Advancing crypto and Web3

In the spirit of building in public, we are sharing a list of ideas our team is most excited about across asset tokenization, specialized exchanges and trading terminals, next-gen DeFi, and AI + robotics. We are actively looking for the right teams to invest behind in these categories.

The convergence of Crypto and AI is giving rise to a burgeoning Onchain AI economy, an ecosystem of blockchain apps and services run by autonomous AI agents. And while Decentralized AI projects have seen the lionshare of funding and growth over the last 18 months, we believe Onchain AI is gaining momentum and signaling the next phase of rapid innovation at this intersection.

The future of startup investing is open and onchain. By becoming a group lead on Echo, the Base Ecosystem Group (led by Coinbase Ventures) will unlock broader and more dynamic capital for builders on Base.

The future of AI can be built on blockchain technology, as crypto can help increase accessibility, transparency, and use cases within the emerging tech. The convergence of crypto’s efficiency, borderless nature, and programmability with AI has the potential to transform how humans and machines interact with the digital economy, including by enabling users to have sovereignty over their personal data. This includes the rise of the “Agentic Web,” where AI agents operating on crypto infrastructure can drive economic activity and growth.

While L2s’ lower gas fees / increased throughput have enabled them to become the hub of onchain activity & account for a sizable portion of the ETH-based economy, they may be constrained by pressure to maintain decentralization & alignment with ETH L1.
Builders that want to [1] experiment and customize their apps, and [2] align with an L2 for distribution, are now opting to build L3s – which are application-chains that settle to an underlying L2. This document is focused on building a shared understanding of L3s.

EigenLayer* is a protocol built on Ethereum that introduces restaking, a new primitive in crypto-economic security that has emerged as a leading narrative within the Ethereum community. Restaking via EigenLayer enables developers to leverage Ethereum's existing economic security infrastructure (i.e., validator set and staked ETH) to bootstrap new Actively Validated Services (AVS). Compared to how traditional cloud platforms and SaaS solutions were transformative to web2 development, we believe the emergence of EigenLayer and its burgeoning ecosystem of AVSs unlocks a "verifiable cloud" paradigm for web3. As restaking and shared security models evolve, their impact on blockchain ecosystems will become increasingly evident, driven by growing demand from stakers and developers seeking to unlock new opportunities onchain.