NFTfi: A Case for the Financialization of JPEGs

Inception Capital
Inception Capital
Published in
20 min readFeb 8, 2023

(originally posted on 17 Jul, 2022 | Written by Mads Pedersen)

Table of Contents

The Big Picture

Industry Overview

Thesis

Other Considerations

Closing Thoughts

The Big Picture

What is NFTfi?

The merge of NFTs and DeFi, using NFTs as the foundational layer upon which to build economic infrastructure.

NFT Overall Daily Volume since Jan 2020, Dune Analytics (dashboard by @abhi_0x)

NFTfi is mirroring DeFi

We are seeing undeniable parallels between the early development of DeFi and the financialization of NFTs as they evolve beyond static art.

A little history:

ICO boom.

The year 2017 marked the ICO boom which became a novel use case for Ethereum. In its essence, this was an alternative to traditional early-stage fundraising that secured financing for projects through the sale of their token. While this form of decentralized fundraising gave rise to incredibly important DeFi projects: AAVE, Bancor, 0x, Synthetix, it also supported incredibly unimportant projects, resulting in the issuance of tokens with limited utility, value accrual, or deep thought behind them.

Often, buyers were seduced by promises and roadmaps that were never realized; the space became fairly repetitive. The novel factor here was the concept of being able to own and trade these various tokens, which were mainly facilitated through peer-to-peer transactions — inefficient due to a lack of deep liquidity.

The birth of the AMM.

The year 2018 marked the deployment of Uniswap, pioneering the Automated Market Maker. This instantly transformed the previously peer-to-peer dependent market into peer-to-pool, unlocking deeper liquidity, instant and trustless trading, and permissionless markets.

At any point in time, you could now sell A number of B tokens into a pool in exchange for C number of D tokens. The result was (1) deeper liquidity enabling a massive increase in trading volume, and (2) the birth of further financial primitives built on top of this: the rise of DeFi.

DeFi Summer.

Liquidity mining, introduced by Compound and Synthetix, designed to enhance monetary value and distribute governance control over platforms, catalyzed DeFi summer. Users were rewarded with yield on tokens they deposited as liquidity to bootstrap various lending protocols, decentralized exchanges, and other on-chain financial products.

Suddenly, a craze was built around protocols renting liquidity (the protocol with the deepest liquidity wins) and investors generating yield on idle assets, giving rise to yield farming. Capital became mercenary, constantly searching for opportunities to maximize yield, while minimizing risks as new projects were pioneering different approaches to utilizing liquidity for financial products (perpetual futures, options, volatility products).

DeFi 2.0

In the midst of mercenary capital and renting liquidity, the concept of protocol-owned liquidity emerged as a solution. Pioneered by Olympus DAO, protocols now started incentivizing users to exchange their LP tokens for discounted governance tokens, meaning that transaction fees on these trading pairs are captured by the protocol itself. This way, protocols pay a lower cost to retain liquidity and gain an additional revenue stream.

NFT -> NFTfi:

Mint mint mint.

Although NFTs have been around since 2015, with some traction in 2017 with CryptoKitties, the real boom took place in 2021. Countless collections launched with the main value proposition being the verifiable ownership of unique digital assets (typically art, profile pictures, virtual real estate, and avatars). Similarly to the ICO boom, many buyers were seduced by promises and roadmaps that never realized themselves and the space became fairly repetitive.

Trading NFTs is still very much limited to peer-to-peer transactions on large marketplaces like OpenSea, reminiscent of trading ERC-20 tokens before the AMM. Although there are merits to the marketplace model given that NFTs tend to be uniquely distinguishable from each other, peer-to-peer transactions are inherently inefficient when transacting with little liquidity. This lack of liquidity sidelines institutional and risk-averse investors and makes it difficult to build further financial tools on top of the stack.

Financialization of NFTs

It is argued that the pricing of NFTs is inherently complicated due to the overlap of both objective, subjective, qualitative and quantitative variables that impact desirability and fair value. At its core, the value of an NFT is simply the highest price the market is willing to pay, not what the seller believes to be “fair” — value needs an evaluator.

Valuation variables generally include:

  • Rarity: A function of scarcity and surplus. Typically, the more common a certain trait within a collection, the lower the value of this trait and vice versa.
  • Utility: The use cases beyond being unique digital assets (granting rewards, rights, privileges). This can be access to IRL events, gaming assets, token-gated group chats, and/or discounts on a certain platform or asset.
  • Team: A fully-doxxed, high-profile team (Web3 native or not) can bring value to an NFT due to high expectations. This can be successful Web3 builders, celebrities/KOLs, and venture-backed projects.
  • Hype: The excitement of the market — tied to buzz on Twitter, strong marketing, anticipation (number of followers on project account, shilling by KOLs, attention from “smart money” investors, etc.)
  • Community: The strength, size, and quality of a community that is supporting a project. Generally, the larger and more engaged the community is, the more successful the collection.
  • Externalities: Was the collection subject to a hack or manipulation? Have the founders suddenly been associated with a rug?
  • Aesthetic: Subjective appreciation and interpretation of digital art (does it look good or not?)
  • Future: Speculation around the future of the NFTs, drawing parallels to early-stage venture investing.
  • Status: Similar to luxury watches, NFTs can be forms of status and wealth signaling

An argument can be made against the financialization of NFTs, however, it is undeniable that they are decidedly financial. NFT sales are largely driven by speculation, just like 2017 ICOs, and pricing data — floor price, price appreciation/depreciation, trading volume — tends to be the core subject of conversation around different collections.

It is a fact that the majority of NFT buyers/sellers are primarily financially motivated, however, the financial infrastructure to engage with the vertical is relatively nascent, proving to be inadequate for the market appetite.

Industry Overview

DeFi vs NFTfi infrastructure

Relative to DeFi, the core pillars of NFTfi are still early in development with weak or missing components (decentralized exchange, structured products) needed to unlock deeper liquidity and financialization.

Current Tools:

Marketplace

NFT marketplaces are the most developed and most saturated tool within NFTfi. At its core, the marketplace model is extremely simple in that it is a platform to facilitate the buying and selling of NFTs. The UX of marketplaces is almost entirely homogeneous (OpenSea, X2Y2, Magic Eden, Rarible, LooksRare) since they all serve the same general function — a platform to discover, buy and sell NFTs — with little specialization around specific NFT communities. Competition is therefore not built around differentiation but rather cost leadership and mindshare: who can establish themselves as a market leader with competitive rates. So far, Opensea has dominated, seeing close to $40B in cumulative volume and 38.5M transactions.

Beyond this, it appears that we are going to move away from more generalized platforms and see more niche marketplaces emerge as NFT utility is enhanced and communities grow stronger. Think marketplaces for specific verticals or communities versus a Walmart-like one-stop-shop for anything. The most obvious example here is in the gaming vertical.

NFT marketplace market share, Dune Analytics (dashboard by @hildobby)

The redundancy in NFT marketplaces means fragmented liquidity and over-generalization. Marketplace aggregation solutions like Blur solve a real issue here by improving the UX of navigating the NFT market as a buyer or seller. Not only is this a useful tool for trading, but it has large ramifications for the entire NFTfi vertical by finding the best price or speed for market makers, or for liquidations on lending protocols.

Lending

Lending is the bread and butter of any financial ecosystem looking to tap into liquidity instantly. Building out collateralized lending protocols has been popular amongst entrepreneurs experimenting in the onset of NFTfi, and we have seen a large wave of different architectures applied to these platforms with the majority built around peer-to-peer solutions, like NFTfi (the protocol). Volume here is dependent on borrowers listing their NFTs as collateral with preferred lending terms, and lenders individually offering loans on the assets they are comfortable backing.

There are benefits to flexibility, especially with certain lenders specializing in loan-to-own strategies in hopes that borrowers default, yet it is fundamentally unconducive to scale. It is similar to the marketplace model in that there is friction for users manually reviewing each lending protocol to find the highest yield and lowest risk.

Recognizing the inefficiencies of peer-to-peer lending-borrowing, especially regarding scalability and speed, several peer-to-pool platforms have been built to enable instant access to NFT-backed loans. BendDAO, DropsDAO, Pine Protocol have built out solutions that enable lenders to deposit ETH to earn interest, and borrowers to instantly borrow ETH through a lending pool that uses their NFTs as collateral. Building on this, JPEG’d pioneered a lending design similar to MakerDAO whereby borrowers deposit their NFT as collateral and mint $PUSd (overcollateralized stablecoin) as their loan, enabling the JPEG’d DAO to act as the primary liquidity provider.

Cumulative loan volume by platform, Dune Analytics (dashboard by @ahkek)

Currently, the NFT lending market is minimal in terms of the absolute market size (just over $450M), yet, as illustrated above, adoption is steadily growing. The total value of the NFT market eclipsed $40B (Consensys) in 2021 and is currently estimated to be sitting at $25B. This means that the overall market only has a debt penetration of less than 1%. For reference, the debt penetration of the global fine art market is around 10%.

Financing

While still a very niche market, BNPL, or NFT financing, is an interesting application of a similar mechanism design to NFT lending. This concept, pioneered in the retail industry, lowers the barrier to accessing NFTs and their respective utility and price appreciation. At its core, it is essentially a rent-to-buy version of an NFT lending protocol, where a lender supplies an NFT and a buyer begins with a down payment coupled with a certain time period to pay off their loan. Upon default, the lender can liquidate the NFT and seize the down payment. Supermojo (backed by OP Crypto) is pioneering this mechanism design, paving the way to making digital assets more accessible for users. While their service has yet to be released, there are strong tailwinds for integrating with marketplaces as a white-label solution to remove the friction from buying NFTs, stimulating increased trading volume and overall growth of the industry.

Yield Farming

Born in DeFi summer, yield farming is migrating to NFTs as users search for passive income on idle assets.

With over 20 protocols live and being built, the NFT lending market is highly fragmented and unoptimized for deep liquidity.

Recognizing the need to scale liquidity in the NFT lending market, Metastreet is in the process of aggregating existing peer-to-peer lending protocols to turn them into peer-to-pool. Note originators provide a peer-to-peer loan to a borrower and then sell this note to Metastreet, which Metastreet purchases with pooled funds from capital depositors looking to earn yield on their idle capital. This is similar to the mortgage market, the only difference is that the collateral is an NFT and the note is purchased by Metastreet, not Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. This way, risk is shared and spread across a pool, instead of being concentrated in a single loan.

While Metastreet aggregates promissory notes, Spice Finance is building out a yield optimizer and liquidity routing protocol for the NFT lending space, becoming a product similar to Yearn Finance, but for NFTfi. As mentioned earlier, a fragmented lending and borrowing market is friction for capital allocators manually reviewing each lending protocol to find the highest yield and lowest risk. On top of that, not everybody has the skill or time to determine the risk of using a particular protocol. Recognizing this issue, the front-end of Spice is simply different vaults built for various levels of risk tolerance, while the back-end autonomously and selectively routes liquidity across loan pools, continuously maximizing returns and minimizing risk across the industry. This project is WIP but definitely something worth keeping an eye on.

Renting

Rental is imperative to most asset-based industries, the NFT market is no exception. The broader market beyond crypto already rents virtual assets (renting movies on Prime Video) and this application is converging with the NFT market. As we progress further into the advancement of a metaverse built on utility-based NFTs, the core reason for renting & lending is a need that is satisfied by the granting of temporary rights to use virtual assets.

Renting NFTs lowers the barrier to participating in digital events, gaming, and subscriptions. ReNFT (backed by OP Crypto), a peer-to-peer NFT lending platform, provides the infrastructure to enable this.

AMM

The AMM is a core financial infrastructure for unlocking deep liquidity and transitioning the NFT market away from inefficient peer-to-peer to efficient peer-to-pool transactions. The NFT AMM market is still highly nascent, with only 2 known projects building in this direction:

  • Sudoswap, which is currently live.
  • Danu, still under development.

Sudoswap is the first NFT AMM that launched in early July 2022. So far, it has seen $62.5M+ in cumulative trading volume and generated over $310K in trading fees (0.5% per transaction) with 32K+ total users and around 220K NFTs traded. The key challenge for building an NFT AMM is that the majority of NFTs within a collection are heterogeneous, with different prices associated with different traits and rarities. Optimizing for high liquidity for non-fungible assets is somewhat of an oxymoron since each NFT needs to be priced differently. Sudoswap is seeing large adoption at the moment given that it is the first to market, however, it lacks the infrastructure to allow for price differentiation based on rarity/desirability — in essence, pricing is denoted by an NFT collection’s floor price. This can instantly make a collection lose a large portion of its “fair value” and does not encourage the trading of non-floor items. As a result of only accounting for floor prices, Sudoswap has given rise to Sudo-themed NFT collections where all NFTs are identical, which have accounted for trading volumes (Webaverse Genesis Pass — highest trading volume, Renga Black Box — 4th largest trading volume, Sudo Inu — 8th largest trading volume, Sudonauts — 10th largest trading volume).

Volume on Sudoswap’s AMM since Inception, Dune Analytics (dashboard by @0xRob)

The mechanics behind the Sudo AMM is interesting. The pools for LPs are highly customizable, allowing users to create three types of liquidity pool: buy-only, sell-only, buy-and-sell. These three types of pools have customizable bonding curves, allowing LPs to choose between linear and exponential curves. The former means price increase or decreases by a fixed value (for example, 0.5Ξ), while the latter means price increases or decreases by a defined percentage (for example, 5%). Swap fees start at 0.5% and are adjustable so that anything more will be paid to the pool creators. This has caused controversy in the NFT community since Sudoswap bypasses project royalties, meaning no fees are paid back to the NFT creators when an NFT is traded.

Market Makers

There are two key challenges in addressing market making of illiquid assets: (1) inventory risk, and (2) high search costs. The former is a result of a lack of market depth translating into longer duration between transactions (holding times) — it is difficult to instantly sell a heterogenous NFT for its fair value — and the latter is a result of price volatility during the holding time. This means that NFT market makers need to be supported by robust hedging tools or else they cannot stay delta-neutral, taking more of a directional approach to market-making beyond capturing bid-ask spreads.

Market makers are vital for deepening the liquidity in markets in both CeFi and DeFi (GSR, Ledgerprime, Alameda, Wintermute, Elixir, etc.) and are now being ported over to the NFT market too. NFT market making is still very early in terms of progress and mechanism design, yet, there are two NFT-focused market makers being built to deepen the liquidity of the NFT market: Spicyest, and Protecc. Beyond these, traditional market makers in the Web3 space are starting to take note and expand their services to NFTs. GSR has confirmed that it is exploring the market making the NFT space, starting with Artblocks (see here & here). These players will interact with all core areas of the NFTfi space, NFT AMMs, Marketplaces/Aggregators, Lending/Borrowing, Derivatives and Pricing Engines, as tools to build out the effectiveness of purely on-chain NFT market making.

Derivatives

In the long term, a strong derivatives market will be built on top of NFTs yet it is currently underdeveloped with few structured products live. Several projects are building NFT derivative tools like perpetual futures tracking floor prices to allow for more liquid trading of NFTs with easy access to leverage (NFTPerp, Tribe3). Putty Finance, an exotic options market for NFTs, recently went live as one of the first tools to speculate on or hedge against NFT price action, yet traction is still fairly limited.

Thesis

Fungible non-fungibles

Floor price is a flawed metric

The explosion of innovation within the NFTfi vertical (marketplaces, lending/borrowing, AMMs, Market Makers, derivatives, etc.) is largely limited in development by obscurity in NFT pricing and reliance on floor price. This is subject to three flaws:

(1) Inaccuracy — Failure to accurately capture the value of a collection

The floor price of collections is currently widely used to value collections, however, this is a flawed metric as it reduces the value of a collection to a simple function ofvalue of collection=number of NFTsfloor price, easily failing to account for over 50% of a collection’s value.

(2) Risk — Subject to manipulation

Floor price is also susceptible to wash trading and floor manipulation meaning NFTfi protocols can be gamed. If we build derivatives on top of floor price, whales can easily value extract by undercutting the floor by selling to themselves while shorting a collection perp, and vice versa. Different tools can be used to combat this, like using TWAP of the floor, yet this still feels rather simplified.

(3) Capitally inefficient — Inability to value collateral

It largely limits the dynamism around products that want to incorporate rarity/desirability into account — be that lending & borrowing, AMMs, market-making, or derivative products. Relying on floor price also makes the capital efficiency of NFTfi incredibly poor, resulting in low LTVs (typically 30% or below) for lending protocols that are unable to measure the value of their collateral.

The focus on floor price is also a result of a low liquidity environment since the floor presents the liquidly traded benchmark. Transitioning to a highly liquid market will introduce different pricing standards beyond the floor. A neutral third-party accurate pricing engine could provide the necessary tooling to account for pricing differences between NFTs from the same collection and, in the process, become an essential catalyst for the development of the NFT market through integration with other NFTfi protocols.

A drawback to this is considerable concentration risk if large NFTfi protocols are built around a single engine. There is also an opportunity for collections themselves to suggest floor values for different traits within a collection and thereby create a pricing curve for the entire collection. Regardless, we see considerable room for innovation in NFT pricing and foresee decreasing relevance of floor price.

Liquidity is low…

Sourcing liquidity is generally a causality problem. What comes first: liquidity or the infrastructure conducive for deepening and sustaining it?

The NFT market is notorious for lacking sufficient liquidity which limits the scale of the NFT vertical as a whole. In the context of a bear market, one may be tempted to point to shrinking NFT trading volume as an explanation for low liquidity, yet even at its peak, NFTs were generally illiquid — high trading volume does not necessarily ensure deep liquidity when considering a daily average of 180 new NFT collections are minted on Ethereum alone. In fact, “39%”(Baioumy, 2022) of NFTs have never been sold after mint, and “92%”(ibid.) have only been sold three times or less.

The main way to trade NFTs is peer-to-peer or sell floor NFTs of collections into a limited selection of pools on Sudoswap, adding high friction to scale. Despite this friction, cumulative NFT trading volume since early 2021 sits at $70B, clearly demonstrating that the industry has the potential to attract deep liquidity, yet lacks the tools to enhance capital efficiency and maximize the use of the liquidity in the market; our tools are rudimentary and limited.

Further development is needed to allow institutional capital to scale in and out of positions with size, meaning NFTfi needs to move in a similar direction to DeFi.

We see three core issues arise in a low liquidity environment:

(1) Ineffective liquidations

(2) Limited financial products

(3) Limited institutional presence

…infrastructure can aggregate it

As we trend towards liquidity aggregation and efficient markets, we expect to see high potential in:

(1) NFT AMM: a concentrated liquidity product

A full-fledged NFT AMM is going to be an instrumental tool for the NFT space. Liquidity is a game of bids and asks and we see this tool as the next generation of NFT marketplaces, deepening the liquidity within the NFT space by providing a perpetual bid. The ability to LP with generally idle NFT assets creates a new incentive for buying and holding NFTs as they now become yield-generating, productive assets, increasing the overall liquidity of the NFTfi market in the process. Currently, the peer-to-peer marketplace model coupled with high trading fees/royalties (2.5%+) is inefficient and while it may remain relevant for certain types of collections, we expect the relevance of marketplaces to decrease in the medium to long term, being replaced by NFT DEXs conducive for high trading volume. The next innovation within this space will be built around an alternative approach to the NFT AMM that accounts for rarity/desirability in the pricing of NFTs, a large gap in the market.

We see a range of success factors for the growth of the NFT AMM. To begin with, it is a core infrastructure needed to trade NFTs with deep liquidity. In addition, it is far-reaching since it can be used as a generalized DEX, and can also be integrated into the entire Web3 gaming vertical (deep liquidity for NFT gaming assets to be integrated into various games), meaning it has the tailwinds of another high growth vertical within Web3. The product market fit for an AMM is evident; eventually, everyone will interact with this tool — swapping tokens has the largest product market fit within crypto, excluding that of the Web3 wallet. As a result, the TAM is huge as anyone purchasing or selling an NFT is a potential user of an AMM. Finally, it is a proven business model within DeFi: simple trading fees as a revenue stream have been substantiated by DEXs like Uniswap, Curve, Pancakeswap, Sushiswap.

(2) Market Makers: more buys, more sells

We are excited and optimistic about the opportunities around NFT market making. Not only will a market maker profit through automated deep liquidity provisioning, providing the inventory to match buyers and sellers to capture the bid-ask spread, but it will also integrate with different NFTfi products (pricing, options, lending, perps), thereby deepening the liquidity of these tools too. This can create an interesting flywheel through token accumulation. As NFTfi protocols emit governance tokens, market makers will end up accumulating a lot of them as high-volume users of the platforms turning them into a Convex of sorts that can control where liquidity is incentivized and shape it to their benefit (depending on the scale and tokenomics of these platforms). Swapping tokens has the largest product market fit within Web 3, excluding that of the Web 3 wallet, and a market maker is both retail and business facing (market making for collections, integrating with protocols, etc.).

Beyond this, market makers also have opportunities to capture arbitrage opportunities between marketplaces and AMMs, profiting from market inefficiencies while making the market more efficient in the process.

Although this is currently a white space with large pockets of opportunity, market-making illiquid assets are not risk-free and we need to see stronger NFT derivatives to allow NFT market makers to build and scale effective risk management. The ability to hedge inventory is instrumental in reducing inventory risk and an effective AMM will drastically reduce search costs, allowing market makers to remain delta neutral in an illiquid market. These tools are all pieces of the same puzzle, with heavy interdependence in ensuring the success of NFTfi in the long run.

(3) Derivatives: hedging and leverage

The derivatives market for ERC-20 tokens is estimated to be around 3x the size of the spot market. We see the NFT space following a similar trend where, in the longer term, the NFT derivatives market will be larger than the spot market. As demonstrated by the ApeCoin ($4.5B full diluted valuation), there is already large interest in NFT speculation through a product that is less capital intensive, carries less inventory risk and is more liquid than an NFT. However, the NFT derivatives market is currently a white space, with very few products live.

We see a plethora of practical use cases for NFT derivatives, the most obvious being the ability to hedge, and expect to see large volumes in NFT perpetual futures (and other products) lowering the barrier to entry for speculating on blue chip collections (not to mention access to leverage).

It is unclear how strong a moat NFT derivative protocols will have against existing DeFi protocols incorporating NFT derivatives into their existing product suite (the barrier for a perpetual futures exchange to add NFT perps is relatively low). This means we will likely not see a distinct separation between NFT and existing DeFi derivatives protocols but rather a blend of both.

Other Considerations

NFT MEV

As the aforementioned financial infrastructure is built out and we approach a more efficient market, MEV (both good and bad) will be captured through NFT trading. Arbitrage opportunities already exist between Sudoswap and Opensea (among other marketplaces). As deeper liquidity is injected into the space and as Sudoswap (and other AMMs) gains further traction, the incentive to front run and sandwich attack becomes larger and more profitable. The barrier to entry for traditional MEV players to engage with NFTs will be drastically reduced as we see NFTfi products mirroring DeFi architecture simply because the friction of porting over MEV bots will lower. Same concept, similar architecture, different token.

Gaming tailwinds

A gaming industry built around virtual asset ownership, mainly NFTs, will intertwine heavily with NFTfi products. Illiquidity of in-game items means poor UX meaning there is a largely relevant use case for NFT AMMs and market makers to integrate on the back end of games deepening liquidity for in-game items. Increasing participants and removing restrictions from studios should create a good amount of liquidity even without market makers, but liquidity optimization can be achieved with the various NFTfi products previously mentioned, improving UX in the process.

Closing Thoughts

Ultimately, the end goal is to allow NFTs to become extremely liquid, allowing any retail user or institution to immediately enter and exit a position as if it were an ERC-20 token. Paradoxically, non-fungible tokens almost become fungible.

An assumption in this argument is that the NFTfi market is built on a fundamentally strong value proposition, however, this is not yet fully the case. As a nascent technology, the core use cases for NFTs are still fundamentally limited: profile pictures and other low-utility metaverse assets, attracting shallow, speculative liquidity over deep, permanent liquidity. To enable the latter, NFTs will need further financial engineering, utility and value accrual.

At OP Crypto, we are committed to advancing the financialization of NFTs, supporting projects building the rails to enable the NFTfi at scale. This will translate into both direct profit for the fund and indirect profit for the entire Web3 ecosystem that sits on top of (and below) this technology. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (@OPCryptoVC & @OPCryptoDegen) for more thoughts and updates from OP Crypto!

TLDR; This is just the beginning. NFTs and DeFi will continue to converge. We need deeper liquidity, better pricing and more robust infrastructure to catalyze this transition. The road being built is in the right direction. Strong tailwinds: not only does NFTfi make sense for DeFi, but it also makes sense for gaming.

ABOUT OP CRYPTO

OP Crypto is a leading high conviction, early-stage venture capital firm in the crypto and blockchain industry, specializing in pre-seed and seed stage investments. The fund successfully raised $50M in September 2021 and has since invested in over 30 projects, including companies such as Scroll Tech, Snackclub, Merit Circle, Omni, and Fyde.

With the support of prominent investors like Bill Ackman and Alan Howard, as well as institutions like Galaxy Digital, Huobi, and DCG, OP Crypto has access to a global network of venture funds, scouts, and ecosystem partners to source the most competitive deals in the market.

With a core team based in the United States and strong ties to the APAC region, the fund serves as a bridge between East and West. Additionally, a dedicated portfolio team provides post-investment support to founders in areas such as marketing, tokenomics, and networking.

Learn more about OP Crypto at: Website

Follow us on Twitter: OPCryptoVC | OPCryptoDegen

--

--

Inception Capital
Inception Capital

Inception Capital is an early-stage Web3 venture capital firm guiding founders from east and west.