On The Brink with Castle Island - 2025 Highlights and 2026 Predictions with Blockchain Coinvestors (EP.693)

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Matthew Le Merle and Mitch Mechigian of Blockchain Coinvestors join the show. In this episode we discuss: The top 5 themes of 2025 for the blockchain industry 2026 predictions and key themes to monitor To learn more about Blockchain Coinvestors visit fifthera.com/blockchain

Today in the podcast I sat down with Matthew Lemurl and Mitch Machigen of blockchain co-investors in what has become a yearly recap and a predictions episode. In this podcast, we discuss the top trends of 2025 and some key themes to track in 26. I think you'll enjoy this one. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Matthew and Mitch. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,

but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. And print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. All right, Mitch and Matthew, welcome back. I feel like this is officially an annual tradition now where we talk about what happened in the current year and some predictions for what's ahead. So thanks for joining us today. Great to be here, Matt. As always, we love your show.

listen to it every week. Very excited to be here. Thanks a lot, Matt. Well, Mitch, maybe I'll start with you and maybe just kick it off for those who have not listened to previous episodes with you guys, a quick background on the firm and a personal introduction. And then same thing from Matthew. And then I'm just going to hop right into it.

We've been on a few times, so I'll keep it a little shorter than normal. Fifth Era, we're a multi-strategy venture firm focused on innovative technologies. So we're probably most well known for our blockchain fund of funds, which is under the brand blockchain co-investors. Through those funds we've allocated to probably almost 60 early stage blockchain and crypto, early stage venture firms. But we're also very active growth and late stage investors. And we actually recently closed our first AI focused fund of funds. So now we're in RIA with offices in San Francisco, New York, and London. And I probably should add full disclosure is that we're investors in several Castle Islands funds, so very happy clients of yours, as well as

likely investors and some of the companies that might come up through our fund of funds where investors in more than 1,200 portfolio companies and have more than 50 direct portfolio holdings as well. So full disclosure there. For myself, background was an investment banker for many years at Morgan Stanley, New York and London, and joined just about five years ago to build out our direct investment arm of the business and I'm a partner based in London. Amazing. I'll kick it over to you, Matthew. I won't have much. I'm based in California, spent most of my adult career in technology, internet, fintech, blockchain, AI, and love it. Love working with entrepreneurs who are changing the world in profound ways.

And I do believe we're absolutely in the middle of a remarkable time. We're digitalizing the world and the software developers we work with are the ones really driving that change. And it's a privilege to work with them and to back them. And I know Matt, you and Nick feel the same. Really exciting stuff. By the time this comes out, I think you guys will have published this blog post where you looked at some of the big takeaways from 2025 and then looked ahead for some of the key themes to watch next year. So maybe less of an outright prediction podcast like we've done in the

past. But Matthew, maybe I'll start with you. When you think about the last year looking back on 2025, maybe highlight some of the things that you would identify as just the big takeaways. I'll do a couple and I'll Mitch will do some too. But for us, 2025 was a breakout year for blockchain and crypto, and the world changed in some very fundamental ways and momentum built enormously. It's not that there aren't concerns and issues too, which I know we'll get to, but we shouldn't underestimate the enormous shift, and it's felt at very different levels. I'll give one example, and then maybe we can zigzag back and forward a little bit as we cover off five important takeaways from last year. But the first is fundamental growth. At the end of the day,

technology amounts to nothing if we don't have great products and services that lots of people want to use. And in almost every respect, blockchain came of age this year, literally hundreds of millions of beginning to use these technologies, opening digital wallets, using stable coins, benefiting from the speed and the ease of access and the low cost products that we're now bringing to market. And obviously, we'll talk about some of the specific ones later, but we actually think, Matt, that we're at an inflection point. And the other way of talking about that is that our early pioneers, the people that we've backed and worked with over the last decade, they're now being joined at least half the world's population beginning to lean in. The early

adopters are now coming online as well. Definitely feels to me like the use case around just saving dollars is driving a ton of activity in developing markets. And I know you guys see that in a portfolio company that we share in yellow card in Africa, there's insatiable appetite for dollars, I guess is my takeaway. Yeah, I think that's right. I would just also add that there is so much infrastructure investment that happened through firms like Castle Island or the 2018 to 2324 period that now doing a lot of these things on blockchain rails is trivially cheap or very simple. Things like launching your own layer two blockchain, which five years ago would have been really complicated. Well, now you have blockchain as a service out of

box and you're seeing, and we can talk about it later, but a lot of big name brands, institutional firms take advantage of those infrastructure rails that have been laid. That's absolutely right. In Mitch the U.S. picture, I would say, changed a lot over 2025. I mean, that to me was just a seismic shift. Look, I think for me, the single biggest thing this year, in our opinion, is the shift in regulatory stance. And, you know, I think for whatever reason, the Biden administration took a very hawkish

stance towards blockchain, to say the least. I mean, you guys covered it ad nauseum on the podcast. But following the election, the regulatory standards industry has just shifted in material ways. And honestly, I think the three of us, if we were here three years ago and we were here today to say where we are today, we wouldn't believe it. And let me just take through some of the things that happened this year, because I think it's such a long list that is important just to step back and reflect at a time of the year like this. We really started with the Bitcoin Reserve Executive Order that was in March. That basically directed the Treasury to hold and not sell at CBTC. That also led to the Crypto Task Force,

led by the Cryptozoz, which started coordinating between the SEC and the CFTC. We got a new SEC chair, Paul Atkins. We have a nomination for a new CFTC chair, Michael Selig, a pro-crypto official. And that just started this litany of dropped lawsuits. Again, you go back one year, the SEC was basically suing everybody. So since this year, we had the Coinbase lawsuit dismissed. We had the Consensus MetaMass lawsuit claims dropped. We had the Ripple Appeals lawsuit dropped. We had the Cracken lawsuit dropped. We had

Wells notices withdrawn from Robin Hood and Uniswap. And I know one very close to your heart, Matt. We had the repeal of Sab 121. There we go on the bingo card. The SEC formally repealed that and you probably have grief because you don't get to talk about it anymore. It was many obsession

of yours. They didn't even forget. That happened in May. It feels like years ago. And that basically allowed institutions banks, to enter the space without having really punitive capital requirements. And then I think the culmination of it all is the Genius Act passing. And the Genius Act, for many of your viewers would know, but if they don't, that is essentially the stable coin legislation that creates the rules of the road to operate compliant U.S.-based stable coins. And that passed, I think, in July of this year, and we've seen tons of firms come in. So just in terms of regulation, the difference that you

could make could not be more stark. If you go back two years again, you had Brian Armstrong, flying to London, CEO of Coinbase, considering moving Coinbase to London out of the U.S. Now you fast forward to today. I mean, the U.S. is clearly without a doubt the center of the crypto blockchain universe again and capital is flowing, founders are coming in, and really the energy is back in the U.S. So I think it could not have been more positive on that front this year. I totally agree. I think that was very well said across all dimensions.

It's great to see the bank regulators becoming more welcoming of the industry. Certainly echo what you're saying about founding. underers coming back to the U.S. and just new company formations, really picking up in the U.S. across a lot of these categories. Also in the U.S. market, I'd say, and maybe I'll kick it over you, Matthew, to talk a little bit more about this. The institutionalization story here has really accelerated, I think largely because of some of this regulatory clarity. That's right. This is the third big theme, if you look back over 2025. And I think you can go back a year or two earlier. If we went back 2022, 2023, we were being hammered every

day in the press by CEOs of banks and payment companies and asset managers who are basically doing the bloodbuster. We don't need this. This will amount to nothing. It's a waste of time and energy. And in fact, it should be banned and the entrepreneurs should be pushed offshore or put into jail. And it was difficult for us as an industry to deal with that constant negative sniping. we were saying at the time that we should as an industry expected because incumbents just can't stand up and say our products are expensive, slow, not really fit for purpose. They're never going to say that. They're always going to defend what they do today whilst monitoring what's coming next. That's just good corporate strategy. What's changed in 2025 is you'll find it very hard today

to find a traditional finance CEO or senior executive who's willing to say, any of those things. In fact, they're all saying the other side now. They're all saying, we're going to be upgrading our infrastructure. We're going to be bringing new products and services to market. We are investing in people and capability in this blockchain and digital asset space. And they'll all have their own flavor of what that actually means. So the payment companies, Visa MasterCard, are beginning to experiment, make a few acquisitions, roll out a few things. The big banks are now actively talking about having digital asset custody and staple coin rails alongside their other payment rails. The asset managers, led by Larry Fink and

BlackRock, are now talking about we make Bitcoin ETFs available to our customers and we're beginning to experiment with real world asset tokenization. So this is actually an enormous 180 degree shift that occurred this year. For our industry, we have mixed feelings about it because you and we back the disruptive companies that are already bringing those products and services to market. And to some extent, traditional players coming into our space is competition. And to some extent, they may threaten or modify or change the things that we would have liked to have seen done. And just this week, the DTCC is now talking about real world asset tokenization of all of the products they support. We know, obviously, they'll try and influence legislation so that they

become the only people in America that have the right to set the standards and to digitalize those real world assets. So large, well-funded incumbents coming into a space is always a double-edged sword. They accelerate adoption. They can actually help clear away roadblocks, but they're also going to try and tip the playing field in their favor. And yet again, they can also be a merger and acquisition roll-up option for some of the portfolio companies we've backed. So there's a variety of dimensions to this, but 2025 was a year when traditional finance finally took blockchain and crypto seriously, but for the industry, it's not all good news. It's going to be really interesting in 2026 around tokenization and just the market structure clarity. So wouldn't be

surprised if a year from now, we're also talking about the institutionalization of just broader digital assets, real-world assets coming on chain. So I think it was a great callout just in the acceleration we saw this year. Another thing we saw this year was equity really took center stage. And maybe I'll shift it over to you, Mitch, around just what's happening in the equity-focused market here, particularly on the venture side. Yeah. And I think this is our fourth look back on the year is equity taking center stage.

And I think we can definitely call 2025 actually the year of crypto equity. So really until now the industry had only one marquee equity exit. And that's Coinbase. Now, obviously, I'm generalizing. that's really the only big one we could speak to. Prior to this year, the lion's share of venture returns were almost exclusively driven by the token side. And as probably the most active early stage VC investor in the space in terms of allocating actual VC funds, we have a really interesting perspective here. So when we look at our own fund of funds, which again, back's about

60 early stage firms, our invested capital has historically been split roughly 6040 between equity and token. So slightly more equity than token. But in terms of return, returns, these have overwhelmingly been token weighted. So you had early token listings and the equity markets were essentially shut to our industry. 2025, this is the year that that dynamic finally started to rebalance. And I think that starts with what we can call the class of the 25 IPO rush due to this regulatory thought. And the marquee IPO of the year is probably the circle IPO, which really was this firing gun on IPOs in the space. But there were many others. We had Gemini, bullish, E. Toro, figure recently announced the securitized D SPAC with counter equity partners too. And then we have a

number of firms filing confidentially or publicly with the SEC, including Grayscale, Crackin, BitGo. So basically we know that the equity markets have opened for our space after a long drought, basically since the Coinbase direct listing. M&A also picked up, which helps the equity side. And we had Stripe by Bridge that deal closed this year. Robin Hood bought Bidstamp. That deal closed this year. Coinbase bought Deribit that deal closes this year. There's a number of others we could probably mention here. So also providing exits in terms of the equity side of the equation. And the last thing just to note, which we probably will talk about perhaps from a negative perspective in terms of the 2026, but we saw the enormous activity around Dats or digital asset treasuries. And these

are effectively your strategy, micro strategy copycats that amass one or more assets, whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum salon, or long-tail assets. And whatever you think about these, I think it's just very interesting to step back and say actually the most interesting thing about tokens are really the most capital in terms of tokens on the year was around an equity wrapper. So even where the capital was flowing in terms of the token market, it came through equities. So I think this is the year that equity came back to our space. And a lot of venture funds that had stuck to their guns and continued to allocate to equity and committed to equity, well, they were rewarded this year after a long wait.

A lot of what you're saying ties back to the regulatory environment. So if you look at the banks, the broker dealers, the payment service providers, why would you build out any of this infrastructure if you effectively felt like crypto and digital assets were more or less illegal in the United States? And now you find a lot of those firms just off sides in terms of their product offering. So not surprising that you're seeing a flurry of M&A, to your point. And if you remember, actually, Circle and E Toro, well, they tried to go public in 2020, 2021, and the SEC effectively stalled them out, just continued running them through the comment period, so those deals could never close. So you had this long period where the public route was a very

difficult, if not impossible route for the space. So because of that, a lot of the exits, a lot of the energy, it shifted to the token market. So we're kind of having a homecoming now to the equity markets. Matthew, how do you think about the market overall in terms of, do you see any froth re-emerging? So you and Castle Island and Nick, and ourselves, we're long-term venture capitalists. So we invest today in things that we think are going to change the world a few years out. And we don't really care about the ups and downs of the market day today. Where it impacts us is, as Mitch just described, the IPA window can open and close. A capital can be more or less available. And mergers and acquisitions can be happening

every day or not at all. So there are things that impact us as venture capitalists, but we're investing for the long term. The traders, conversely, they're very narrative driven, they're worrying today, will this stock go up today or tomorrow or next week? And they have a very short-term view. And that does create issues, particularly around the public liquid traded tokens, which are created by our industry, but are actually behaving in as public market assets. There's a lot of capital that is able to move very quickly if there's an expectation of a short-term change in the value of a publicly traded asset. And we've seen that this year. So 2025 was a year in which Wall Street became comfortable deploying very large amounts of capital into the products and

services coming out of our industry. And that begins obviously with Bitcoin and Solana and Ethereum. But it also included, as Mitch already mentioned, the Dats. And to some extent, extent late stage rounds for the leading blockchain unicorn. So a lot of cash came fast towards our industry and valuations as a result got impacted. And there is always a risk that that can reverse. Capital can suddenly get less interested in the sector and flow out. And we do see that happen year after year in VC. So early stage valuations typically don't go up that much. Onex, two X, 1x2x. Mid-stage valuations can get a little bit more volatile, but it's in the late stage, the pre-IPO stage where we see enormous boom and bus cycles, and that's what tends to get

into the media. So the dot-com boom was very much a late-stage driven issue. So 2025, we do have concerns. As we finish the year, I think that the weight of capital and some of the valuations definitely began to look elevated, let's say it that way. And by the time you look at AI, I think there's a very serious concern that the trillions of dollars going into the AI sector could actually look a little bit like a bubble later on in 26. We'll talk about that when we talk about 2026 in a moment. So we do have concerns at as early stage venture capitalists,

every day what we're waking up doing is backing the entrepreneurs who are over a five to 10 year time frame are really going to deliver value. And evaluation isn't the topmost question we're asking in those types of investments. It's funny. In crypto, we have a tendency to just speed run cycles. It felt like earlier in the year, these digital asset treasury companies were the hottest thing around. But it didn't take long for a lot of them to trade at discounts. So the frothiness in that part of the market specifically seems to have come and gone just within the calendar year. Yeah, I see that too. And the issues sometimes take a moment for people to get their heads around.

So capital can flow faster than the analysis, if you see what I'm saying. So in AI, as an example, all of a sudden this year, people are allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive data centers all across America. But we haven't quite answered the question, what will be the state of computing power in five years' time and will we actually need large data centers? It's just an example. So capital sometimes flows against the theme faster than people have their heads around the next five to 10 year perspective. And obviously, today's valuations are driven by terminal values that do require you to have a long-term view. So it's pretty interesting for watch Wall Street. But we don't participate as traders. We're long-term venture investors. That makes a ton of sense. Well, maybe shifting gears a little bit and talking about what's ahead.

this is always the most fun part of the podcast, just trying to predict the future a little bit here. So maybe I'll start with you, Matthew. Maybe highlight some themes that you're watching for 2026. What do you think we'll be talking about? So the irony is the five things we just talked about, fundamental growth, regulatory change, institutionalization of crypto, equity taking center stage and the risk that markets may have become overinvested, it's going to sound very similar because when we look ahead to 2026, we think a lot of these trends are going to take years and years to play out. So the most important thing I think

we're going to see in 26 is actually a continuation of fundamental growth and the adoption of these technologies. So it's a repeat of 25. On our side, we've been tracking digital wallets for a long time now. No one knows exactly how many there are, but let's just say that there's 500 million today. that means that less than 5 or 6% of the people in the world actually have a digital wallet. So it's very, very early days. We think the curve of digital wallet openings is about to get very, very steep. We think that there'll probably be 2 or 3 billion new digital wallets opened in the next 3 to 5 years. So that's 4 or 6 times as many as our industry was able to open up over the last 12 or 13 years.

So this is a real steepening of fundamental growth. And those wallets now have more products and services to utilize. So when we all opened our first digital wallet, there were very few things you could put in it. And Bitcoin was the primary one. Today, there's a breadth of products, not just crypto products, but traditional financial products in tokenized wrappers and digitalized gold or other things that if you're interested in having those exposures, you can just stay in a digital wallet and buy and sell and move around. You don't even have to go off platform and you don't really have to deal with the Fiat world anymore. And I think that notion will also be another thing we'll see in 2026. So more digital wallets, more products in them, but also the major players, the Coinbase's, Robin Hoods, the crackens, the upholds, they'll all be trying to become

financial supermarkets and they'll be bringing in whichever product categories they already have, they'll be adding others. And I think by the end of 2026, we'll be looking a lot more like Alipay or Wepay, where we have a real breadth of financial products within any given digital wallet, one click away. And I think that that is something to really watch because this adoption curve is getting steep right now. Yeah, I mean, there's so many vectors for growth there on the wallet side. Do you think about stable coins? That's a huge vector. You're going to have more international payments, you're going to have more dollar savings, then you have the tokenization story, then just have efforts of centralized companies like Stripe that are launching their own

layer one networks, and you wonder how much that $2 to $3 billion would just be Stripe pushing forward wallet infrastructure. So it feels like there's a lot of different ways to get to that two to $3 billion number. Agreed. And big players now are going to try and drive that adoption curve up as well. So Coinbase and Cracken and so on are fantastic. But their marketing muscle and the number of current customers is only a fraction of the traditional industry. So as we begin to see major players, major banks, major asset managers also open up digital wallets. They'll start pounding the drum around. This is ready for prime time. You really need to have one of these. And I do think that use curve will get very, very steep. Who's going to win and who's going to

lose is a bigger question. Personally, I think it will be whoever has the easiest, most accessible, broadest product offering at the lowest possible cost is where the digital natives will go. And I'm not sure that will be incumbents. I personally think that we're going to see. It's sort of like Sears should have been Amazon, but it wasn't. J.P. Morgan should have been the mobile digital wallet financial service provider of the future, but I don't think it will be. It's hard to cannibalize your own business and it's hard to move fast in big organizations. So I think that's exactly right. Mitch, how are you thinking about tokenization and stablecoins as we move into the second prediction here?

So I think, you know, our prediction here, and it's very related to what we're just talking about, is that tokenization and stable coins continue to eat the financial stack. And the fifth era thesis here is that all financial activity may ultimately settle on blockchains. And that is a tokenization and stable coin led story. And I think the big picture on this point is that we're in the midst of a sort of great convergence. From a high-level perspective, we have this accelerating convergence of what you may have called FinTech or tech-enabled finance and crypto. So this year we saw traditional financial giants, and you guys already mentioned some of them,

but the likes of Robin Hood and Revolut, well, they got aggressively involved in on-chain infrastructure. On the other side, we have crypto-native firms like Coinbase and Cracken, and full disclosure, or fairly large holders of Cracken, expanding into traditional financial products by offering stocks and derivatives. So we're seeing this convergence where you may not even know that you're using crypto products by using one of these firms. And again, the two use cases driving this are tokenization and stable coins, which we see as the backbone of this new financial infrastructure. And as Matthew alluded here, really distribution is king. So you're Robin Hood, you're selling Vidae stocks to millions of American retail investors. Well, now you can just move into crypto.

and offer on-chain products. So it actually makes a lot of sense. But outside of those firms, PayPal is getting into the space. You guys mentioned JPMorgan. Despite what Jamie Diamond says, they launched JPMD, the deposit token, Visa's doing back in settlements on stable coins. Robin Hood's actually announced its own chain. Stripe announced a chain.

So in terms of growth and really hitting that prediction from number one about a growing number of users, you can start to see how we're going to have developed world-led growth through these traditional and large traditional fintech firms really pushing that, again, to a point where you may be making a payment to a vendor with Visa and somewhere, somehow, there's a blockchain transaction happening and you don't even need to know because it's been abstracted away. And that's probably what it looks like in the U.S. market to start, I would say, you don't even need to know that you're using a stable coin. It's just that your dollars can move on the nights

and the weekends outside of bank hours. That's exactly right. And if you go back to like previous Thesees we had. We always saw this as a developing world story first in terms of direct consumer adoption just because the payment systems are so archaic and you have high inflation environments. So the salience of new crypto networks is very high. In the developed world, we have Apple Pay. We have these things. So we've always seen it as an institutionally led adoption curve here. And I think we're really starting to see that fruition. And then look, the last two things here I'll say is you sort of brushed on it earlier, but I just want to double click. It shouldn't go notice that a DTCC this month got the SEC no action letter. So again, you can start to see that

the real backbone infrastructure tubes of our financial system is coming into this space. And you might start to see things like collateral management, move on tokenized rails. There's a lot of really interesting things DTCC could do. And then also, I think you should just listen to what the SEC chair is saying. I think our prediction here is exactly what Paul Atkins said about two weeks ago when he basically said the entire U.S. financial system could shift to tokenization just within a few years. So for us, that's the direction this is heading. This is the thesis our firm was founded on. And this is a topic we think is going to keep coming up year over year. Atkins has just been such a breath of fresh air. I feel like if one of us had made that

statement a couple of years ago, people would have called us crazy. And now you have the head of the SEC asserting that tokenization is going to impact the whole financial system. And he's not wrong. It's just crazy to hear it. Matthew, how are you thinking about the public markets in 26? So it's interesting. We just talked about 2025 as a year in which the capital markets embrace the industry and Mitch went over some of the very exciting things that are going on with such a large number of blockchain companies in the process of going public. The data's obviously getting stood up and a lot of capital flowing. We shouldn't assume it 2026 will be like that the whole year long because if you actually look over the last 20, 30 years, the IPO window is a cyclical thing.

The typical IPO window is open for roughly a year and then oftentimes it closes for a year. After the great financial crisis, it was more like a two year close. After the dot-com crash, it was more like 2.5 years where very few IPOs were done. And obviously under the Biden administration, there was a couple of years in there where essentially no technology IPOs occurred. So just to give you a sense, just realistically, if the IPO window has been open now for nearly a year, it's a fairly good probability that it will close down sometime in 2026 for some reason. So that has an important knock on implication for our industry because we've got an awful lot of blockchain companies trying to go public right now.

My hope is a lot of them will get out in the first six months of the year. But I think that they and their boards should all have Plan B penciled up already, and Plan B is almost certainly a DSPAC merger because DESPAC mergers go on all the time. They don't come and go and open and close in the same way that the IPO environment does. Now, we've obviously got key players in our industry, Tether being an example, who are now exploring completely different ways of going public in the possibility of a tokenized tether share being made available globally. I think that would be very exciting to see direct listings do occasionally occur fairly rarely, but you never know. And then there's a knock-on implication of everything I just said for the M&A market.

So we are beginning to see, as Mitch outlined, mega mergers within the industry, with the acquirers being Coinbase and Ripple and Stripe and Robin Hood and Cracken and so on. We're hoping that 2026 is a year when traditional finance realizes it needs to buy capability. because it can't build everything in-house that it needs, and they're frankly too far behind where they need to be. So combining all of that together, we think there's a substantial risk that the capital markets will close down sometime in 2026,

because they always do. We think the despatch mergers will become more interesting to blockchain-leading companies that want to be public. We're hopeful that M&A will continue very strongly in our industry, and that will allow some leading companies to become real competitors to the world's largest financial institutions. And then capital availability, there's an awful lot of capital that needs to be deployed towards technology and is still sealed up in asset classes from the past. So we're not actually worrying about capital availability. I think the world now understands that our innovations and

technologies deserve to be funded. So we think a lot of capital will flow into our industry, the exact mechanisms may be different than those of the past. That's really interesting. I think maybe just to build a little bit on what you said on the M&A front, it is still surprising to me that you see some of the world's largest asset managers having not entered this space even. And you'd have to think that they will have to enter inorganically in some of these categories. I think the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF is their most profitable product right now.

And then you have State Street Global Advisors isn't doing anything. It's a weird market in that way. Absolutely. And we've seen it before. So for those of us old enough to remember, in the 90s, the financial industry thought the internet was crap and they didn't need to have online access, online banking, and so on and so on. We saw the beginnings of the Ameritrades and the e-trades and so on begin to get traction. A few people like Bank America and Wells Fargo launched online banking in America. and then suddenly all of the big players woke up one night and realized we don't have it and we need it and customers want it. And as you said, you can't then hire a few people and set out on a journey

if you're an established player. That's a two-year exercise. So they did start making acquisitions. And we saw a flurry of acquisitions. And the assets were scarce. That's the other thing you need to remember, which is there's a lot more banks than there are blockchain crypto custody companies. And there's a lot more asset managers than there are high-quality digital exchanges and marketplaces for assets. So if that lights up next year, everything's an auction and scarce assets should start going for high prices. And I think that there can't be a board of an established bank payment company or asset management company that isn't going into the Christmas break with that on their minds. Have we left it too late? How do we really get accelerated? How do we really get accelerated? How do

we avoid FISA? Just to use an example, FISERV share price just dropped by half because the world suddenly woke up to the reality that every products and service they're bringing to market may not have guaranteed growth in the terminal value. 75% of the value of FISA was in the terminal value and that just collapsed when people realized that nothing is guaranteed for traditional financial companies. And I think every bank is confronted by the same issue. Today's market value relies upon a terminal value that has embedded in an assumption that the products and services they currently have and the distribution approaches they currently use are going to carry on growing and almost certainly they're going to be made obsolete.

Such a good point on the scarcity. I mean, you look at the MPC custody market. You better buy one of those quick if you want to be in that game. You look at things like travel rule compliance. There's maybe one or two companies that do that right now. You look at trade execution. There's one or two that matter. So it's such a good point. I think that there'll be a game of musical chairs here and some of the traditional finance firms may be left out. I know we're going a little long

on this theme, but believe me, Coinbase, Cracken, Ripple, Robin Hood, they know this too. So the acquisitions you're watching them make are not non-strategic. They're highly strategic. It's like each one of those blockchain leading companies has mapped out what the future looks like, what are all the capabilities that are needed, and they're themselves acquiring the things they're missing. So if you're a traditional finance company, if you don't get going in 2026, I think you're a seller, not a buyer. Exactly. Mitch, maybe moving the conversation back to the regulatory, how are you thinking about that

for 26? So again, 25 could not have been a better year, but looking to 26, I think it could be even more consequential. And we'd love your opinion here as well, Matt. But the way I see it is that right now, much of the crypto space, we effectively operate in a gray area. We don't know 100% whether these are legal businesses. I think we can just say that with the current administration, we're clear that they're legal businesses. But a new election could bring a new round of appointees to these top institutions and things could flip. And the one exception to that is now stable coins, where we have this law that sets it in stone.

So it doesn't matter who's in the White House, who comes in these agencies. We have a sort of broadly accepted lease. definition, but the rest of the market remains to be seen what happens in terms of actual laws. So that's why for me, the single most important thing I'm watching from the regulatory side is the market structure bill. It's called the Clarity Act in the House. It already passed in the House. Now it's going through the Senate. We're going to have some sort of ability to bring these two laws together. But effectively, this bill is going to outline who governs the spot market, whether it's the SEC or the CFTC, and effectively whether or not certain tokens or securities or not. So if we can get a bill through Congress, a market structure bill and signed into law,

our industry will be in a very defensible place that should be able to withstand whoever is in the White House. Now, the bad news is that it's a midterms year. So the closer we get to the midterms, and the more the Trump family does with crypto, just a little aside, the more political this issue could get. And I am a little worried that if we don't get something done in Q1, before and sort of full-fledged political warfare ahead of the midterms, that we might not get anything done. The only counter to that is that stand with crypto, the crypto super PAC,

continues to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and likely will be just as formidable in the midterms as it was in 2024. But I think it's critically important that for our industry, we get some market structure bill done so that it doesn't really matter who comes into these agencies in the future, because as we know in our system, the shoe always is on the other foot at some point. I think market structure is hugely important on the two dimensions you talked about, for the protocols, just to give them clarity on how to launch a layer one, layer two protocol. And then on the security token market, I think that's just a new market creation story.

So ideally, we get it. I guess the question is, if we don't get it, if it stalls out here and Atkins comes in and does rulemaking, I'm actually pretty optimistic that that specific rulemaking would be really hard to roll back. I mean, usually when you have SEC coming out with rules, it's looking at an existing market structure and it's putting more bells and whistles on. it, you rarely see rules that just shut down pockets of the industry. So it would be hard to see Gensler 2.0 coming in and telling Apollo and Fidelity and BlackRock, hey, I know you

launched these tokenized products, but shut them all down tomorrow. I think you'd have a lot of pushback on something like that. So the consolation prize here might actually be fine, but I agree with you that we should get a bill done. Can I just add to this? I want to take a different view of this question because I actually think that governments don't drive innovation and rules and regulations whilst valuable do not create in most cases powerful products and services that customers want to use. The biggest single driver of change is the latter. It's that someone comes up with something that people really, really want. And then years in some cases later, we figure out what new rules and regulations we need to put in place. And the reason

why I say that in this discussion is because I think the genie's out of the box now. I think that the digital natives are now 55 or so percent of the US and they want these products and services that can be delivered in real time at no cost to their mobile devices. Every year, just to put it into context, every year between 1.5 and 2% of the voting population in America is either new or leaves the system. So we get new 1.5 to 2% per year voters. And then, of course, we get about the same number of people passing away. The new voters are all young. The new voters all want this. So if you go in a four-year cycle, you're talking about 6 to 8% more people that want what we're talking about. And that swings the entire election. So I think both from a

consumer user perspective, we already talked about we're on the power curve of open up digital wallets, using stable coins, tokenizing assets. And then from a voting perspective, we're on a power curve of politicians can't ignore the reality that their voters want this. And I don't see either one of those things being resisted. So whilst we may never get a market structure bill, that's not going to stop these innovations coming to market. I really believe that. And Matt, I would say, just to use the internet as an example, we're 40 years in, 40 years. And we still do not have global perspective on fundamental questions like privacy, the right to be forgotten, copyright infringement and how to handle it, and many other issues. So I know you want a market structure bill straight away.

I'm actually pretty comfortable right now living with regulatory uncertainty because I think the users and the, citizens are not going to stand for this industry being closed down again. That's a really interesting perspective. And I would feel a lot better living in that world if we didn't have a senator in Massachusetts who is just trying to shut us down. But I take the point. I think it's a good one to look at historical analogies. Matthew, maybe staying with you, and I think this is your final key theme to watch.

Are you seeing a convergence with other technologies here? So everything we just spoke about was very blockchain and crypto-focused. So for 2026, we just said, fundamental growth is going in the right direction. tokenization and stable coins are eating the financial stack. Public market boom may be jeopardized, but there's still a lot of good things happening. And in Washington, we do have concerns about getting everything done before the midterms. But this last one is the one that we're most excited about.

We think that 2026 will be a year in which a variety of innovations begin to converge in ways. that will kick off the next great cycle of startup and innovation funding. And I want to get a bit more specific here. But for those of us like you, Matt, who have been in blockchain for 10 years and more, we were constantly berated by the question, well, apart from stablecoins, what are the use cases? And we'd always argue back, well, hang on a second, you can't say apart from stable coins because every financial transaction requires a way to settle it. and digital monies is huge, and we've only just begun to scrape the surface.

So don't dismiss that one. That one's a huge one, as are digital commodities and digital securities too. But what we're now beginning to see is the convergence of themes that we've been talking about for decades. One of them is blockchain and the movement of value over the internet. Of course, the second one is AI and advanced intelligence and computing. The third is the internet of things and connecting devices together. into ways where they actually transact device to device and increasingly intelligence to intelligence. And then there's the whole decentralization theme and the notion of the distribution of

the creation of products and services and the use of products and services on a global scale with or without centralized intermediaries. And we see all of those things converging. So when we talk to blockchain entrepreneurs, they're no longer blockchain entrepreneurs. They are software engineers working at the interstellarers. section of all of the convergence of these things. And I don't think we're seeing too many good blockchain engineers who aren't also thinking about how to leverage AI and whether or not to create micropayment platforms for device-to-device interaction or whatever. I think that the biggest single breakthroughs that will get back next year will be convergence place. They won't be one

thing or the other thing. There'll be a mash-up of many things. And if I was an entrepreneur, listening to today's webinar, I would be going away and taking that to heart. In fact, San Altman said an interesting thing very recently. He said, if I was a venture capitalist, I would not be backing any AI application companies. I'd be backing whatever's going to come next. I think this is what's coming next. It is the mashing up of advanced software-based innovations into new here-to-for-unimagined solutions that we will be using for decades to come. And I I'm very, very excited by 2026 being a year where we'll begin to see some real offerings of that nature. I think that's spot on.

I think the infrastructure has been laid here over the past five, six, seven, ten years even. And now you can actually build some of these things. So I think that's a spot on prediction. Well, guys, this has been awesome. Really powerful stuff. And it was an exciting 2025, hopefully 2026. We continue with the trend. Where can we send people to learn more about the firm and maybe get in touch?

People can head to our website, 5thera.com, and look at any of our products or funds. We also put out webinars and newsletters that are on there. Or if you're interested in talking to Matthew or me, feel free to email us at ira at 5thera.com. Amazing. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, guys. Looking forward to doing this again next year. Thanks, Matt. Thank you, Matt.

And just to remind everyone, we're the biggest fans of Castle Island. I appreciate it. We love the partnership. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To learn more about Castle Island, visit Castle Island.V.C. And to listen to all of our podcast episodes, please visit castle island.vc slash podcast or just click on the tab on our website. Thanks for listening.