growth in the coming decade, it will need a true technology leader to drive that transformation. That’s precisely the opportunity for WAG. This vision is grounded in two key pillars: proprietary technology and data through Artory, and an unprecedented level of trust and expertise through Winston Art Group – all guided by industry leaders with unmatched networks and domain knowledge.

Trust in the art market is hindered by the lack of any centralized repository containing all catalogs and independent appraisals of artwork. There is no source of trustless truth; dating back to Bitcoin, trustless truth is precisely what the blockchain industry is built on. This lack of trust has limited the development of tech-enabled products to keep pace with broader market innovation. The art world is still stuck in the Stone Age. Technology built on unique, verifiable and trusted data can unlock the kinds of tools and services that other industries already take for granted – and Winston Artory Group is uniquely positioned to make that possible. It’s a business opportunity of truly massive scale.

WAG possesses the world’s leading proprietary art data set – uniquely non-replicable – spanning over $100 billion in value across 250,000 private transactions since 2010, along with more than 50 million public art records. Its tokenization capabilities generate tamper-proof, timestamped data that injects much-needed objectivity into an often opaque market. With the global brand strength of legacy Winston Art Group and cutting-edge technology across a proprietary database, tokenization engine and AI-driven analytics, WAG is uniquely positioned as an unmatched platform for collectors, fiduciaries and institutions – delivering a full-suite, intelligent solution for modern art and collectibles stewardship. WAG’s clients include the leading global art collectors, banks, wealth managers, insurance companies, museums, auction houses and more.

The legacy Winston brand serves as a trojan horse into which WAG sells next-gen, tech-enabled products and services to an established, rich global client base. An immediate fix to the cold start problem that plagues startups and any other competitor. What this platform looks like more specifically is:

• Data Software Services: real-time valuation tools, AI-driven analytics, and digital asset management solutions using WAG’s depth of expertise and unparalleled data analytics that empower clients to make informed decisions and maximize the potential of their collections (see: WAG Portfolio Manager shown below);

• Asset Management: tokenized investment funds offering investors diversified exposure to art, rare wines, whiskeys and more;

• Advisory & Appraisal: Winston’s legacy business supercharged by Artory’s tokenized object library and AI-driven analytics to allow these processes to both move more quickly and efficiently, plus be more (data-)informed. These services span appraisals for estate planning, family division, insurance, damage assessment, donations and art-as-collateral, as well as strategic guidance and advocacy for buying, selling, financing and managing every collecting category, tailored to meet clients’ unique goals and maximize value; and

• Tokenization: an advanced, data-rich tokenization engine serves as a tamper-proof ledger for all transaction and artwork data. While the core value – permanent, verifiable provenance – is simple yet powerful, tokenization also unlocks transformative possibilities: from enabling a digitally-native secondary marketplace that could (will) one day rival Sotheby’s and Christie’s, to laying the foundation for a next-generation art-backed lending platform.

  • Art-backed loans: tokenizing collateral data and providing real-time verification of an asset’s location and condition will both broaden the serviceable market for art-backed loans, as well as drive down the cost of capital to borrowers.

  • Secondary marketplace: a forthcoming digitally native, tokenized art marketplace will allow WAG to eliminate rent-seeking middlemen, replacing reliance on intermediaries with trust in verifiable technology. This shift can reduce the all-in transaction cost from over 30% to a much more fair platform take-rate of 5%-10%, while also delivering a significantly improved user experience.

While WAG’s SaaS platform, tokenized investment funds and appraisals & advisory business lines are expected to generate strong base revenue and a sticky, enjoyable one-stop-shop user experience, the tokenization vertical is where we see truly venture-scale return potential and is central to one of Strobe’s core investment theses: The Unbundling of Sotheby’s.

At a high-level this unbundling involves the evolution of market share away from a few expensive, gated and inefficient generalized marketplaces (Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips in this case) to specialized vertical marketplaces that offer better user experiences for cheaper. Blockchains serve as open, trustless infrastructure that are also rich in data and act as the key enabler of these businesses. Another Strobe portfolio company, BAXUS, is unbundling the archaic alcohol distribution market with a revolutionary platform for spirits and wines built on the Solana blockchain.

Art-backed lending is a core pillar of WAG’s tokenization strategy. While WAG serves ultra-high-end clients (their first customer is in talks to borrow $150 million against select artworks) this is a more competitive segment of the market. The company primarily targets the underserved middle market, offering art collectors attractive loans collateralized by their collections. With deep in-house expertise spanning valuations, data, appraisals, insurance and a robust liquidation network (in cases of default), along with an unmatched industry rolodex, WAG is well-positioned to expand the serviceable market and capture a significant share of the overall market for art-backed lending. In this way WAG is increasingly transforming individuals’ portfolios from passive to active, providing significant value to otherwise neglected segments of a given portfolio.

Their tokenization engine will reduce the expected default rate on loans and bring down the cost of capital in art-backed lending, plus broaden the audience to whom they can lend, given a smarter data-driven underwriting framework and emphasis on transparency / verifiability (ie, the core value propositions of blockchains). The upper-end of the market is well serviced by private banks; however, smaller loans or those concentrated on specific niches generally experience difficulty borrowing (or are pushed to very high-cost private lenders). WAG is partnering with large capital allocators (eg, insurance companies and traditional asset managers) structured as joint ventures and is expected to generate 7-figures of annual lending revenue by YE26.

WAG is in the early stages of building a tokenized online art marketplace, with the bold ambition of eventually disrupting – and potentially displacing – the legacy auction houses. As younger generations increasingly favor digital experiences and the great baby boomer wealth transfer unfolds, the conditions are ripe for a new market leader to emerge. It’s not hard to imagine a future where buyers and sellers grow tired of paying 30% or more in combined commissions and premiums, which is the standard with traditional auction houses.

The opportunity is significant: if WAG captures just 2.5% of the $65 billion annual art market and charges a 5% seller’s commission (an 80%+ discount to incumbent fees) the company could generate over $80 million in annual revenue. WAG is uniquely positioned to win, thanks to its trusted brand, long-standing relationships with high-net-worth clients, in-house expertise and integrated services such as Lending and Analytics through its proprietary SaaS dashboard. These elements create a sticky platform-based experience that legacy players can’t easily replicate. Blockchain rails enable quicker and cheaper transactions, a robust data-driven UX and provide an added layer of verifiable trust that eliminates otherwise potential friction to adoption.

WAG has the ability to offer a far superior user experience. Its marketplace can harness proprietary data to deliver a rich, insight-driven interface – with features like smart analytics, market comps, historical bid/ask data and dynamic pricing charts – giving collectors and investors a modernized buying and selling experience that doesn’t exist today.

While some clients may always prefer the traditional route, there is substantial white space for innovation. No other company combines the right mix of talent, brand equity, trust, technology and proprietary data like WAG – positioning it to capture and lead a significant share of this market.

***

In Q1 2025, Strobe led a $10m Series A financing to help catalyze the merger of Winston Art Group + Artory and joined the board of directors. Galaxy Digital, CMT Digital and the family office of legendary art collector Eijk van Otterloo also invested in the round. Proceeds will be used to make key hires and prioritize its emerging lending and data SaaS businesses, while also set the foundation for its forthcoming art marketplace.

Like all other value in the world, art will be tokenized. WAG will be the one tokenizing it, and in doing so, the company has the potential to become a generational business that reshapes the global art landscape. With an unrivaled combination of brand trust, deep expertise, a growing and irreplicable dataset and next-generation blockchain infrastructure, WAG is uniquely positioned to lead in a $3 trillion industry that still lacks a true technology leader.

WAG is building a one-stop platform where collectors can access insights into their portfolios, monitor market trends, obtain insurance and appraisals, seamlessly borrow against their collections and soon tap into a digitally native marketplace to discover, buy and sell art. WAG is steadily becoming the central hub for anyone who owns art — the place where value is understood, enhanced and transacted.

On the heels of two years of a global slowdown, the art market is starved for a technology leader to catalyze rapid growth over the next decade. WAG is uniquely positioned to play that role and Strobe, as the company’s lead investor, is excited and privileged to play a small role and have the opportunity to leave a permanent dent in the history of the art market.

The views expressed here are those of the individual Strobe Ventures LP (“Strobe”) personnel quoted and are not the views of Strobe or its affiliates. Certain information has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Strobe. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, Strobe has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the current or enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; Strobe has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein. Learn more about Strobe Ventures at strobe.fund.

At Strobe, we believe community-owned and co-created brands are the future, especially for Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers who demand their voices be heard in the products they purchase. Younger generations don’t just want to buy products. They want to belong, advocate, and actively shape the brands they love.

Today, the winning formula for building a category-defining consumer brand is to have one or more of the following: 1) ridiculous ad spend, 2) a creator/celebrity distribution, or 3) a cult-like community. 

In lieu of spending millions of dollars on Facebook and Google advertising, or unless you're a creator with a casual 10m+ followers, you need to cultivate your own community that becomes your marketing engine and distribution channel. 

As such, successful modern brands need to be either community-led and/or creator-led. They either harness massive distribution from a celebrity/creator or tap into the energy of a cult-like community.

And that's why we're co-leading TYB's $11M Series A alongside Offline Ventures. We’re excited to back a team that has firsthand experience in building a community-led brand from the ground up and is now productizing those components on crypto rails.  TYB is laying the rails for a new era of onchain commerce, starting by rebuilding loyalty from the ground up. 

How commerce is changing

1. Traditional loyalty programs are fundamentally broken. They're one-way, static, single-player games where points expire, rewards feel generic, and engagement flatlines.

2. Meanwhile, brands are spending more and more on acquiring customers. On average, Seed and Series A DTC brands now spend 30-50% of their total raised capital on paid media: TikTok, Instagram, influencer programs, and more. As every brand floods the same channels, ROAS declines and customer acquisition becomes a battle for attention. 

3. At the same time, Gen Z and Gen Alpha prioritize authenticity over aesthetics. Picture-perfect feeds don't convert anymore, as brands with personality that directly engage consumers win. Think Duolingo's viral owl mascot. Younger consumers crave community and belonging. 

4. This is driving a new type of "direct-to-consumer," where brands directly engage with their community and most loyal fans. Deeply incentivized communities will unlock a new flywheel and model where their customers are brought in earlier in the funnel, becoming product specialists, brand advisors, content creators, and micro-influencers.

5. Lastly, Strobe believes commerce is becoming inherently social. A new social commerce layer is emerging both on and offchain. Consumers are sharing their obsessions and purchases and expect to be rewarded for their taste. 

So, what is TYB?

At its core, TYB is a mobile-native, play-to-earn platform where consumers build status by earning coins and collecting rewards through "challenges", including mini-games, surveys, and product feedback from their favorite brands. For every challenge completed, friend referred, or obsession shared, consumers earn tokens that unlock new status, direct discounts, and exclusive access from brands like Rare Beauty, Urban Outfitters, Glossier, Poppi, Paris Hilton, and Crocs.

Before TYB, brands cobbled together fragmented solutions across Instagram DMs, Slack channels, and Google Docs to engage their communities. TYB is rewriting the playbook for community-owned brands, providing infrastructure that lets brands directly incentivize valuable fan actions while community members share in the financial upside.

The app creates a gamified social experience where brand loyalty becomes a status-driven identity that drives daily engagement across a multi-brand network.

Recent product launches demonstrate how TYB is evolving beyond traditional cookie-cutter loyalty.

Investing in community drives measurable returns

TYB now powers community for beloved brands like Poppi, Glossier, Rare Beauty, OUAI, Saie and more. And the early results show that investing in community is paying off. 

The ~1m users users, predominantly high-value Gen Z women, on TYB purchase 43% more frequently than non-TYB members, with brands reporting 24% higher LTV from their community members versus non-community members. 

More importantly, TYB is driving 15% monthly user growth through product-led features like discovery and user referrals. Users aren't just passively accumulating points; they're actively recruiting friends, sharing content, and building reputations as tastemakers within their favorite brand communities.

This shift from transactional to participatory loyalty is creating a new model where customers become co-creators and advocates, not just purchasers.

For instance, TYB members on Glossier have 3x higher purchase frequency and 96% higher LTV compared to non-TYB users. 

Why this team?

There's no better person to build this than Ty Haney. At Outdoor Voices, she didn't just build a brand - she pioneered community-led commerce before anyone knew what to call it. During the height of the 2010s DTC era, other brands burned through paid marketing budgets while Ty rewarded community members with physical "Doing Things" hats for participating in surveys and product feedback. Those hats were the analog precursor to the branded collectibles (NFTs) that TYB users mint today.

Ty fundamentally understands what it means to put community first, consistently differentiating her brand by bringing her community upstream in product creation, design, and marketing. Back then, she used web2 platforms like Instagram, Twitter DMs, Slack, and Google Docs to solicit feedback from her community. Now, Ty is building the scalable infrastructure she needed back then - but scalable for any brand.

Community commerce now comes onchain

What’s starting out as this fun gamified social experience will eventually become the building blocks for a new type of onchain commerce infrastructure on Base. 

As consumers complete challenges and curate obsessions on TYB, they are actually creating a verifiable taste profile onchain. These components will build a portable reputation system that can eventually be ported across brands and platforms. Onchain TYB data enables new primitives for identity, social, and value distribution that other advertisers, marketplaces, and brands can not only tap into but also build on top of. 

Consumer-owned commerce data flowing through TYB's platform will power a verifiable identity layer, enabling hyper-personalization and net-new behaviors/actions.

Try Your Best now

Join ~1m other users and discover your favorite communities on TYB today. If you're a brand interested in TYB, reach out to the team here or fill out this form.

With the rise of derivative exchanges and novel yield products on new chains, even the most sophisticated traders struggle to capture maximum value, effectively manage positions, and efficiently move assets across multiple protocols. This has created lucrative opportunities for retail investors, traders, and institutions who can navigate this convoluted onchain maze.

It’s clear that decentralized protocols are rivaling centralized exchanges head on. Last year, total DEX trading volume was on par with Coinbase’s trading volume of $1.2 trillion. Recently, Jupiter's daily volumes have grown to approximately 20% of Coinbase's, exceeding $40B in monthly volume in February 2025.

This shift isn't just about trading volume. Many tokens trade exclusively on DEXs as onchain venues have become increasingly competitive on execution quality, providing deeper liquidity and tighter spreads.

As this activity shifts more towards decentralized protocols, we are seeing a new generation of trading platforms emerge. The archetype of these users spans from asset managers broadening their asset selection universe to casual traders who are discovering new memetics. 

However, in the past, trading across DeFi was limited to those intimately familiar with the various protocols, felt comfortable bridging large sums of money across multiple chains, and probably required some level of technical expertise in order to trigger stop losses, limit orders, TWAPs, and more.

At Strobe, we’ve observed that there’s now a spectrum of DeFi traders, who range in level of sophistication and what they prioritize (e.g., speed, mobile or desktop first, convenience, UX, price). We believe there are multiple billion dollar outcomes serving each of these cohorts of users, and we are already beginning to see these platforms emerge.

At one end of the spectrum are retail users who discover memes on TikTok and share jokes with friends within social chats. These users prefer convenience, mobile-first experiences, and their trading is innately social in nature.

As such, they prefer to use interfaces like Bankr on Farcaster and X to directly purchase tokens on the feed, or leverage agents to help them execute across chains. Many of these users love to share memes within group chats or see what tokens their friends are purchasing. This cohort of traders often executes directly on apps like Frens, Vector, and Moonshot, or directly via Telegram trading bots (e.g., pvptrade, Pocket Protector, and Bullx). Simple consumer-friendly interfaces offer highly abstracted but often expensive entry points, charging up to 2.5% per transaction.

Bankr

@bankrbot

the easiest way to copy trade directly in the social feed

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7:49 PM • Mar 24, 2025

Somewhere in between the institutional and retail are the crypto-native traders. These users feel comfortable interacting directly with DEX aggregators like Uniswap and Jupiter, or from their native wallet, which provides protocol access with moderate fees but limited trading tools and analytics.

When it comes to serving institutions, OTC desks, and DeFi whales that need to trade with size, it’s paramount to get the best execution price because small differences can translate to tens of thousands of dollars. In a world where liquidity is spread across hundreds of pools, finding this optimal execution path is essentially not feasible without automation. This is where Definitive comes in.

Definitive is an advanced onchain trading platform built to bring institutional-grade trade execution to DeFi. Created by a team of Coinbase Institutional Trading alumni and active DeFi experts, Definitive combines the sophisticated trading capabilities typically reserved for centralized venues with the permissionless, non-custodial attributes of decentralized finance. Think Coinbase Advanced but for DeFi.

The platform’s smart order router aggregates liquidity across 100+ DEXs, liquidity pools and market makers, providing superior execution prices and enabling users to trade with minimal market impact across any token across EVM and Solana. 

• Individual Traders such as DeFi whales and yield farmers seek sophisticated tools for interacting with protocols but with a "Binance-esque" experience. They are also rolling out a mobile app with an intuitive UX and all the same advanced trading capabilities.

• OTC Desks face growing institutional demand for trending tokens unavailable on centralized exchanges. They are able to plug into Definitive's smart order router that taps 100+ liquidity sources. This enables them to serve the likes of Franklin Templeton and Fidelity as these institutions accelerate their onchain activities. 

• VCs, Family Offices, DAOs need to strategically manage positions across chains with minimal market impact and detailed reporting. Many of them demand institutional-grade execution tools that they are accustomed to in traditional finance.

• Strategic Partners such as wallets, aggregators, and custodians can white-label DeFi yields and trading capabilities to their end users via Definitive's API.

As DeFi gets more and more convoluted, there are more traditional fintech players, AI agents, crypto front ends, and other consumer-friendly interfaces that are looking to abstract away this complexity while still plugging into DeFi rails. 

Definitive is positioning itself as the execution layer for this emerging landscape of agents, frontends, and wallets. Today, AI agents can only perform very simple swaps, and users can't trust them to execute trades efficiently or manage complex strategies. Definitive's API and execution capabilities provide the perfect foundation for this future—where AI-powered apps can navigate this complex multi-chain world on behalf of users, but with the sophisticated execution quality that institutions demand.

At Strobe, we are excited about the DeFi mullet. We have seen successful examples with companies like Morpho enabling bitcoin-backed loans within Coinbase’s main app, allowing Coinbase CEX users to borrow USDC against their bitcoin holdings. We believe we will see more DeFi mullets across not only CEXes like Robinhood and Revolut, but also agents and social interfaces.

With more onchain apps emerging across sports, media, social, trading, and other categories, many of these apps will require a DeFi execution engine that enables features beyond simple swaps. As this trend accelerates, Definitive is also launching their DeFi Execution API, which will serve as the connective tissue for this rapidly evolving landscape. In a world where alpha is increasingly found onchain, the winners will be those with the infrastructure to capture it efficiently, securely, and at scale.

Definitive is live here. You can learn more here.

The views expressed here are those of the individual Strobe Ventures LP (“Strobe”) personnel quoted and are not the views of Strobe or its affiliates. Certain information has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Strobe. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, Strobe has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the current or enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; Strobe has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein. Learn more about Strobe Ventures at strobe.fund.

On-chain prime brokerage, a scalable new-paradigm stablecoin and oracles are a few of crypto's holy grails. If you’re building the first category and it’s not obviously unviable reach out to us and we’d love to chat. We were lucky enough to back the second category in a substantial way. As for the third: we’re excited to announce our lead investment in Chronicle Labs $12M seed round. Chronicle is a next-generation oracle solution delivering scalability, material cost-efficiencies and true decentralization; the team wrote the first-ever oracle on Ethereum as part of MakerDAO in 2017 and spun out of Maker in Q3 2023. Additional backers include top-tier institutional investors Galaxy Digital, Brevan Howard, Tioga Capital, 6th Man Ventures, Robot Ventures, plus industry OGs like Rune Christensen, Andre Cronje, Stani Kulechov and Mark Phillips.

OBVIOUSLY UNVIABLE

Before we get into Chronicle and why we’re so excited by the opportunity, let’s touch on the presumptuous-sounding obviously unviable. There are a number of reasons this might be the case.

1. Network effects → as a product’s or service’s user base grows, its value increases as well. The most obvious cases include social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

   • Stablecoins also benefit from network effects. For example, as more developers and platforms integrate leading stablecoins, such as Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, their use becomes more available and frictionless, thereby increasing their value propositions. Circle and Tether certainly benefit from network effects; web3 social has been a trickier path to navigate, evidenced by a graveyard of startups, but we’re confident that will change.

2. Regulatory arbitrage → otherwise known as the Warren Buffet playbook. In the trad equities world we see many cases of this, for example with regulated utilities businesses, which are essentially government-crowned monopolies.

   • This is a bit less prevalent in the crypto world, partly due to the fact that Gensler and his cronies have prevented any semblance of a regulatory framework in the U.S. for the last four years. However, there are examples where certain licenses - like the New York BitLicense or the OCC charter - have funneled a ton of (mandated – I use that lightly) demand that companies like Coinbase and Anchorage have benefitted from (not to take away from their own merits).

3. Deep/complex tech & IP → this one is pretty straightforward. Highly complex and specialized tech can provide deep moats in the startup world. MPC is a segment of the market where leaders experience some degree of this edge. With that said, there are many winners in this market and the obvious unviability typically comes more from a critical tech infrastructure risk where large customers hesitate to trust startups over battle-tested incumbents (if nothing else than for the career risk associated with CTO’s in making these decisions…no one ever got fired for choosing IBM).

   • Unique proprietary data is a prime example of true IP edge. A number of businesses benefit from this, including those operating in the exchange and trading software verticals. Other exciting opportunities we might discuss in the future include proprietary datasets in the art world 👀

4. Scale/cost advantages → certain businesses, like Amazon, operate at such tremendous scale that they can offer prices and various loss-leader strategies that are nearly impossible to overcome. In the crypto world, CEXs are a prime example of who benefit from this.

5. Brand equity → Apple, LVMH, Tesla…Ledger, Coinbase, Solana – a handful of web2 and web3 businesses that enjoy strong benefits from established brands consumers love and trust.

   • This extends beyond consumer products – enterprise cases are often a function of credibility and the aforementioned adage that no one ever got fired for hiring IBM. Chainlink is a prime example in the crypto world.

6. Technologically infeasible → lastly, certain ideas might just be too hard to actually build today due to technological constraints. This is what comes to mind when we consider on-chain prime brokerage that actually works and mimics what is table stakes in trad finance. This won’t always be the case; someone will build a monster project in this space, and we hope to back it. Again, DMs open.

These are a handful of the factors that might lead one to find a given deal or idea obviously unviable. We’ll never whisk a deck off the desk too quickly, but the above provide formidable defenses for today’s market leaders.

Of course, operating as a venture capitalist often requires you to be contrarian in your thinking. It favors the (grounded) optimists. We hope and even assume all of these challenges will be overcome and holy grails discovered and funded; otherwise, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs. We might heed the advice of Winston Churchill, who instructed that “success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”.

We’ve seen a number of startups defy the odds, execute and go on to win in a major way. Ethena is the most obvious example from this cycle. Solana, MakerDAO and Uniswap are a handful of others from the past. To understand why Chronicle is added to this list, we must first understand why the odds are stacked against oracle startups more generally.

AN UPHILL BATTLE

Brand equity + technological risk --> deadly recipe for whisked off the desk. Chainlink has had a near-monopolistic grip on the market for years. They have a strong brand, their tech works and they’re battle-tested. That’s the story. 

Building and maintaining a good oracle platform is technically challenging (nevermind a great or a novel technology). Relatedly, and most importantly, if you’re a startup founder in need of an oracle – first & foremost, you’re a startup founder. This means you face myriad other challenges, risks and stressors that sit above that of the oracle provider you’ve integrated into your business. You likely have minimal bandwidth to vet alternatives (to the dominant incumbent) and/or you have better uses of your time. Additionally, say you find the bandwidth and decide to go with what you perceive to be a better option for xyz reason, the potential risk of it not working, even for a split second, and causing losses to your customers can be existential. As such, you’re probably going with the incumbent. This tech/critical infra risk is further compounded over time by the entrenching effects of growing brand equity. 

This plus a mix of other strategies, which are beyond the scope of this post, have afforded Chainlink a valuable moat around its business for years. This is not to detract from what Chainlink has accomplished. They - plus others, like Pyth - have developed good businesses and advanced the industry in positive ways. However, they have their drawbacks and the industry needs a superior option. Enter Chronicle.

THE PATH TO BECOMING THE #1 ORACLE

To understand why Chronicle is not obviously unviable, we look back to the key tenets of that suggestion for the oracle space. 

Brand equity → Chainlink’s brand equity is formidable; everyone knows them, many use them and its $15B $LINK token reinforces its position (eg, as a GTM incentive). 

• However, Chronicle spun out of MakerDAO and the founder, Nik Kunkel, wrote the first-ever oracle on Ethereum in 2017 to facilitate the creation of SAI, the predecessor to DAI. Chronicle inherits this brand equity, among other strategic benefits, and not only effectively mitigates this risk but actually creates an unfair advantage where Maker (strongly incentivized via ownership of $CLE) can (/has /will) strongly influence who its partners use for oracle services.

Technological risk → at its worst, some might consider oracles as simple technology; at its best, as is the case with Chronicle, the technology is complex. It’s difficult and costly to develop an oracle business that hopes to compete with incumbents. An error in the technology that causes losses to users could be existential, which reinforces how critical the technological risk is.

• However, Chronicle has developed its core technology for the better part of the last decade (very few teams in the industry have even been around for that long). It has poured a significant amount of resources and capital into its development, and it has been rigorously battle-tested in handling Maker’s growth – including at times securing more than $20B in value. 

Few projects have stronger and more wide-reaching brand equity than MakerDAO. Chronicle’s Maker pedigree and performance in scaling its growth more than 50x helped to flip Chronicle 180 degrees in our deal pipeline from risk of obviously unviable to obviously compelling.

The Ce(De)Fi opportunity is massive, fast-growing and individual clients alone represent opportunities that are larger than the entire sector today. This represents the clearest near-term path to becoming the market leader.

Next we turn to the more exciting stuff – why Chronicle is better and why it will be broadly embraced across both DeFi and CeFi as it sets course to usurp the industry leader. 

Team → the team who literally wrote the world’s first onchain oracle. Nik & team scaled and battle-tested the technology inside one of the industry’s largest and most important protocols for more than six years, and spun out with a well-networked and deeply experienced team to dominate this space.

Hot start via MakerDAO pedigree → support by MakerDAO and its growing subDAOs. This lends not just experience and early nearly-guaranteed traction (eg, in the case of Spark), but also critically-important credibility that provides Chronicle with a hot start (opposite of the cold start dilemma that nearly all oracle upstarts face — going back to the adage that no one ever got fired for hiring IBM).

• Note: beyond DeFi, Chronicle has closed some yet-unannounced landmark CeFi deals that are complete game changers...more on that soon 👀

A clear, scalable business model → that follows traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) monetization and novel technology that leverages cryptographic mechanisms with drastically better unit economics than is currently in the market.

Institutional calibre → alongside increasing institutional + broader trad adoption (eg, BlackRock and Robinhood making strong pushes in the space), we expect significantly more demanding standards from all players in the space (many of whom won't be able to meet these demands), and especially for those building critical infrastructure. Whether this takes the form of, for example, SOC II compliance becoming table stakes, or transparent, accountable and professional processes, it’s plain & simple that many players in the space today simply don’t come close to meeting the bar of what has been demanded by traditional businesses for decades. If we expect continued convergence and adoption (which Strobe does) these become non-starter competitive edges for businesses like Chronicle.

• As one simple example, the Chronicle Dashboard provides simple, end-user level transparency on Chronicle’s Oracle Feeds and validator network. Notably, it enables any user to potentially verify the aggregated signatures, which is not possible via Chainlink and other oracle networks.

Technology advantages → Chronicle has developed truly novel technology that sets it apart from the competition. This sets the stage for them to win on cost, brand and unique selling points, particularly for the large traditional institutions (eg, BlackRocks and Fidelitys of the world), who will demand more secure and robust infrastructure that is inherent to Chronicle’s design.

• The architecture is centered around a unique implementation of Schnorr signatures, which promote 1) lower cost and 2) more censorship-resistance, allowing for a fixed oracle update cost independent of the # of validators. This fixed cost is 3.5x cheaper than Chainlink and Pyth, and 2.5x cheaper than Redstone. This means that Chronicle’s oracles are highly accurate and update very frequently even on traditionally expensive chains like Ethereum. Further, not only are the oracles cheaper for developers but Chronicle’s architecture also mitigates centralization risk and allows for a greater number of validators and more transparent, onchain validation of audit trails.

• There is a direct linear relationship between # of validators and protocol operating expenses (gas on blockchains). Historically, competitors have opted to maximize profit margins at the expense of centralization. Chronicle has a structural cost advantage that not only allows them to undercut competition on price (if they so choose), but also offers a more decentralized and secure platform (which actually should command a premium). To add specifics, the average number of Chainlink validators required for quorum is 11; worst yet, for their L2 oracles, the quorum is just 4 (note: any 3 can update the oracle). This is far from permissionless and represents material risk of collusion.

  • This has resulted in a moral hazard to minimize the number of validators (reducing security & decentralization) to keep costs constrained. Due to lack of true competition over the years, Chainlink has been able to get away with this suboptimal and risky status quo. 

• The solution: in short, Chronicle’s tech compresses validator signatures and effectively decouples the relationship between the # validators and operating costs. Importantly, Chronicle’s tech is not theoretical – it has been battle-tested for years across chains and securing $ billions in value for the space’s largest projects.

OWNING THE RAILS OF THE FUTURE

The Pennsylvania Railroad operated between 1846-1968 and was known as "The Standard Railroad of the World". It was a pioneering railroad known for its technological innovations, extensive network and financial dominance in the industry. In the late 19th century it became the largest railroad and corporation in the world and it standardized (and set the bar for) many aspects of the industry, as part of its legacy.

As far as onchain infrastructure goes, there is not much that is more critical than oracles. In order for our industry to thrive, it needs its Pennsylvania Railroad moment – that moment and steward is Chronicle. We couldn’t be more excited to back, fuel the growth of and own our share of these rails of the future. 

Chronicle is redefining access to cost-efficient and verifiable data. Together with its warm start problem + brand equity Chronicle is set to disrupt the oracle space across both DeFi + CeFi and scale massively to become the world’s largest and most trusted source of truth that enables onchain transactions. Chronicle is driving the adoption and growth of web3 and catalyzing exciting convergence between the off- and onchain worlds.

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The views expressed here are those of the individual Strobe Ventures LP (“Strobe”) personnel quoted and are not the views of Strobe or its affiliates. Certain information has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Strobe. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, Strobe has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the current or enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; Strobe has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.

From your imagination to doorstep in just two weeks, Dripster now enables virtually anyone to become a designer.  

Today, the role of product design and creation is relegated primarily to fashion houses, manufacturers, large creators, and traditional brands. Traditionally, these brands spend months designing and manufacturing pieces for every season or drop. The process for hyped up product drops from brands like Supreme, Off-White, Aimé Leon Dore are fundamentally broken. Bots snipe initial supply, dominate resale markets on StockX, GOAT, and eBay, while true buyers pay a multiple of the original sticker price. The result is a fragmented landscape where incentives are misaligned and most stakeholders (including the brands themselves) lose.

Dripster solves this by creating an ecosystem where everybody wins—from creators to communities to manufacturers. It replaces traditional "product drops" with "product launches," where creators and communities share in the financial upside of successful products and directly influence the final supply that will be brought to market.

Dripster enables users to mint "dripcoins"—tokens tied to a user-generated product design. When a dripcoin's market cap hits key milestones, token holders can claim the limited-edition physical products that Dripster’s network of manufacturers will produce. This model completely flips the current fashion and supply chain process on its head, and returns the power and financial upside back to everyday creators and their early supporters. It empowers anyone (regardless of whether they went to fashion school or have never opened Illustrator) to become a designer and create interesting items that can be brought to physical life. 

1. Design: Users upload or generate a product concept using Dripster's AI product studio. 

2. Launch: Users mint a dripcoin tied to their design on Dripster's bonding curve.

3. Fund: When the dripcoin hits $40K market cap, $8K of liquidity is deposited in Raydium and locked. Creators earn 2% of the escrowed supply as the coin graduates.

4. Claim: At preset market cap milestones (starting at $200K), physical product units become claimable by token holders. Higher market cap milestones unlock additional units—one per wallet.

5. Produce & Redeem: Token holders receive the unique physical products once production is finalized through Dripster's manufacturing network.
   

Unlike memecoins, dripcoins are anchored to physical products, offering intrinsic value to tradeable coins. 

Token launchpads have rapidly evolved over the past year. The first generation, exemplified by pump.fun demonstrated the massive market demand with ~$600M in revenue and 8.6B tokens created on Solana, but focused primarily on pure memecoin creation.

The second wave brought purpose-built protocols and platforms like Clanker (social-first token creation via Farcaster agents and Clanker interfaces), Virtuals (AI-agent powered tokens), Pure Markets (launchpad utilizing dutch auction dynamic bonding curves), and Flaunch (novel mechanics on Uni v4), which collectively have expanded the design space for issuing tokens with more sophisticated mechanism designs. Recent entrants like Yapster have introduced gamified social elements, while Dev.fun and Ohara are pioneering text-prompted mini-app creation with native token integration.

Dripster represents the next frontier in this evolution—bringing token launchpad mechanics to the fashion and physical product world. By combining their proven AI design platform with token-based funding mechanisms, Dripster creates a powerful new paradigm for bringing physical products to market.

Dripster is built by the team behind Off/Script (recognized as Vogue's #2 Innovation of 2024), which has amassed nearly 800K users across 100 countries to create 2M product designs spanning apparel, outerwear, sneakers, furniture, jewelry, accessories, and home goods. At Strobe, we’ve had the privilege of seeing Jonathan and Justine navigate the idea maze, and combine truly novel token mechanics with their background in AI commerce. The team has established deep manufacturing relationships with factories across 4 continents that enable Dripster to prototype new SKUs and products within 2-3 weeks. They are able to do this because under the hood, Dripster has trained their models based on the specific product sheets from these factories. The team is deeply embedded with their manufacturing network of 200+ partners who work with brands like Burberry, Adidas, and Off-White.

Speculation is a feature, not a bug: Dripster capitalizes on two of crypto's core use cases that have product-market fit this cycle: capital formation and speculation. We firmly believe that crypto is a great mechanism for capital formation, and if done correctly, Dripster can leverage memecoin dynamics to create novel real-world products. As everything moves onchain, we are now able to tokenize everything from <1 cent to billions of dollars. Unlike traditional memecoins, Dripster's tokens are anchored to physical products, providing intrinsic value while enabling communities and creators to share in the economic upside of successful launches.

For the first time, a launchpad enables influencers, early holders, and communities to monetize influence without being unilaterally extractive.

Fashion's evolution into a high-velocity industry, driven by rapid trend cycles and the rise of influencer-led drops, has created an urgent need for real-time retail capabilities. Traditional brands remain constrained by manual workflows that span lengthy stakeholder reviews and complex processes that can no longer keep pace with market demands.

AI represents a solution to this bottleneck, enabling the conversion of new trend data into design concepts within minutes rather than weeks. While traditional AI image models can create compelling visuals, AI product development demands domain-specific expertise across apparel, accessories, and footwear design. By focusing on these specialized requirements, Dripster's supply chain network and models enable rapid product testing, accelerated deployment of trend-responsive items, and more precise inventory forecasting.

Real-World Products: At Strobe, we like backing teams building real world products that leverage tech in novel ways. Dripster dramatically reduces the barriers to becoming a designer. By combining Solana's efficient trading infrastructure ($20B+ in weekly trading volume) with their established design-to-delivery process, Dripster creates a powerful primitive for transforming creative concepts into tangible products. 

We believe Dripster represents the future of tokenized product creation, and are thrilled to support this team as they usher in a new type of onchain commerce. Dripster is live today on Solana, and you can start creating cool drip!

The views expressed here are those of the individual Strobe Ventures LP (“Strobe”) personnel quoted and are not the views of Strobe or its affiliates. Certain information has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Strobe. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, Strobe has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the current or enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; Strobe has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.

After years of building one of crypto's most trusted investment platforms, we're starting a new chapter with a sharper focus on what matters most: backing founders who are building things that last. 

Our approach is intentionally different. We’re a lean team by design, invest pre-consensus, and take a hands-on approach with fewer founders. With over $235M in assets under management and significant dry powder ready to deploy, we're actively searching for partners who share our vision. 

Over the last few cycles, some patterns have become clear. The hype, the subsequent crash. Fortunes made, fortunes lost. Users flood in, users vanish. The same mistakes repeat, preventing the industry from reaching its potential. 

We believe in crypto – that’s why we’re here. But for crypto to reach its potential, we need to overcome the seven deadly sins that are holding the industry back.  

Greed
The pursuit of quick returns over sustainable value. Projects launch with inflated valuations and low floats, using tactics that benefit insiders at the cost of innovation. We've normalized practices that would raise red flags in any other industry.

Insularity
Crypto can sometimes feel like an echo chamber of crypto natives selling to each other. Capital circulates between protocols – when one DeFi farm winds down, users migrate to the next one. We're building complex solutions for 50,000 active users while missing opportunities to serve billions.

Opacity
Despite blockchain's promise of transparency, the industry runs on hidden complexity. Projects operate behind anon teams while managing billions in user funds. Simple concepts get wrapped in convoluted tokenomics. Key information about ownership and governance stays buried in dense documentation. At this rate, we’re recreating the opacity of traditional finance without its accountability.

Short-Term Narratives
We tend to run on narratives, not fundamentals. One week it's NFTs, the next it's Bitcoin L2s, then it's an entirely new scaling solution we realized we needed overnight. Projects launch, pump, and fade before delivering real value.

Laziness
We see more copypasta projects than real innovation. Successful protocols spawn dozens of forks with minor parameter changes. Teams would rather launch another marketplace clone on a new chain than tackle tough technical challenges. True breakthroughs require original thinking – but why bother when you can fork existing code and still capture value?

Deceit
Companies tout metrics without painting the full picture. “Active user” metrics mask the reality that most operate multiple addresses. "Partnerships" amount to little more than shared chat groups or token swaps. Marketing trumps transparency.

Arrogance
Teams raise $100M on pitch decks, then focus more on narrative than code. Self-proclaimed "thought leaders" with limited experience try to reshape entire industries. We've built a system where meme-making often matters more than product-building.

***

And yet, we have more conviction than ever in crypto’s potential. That’s why we’re starting Strobe. 

You might ask – how?

Because beneath the noise and speculation, there are founders who are charting a different path. They're asking the hard questions: What if we built for the next decade instead of today’s narrative? What if we measured success by user adoption rather than token price? What if we replatformed entire industries by leveraging crypto rails and onchain primitives?

At Strobe, these are the types of founders we back. 

But don’t just take our word for it. Our portfolio companies have demonstrated what's possible when a team embodies the virtues that drive lasting impact.

Integrity
Building with integrity and transparency. When the 2022 credit crisis hit, Maple Finance faced a critical decision: sugar-coat the losses or confront them head-on. They chose transparency, restructured their business, and emerged stronger than ever. Today, they’ve scaled their overcollateralized lending business back to $600m in TVL, after a near complete reset to $15m at the depths of the bear market, and are a bonafide backbone of institutional DeFi lending.

Patience
Taking the time to build strong foundations. While others rush to launch marginally differentiated products, Ethena spent months perfecting their framework. They resisted pressure to launch prematurely, focusing on security and sustainability. Their patience paid off – they’re now one of the industry’s highest-earnings projects, have grown to become the third-largest stablecoin in the market, and have successfully navigated industry wide security incidents. 

Humility
Letting execution speak louder than words. Chronicle's team spent two years building their oracle infrastructure in relative quiet, focusing on reliability over hype. They didn't announce their product until it was battletested across multiple chains. As the second largest oracle platform, they secure billions in value across the leading DeFi protocols and are expanding into groundbreaking partnerships with the world’s largest asset managers.

Action-Oriented
Moving beyond whitepapers to working products. TYB identified a clear problem in brand engagement, and moved fast to solve it. Instead of endless theorizing, they rapidly iterated with cult-like brands (e.g., Glossier, Poppy, L'Oréal), gathered real user feedback, and built something consumers actually use. Their platform now powers real-world communities across streetwear, beauty, and CPG, and is laying the tracks for the future of onchain commerce. 

Boldness
Tackling fundamental challenges instead of chasing trends. Morpho didn't just build another lending protocol – they reimagined lending from first principles. Enabling fully permissionless market creation, Morpho Blue became a new lending primitive with $5B in total deposits. As a core piece of DeFi infrastructure, Morpho launched Bitcoin-backed loans with Coinbase, allowing exchange users to borrow USDC against their Bitcoin holdings. This DeFi mullet marks a pivotal and bold step into bringing decentralized protocols to mainstream users and traditional fintech experiences. 

Obsessed
Deeply passionate about their specific problem space. The founders of Winston and Artory (launching Summer 2025) spent more than 25 years in traditional art markets before realizing blockchain could not only solve art's fundamental authentication and provenance challenges, but also create entirely new design spaces for how art functions in collectors’ portfolios. This deep domain expertise led them to build solutions that the world’s largest art collectors actually want to use. Oftentimes, our founders come to crypto because it’s the only way to help solve a problem they have been obsessed with for decades. 

Contrarian
Willing to challenge consensus and explore uncharted territory. While everyone was building clones of [insert current meta on crypto twitter], our founders were tackling harder problems: restructuring archaic industries, building new financial and internet primitives, and creating tools that work for users outside crypto.

At Strobe, we're looking for founders who embody these virtues. 

Our approach is high-conviction, patient, and focused: we make fewer investments but engage deeply with each team. 

We believe crypto can do better than short-term thinking and incentives. If you're building something meaningful for the long term, we want to hear from you. Come build with us.