Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/08/21赛道影响Market finally starting to agree again
AI：偏主题投资表达，释放对基础设施与新叙事的偏多信号。
Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/08/21观点输出@pangram @TangTrades @TheTieIO Can confirm 🫡
AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。
Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/08/18政策影响An optimistic lament.
It was rather bittersweet being at the Out East Summit by @TheTieIO — don’t get me wrong, it was a fantastic retreat. Could not have asked for a higher-signal crowd.
It’s hard not to be bullish when you see the most established financial institutions on Wall Street proclaiming that by 2023, all of Wall Street is coming onchain and trading 24/7 on crypto rails. Then what’s the problem?
The problem is — our industry seems to have resigned itself to the idea that crypto is just Finance 2.0.
To say blockchain is only for finance is akin to saying AI is only for developers. The pendulum of capital has swung too far toward “market integration” companies with the arrival of Wall Street.
Let’s start with the framing: there have been two camps of startups in crypto:
1. Market creation
2. Market integration
Market creation startups are standalone companies that ultimately have an “internal locus of control” over their product and GTM. Examples are the initial batch of DeFi projects and L1s before they became the dirty words they are today from oversaturation, overvaluation, and hacks.
They do not rely on incumbents for product design, GTM, or distribution, nor do they need an institutional BD team wearing suits to translate what they are doing to the procurement or corporate strategy teams of the “Goliaths.”
Market integration startups build with more of an “external locus of control.” Their product roadmap and GTM are influenced by and adapt to existing incumbents, often with an eventual acquisition as the endgame. Think identity, middleware, and infrastructure companies wiring themselves into BlackRock, Stripe, or Mastercard’s rails.
In their purest forms, the underpinning beliefs of the two are:
- Market creation: crypto will create its own market.
- Market integration: crypto will be subsumed into the existing market.
2020–2022 was when the market-creation imagination dominated — so too did the conviction that crypto was building a new world of economic activity run on a transparent & verifiable engine onchain, where no one was gated by access due to their existing socioeconomic class.
A lot of it failed & deserved to. But at least builders in that era dared to think outside the “finance” box.
Then the tables turned.
The arrival of Wall Street in digital assets was something too good to be true to have fathomed back then, but came with a Trojan horse that changed the DNA of crypto. Gradual then all of a sudden, “crypto is Wall Street 2.0” became the new consensus.
Is there something wrong with that? Yes — because it constricted the imagination of what the technology can do.
I continue to believe blockchain is one of the most important underpinning technologies in a world demanding unprecedented techno-societal velocity, complexity, and integration.
At @PortalVentures, @evanbfish and I went to great effort to distill exactly what this technology is good for: the FEIT framework.
1/ Financialization
Wall Street 2.0, tokenization. No explanation needed here.
2/ Efficiency
It comes in two parts:
→ Capital efficiency because blockchain’s composability allows builders to borrow liquidity by standing on the shoulders of giants vs. bootstrapping their own.
→ Operational efficiency because smart contracts disintermediate middlemen.
While this may sound intangible, it is a direct bottom-line optimization lever for institutions. Wall Street’s newfound obsession with tokenizing equities, stablecoins/CBDCs, and agentic payments hinges entirely on blockchain’s ability to drastically increase the efficiency of financial plumbing through rule-based self-execution and onchain verification.
3/ Incentives
Blockchain can coordinate new networks & incentivize productive actions. Yes, it’s true that DePIN hasn’t worked so far, largely because of a lack of best practices to:
→ systematically drive demand and sales motion, something most “crypto-native” teams lack the knowledge and experience to do
→ provide institutional-grade service quality / SLAs
→ sustain a token price floor through onchain value accrual, where regulatory clarity would also play a role
But no one can deny blockchain’s magic in bootstrapping network supply through incentives. Filecoin amassed 10 exbibytes of storage in under a year through token incentives — something that took AWS more than a decade. Yes, you can argue: what good does supply do if there’s no demand? But you have to start somewhere, and if supply can be solved by blockchain, you have one fewer problem to tackle.
4/ Trust
The entire verification & privacy tech stack: ZK, TEE, FHE.
I’ve always found the framing that “crypto is about trust” too abstract and philosophical to be persuasive in a capitalist sense — but I’ve increasingly felt the commercial impact of trust firsthand:
→ In M&A, one of the most critical sources of overhead — and the honeypot where bankers / consultants / auditors make their money — is finding proof that the acquirer can trust the acquiree’s claims about the health of their business.
→ In public markets, listed companies spend an average of $2.4M a year auditing their 10-Ks just to verify their reported numbers.
→ In enterprises, different departments spend $$$ reconciling data because they lack a verifiable, trusted shared ledger. Per Anaconda’s 2020 survey, data scientists spend nearly half their time just getting data across sources clean enough to trust and use.
→ In retail, no trust = no business. Exhibit A: the widespread adoption of Trustpilot, Google Reviews, and Yelp.
→ In service industries, customers need to know they can trust vendors’ judgment and ethics to charge fairly before making a deal.
→ In crypto, HYPE trades at a 12x premium on FDV/Revenue over PUMP, even though both are profitable businesses directing revenue toward token value accrual. Why? People simply trust the HYPE team more than the PUMP team to 1) keep making money and 2) keep accruing it to the token.
Trust is expensive to outsource — what if it came built in?
---
Now map FEIT back to market creation vs. market integration.
“FE” (Financialization & Efficiency) is naturally dominated by “market integration” startups because you tokenize someone’s equity; you disintermediate someone’s existing rails.
But the ocean is still blue in “IT” (Incentives & Trust) for “market creation” opportunities. The value proposition is there regardless of whether an incumbent adopts it or not.
Perhaps what we really need is to stop calling our industry “crypto” — to finally shed the FTX and vapor-token baggage that name still drags around. “Crypto” is ONE business model enabled by blockchain, but we should not let it define the limits of the technology.
The risk to our industry isn’t rejection by Wall Street. It’s being defined by it.
Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/08/12观点输出RT @blockworksDAS: NEW: @dotcuriouscat to speak at DAS Asia this Oct 7th
Hear the @PortalVentures view on venture in Singapore https://t.c…
AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。
Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/08/05观点输出@greengeo @aaalexhl Get a life my friend - it’s been months. And the article still isn’t wrong yet.
AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。
Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/08/04观点输出See you in 🇸🇬
AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。
Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/08/04赛道影响RT @davidsenra: Ribbit Capital founder @mickymalka shares the 5 traits he looks for when investing in founders:
- The energy of a scientis…
AI：偏主题投资表达，释放对基础设施与新叙事的偏多信号。
Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/08/02观点输出RT @porterstansb: What Everyone Missed In Leo’s Blow-Up👇
Leopold Aschenbrenner lost $30 billion (~67%) in a month.
The consensus post-mort…
AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。
Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/07/29赛道影响I'm just not convinced "AI Harness/Trust layer" is a space where startups have rights to win.
A harness is useless if you cannot get someone to wear it — and that someone here are AI labs, the agentic payment companies, and the API owners.
If I'm Amazon and want a harness to dictate what agents can vs. cannot do with my API on crypto micropayment rails, why would I work with a third-party startup vs. a Visa/Mastercard/Stripe of the world?
Sure you can make an argument on innovator's dilemma — aka these incumbents work too slowly. Valid, but it's also inevitable that they WILL get there one day with a big bang. Think about OUSD's blow to USDC — and Circle has 8 years of first mover advantage.
I can assure you it will NOT take that long for Visa/Mastercard/Stripe this time to push this out given their recent agentic interests + crypto x402 momentum.
Now if I'm a founder, my options are:
1. Build something fast and expect to be bought by a slow turtle incumbent
2. Knife fight to be the "credibly neutral" AI harness layer against 50+ others on the market
Forgive my capitalist hat but neither are easy to underwrite from an early-stage venture lens.
I must be missing something...
Catrina Wang@dotcuriouscat · 2026/07/29观点输出RT @dotcuriouscat: @Rick_Zullo Also I do think it’s an issue if a founder is “too rich”
Cannot assume Elon in everyone. Money does change…
AI：延续个人公开立场，强调长期主义、执行效率与行业方向判断。
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