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Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev thinks there are “huge advantages” to using crypto rails for stocks, commodities, you name it. 

Now, imagine what a couple of MIT engineers could do, Tenev said in a fireside chat. They could build something like Robinhood on crypto rails. 

“There’s no reason you should be able to invest in a memecoin freely as much as you want, but SpaceX and OpenAI are too risky,” he added.

“So I think we’ll have to fix that.”

Go off, Tenev — and, perhaps, get building.

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s just barely holding on to $90,000 this morning, down slightly over the past day. ETH, on the other hand, is up 2% to $2,200.

• XRP and SOL are up 5% and 2%, respectively. ADA, however, is down 4%.

• DEX volume is down 6% in the last week to $9.11 billion, per Blockworks Research data.

🛍️ Consumer-focused

If you ask Simon Dedic of Moonrock Capital what he wants to see in crypto, there’s one big item on his list: more consumer apps.

In the last year, we’ve seen a slew of investments in infra projects — and we’ve even asked the question ourselves over at Blockworks: Are we building too much infrastructure?

While Dedic would prefer to see more investments in consumer apps, he told me he wouldn’t be surprised if infrastructure remains a focus, at least on the venture capital side. 

“I just think it's still kind of the case that infra plays are very easy for VCs,” he said. It’s what the space is currently used to, projects pitch their infrastructure — and they’re notably important to keep building on crypto, of course — and VCs are ready to put their money where their mouths are.

But the whole idea of building infra first and then gaining adoption through consumer apps is a backwards take if you ask Dedic. Why not do both? 

“It’s something that can definitely evolve in parallel,” he noted. Remember how we made the internet comparison a couple of weeks ago with Empire’s Santiago Santos? Well, it’s back. Dedic’s point is that there wasn’t, say, a 20-year time commitment building the internet before emails were created. The internet had a bit of a lead, and then the technology was capitalized on so that we could all have inboxes in our pockets. 

If you ask Dedic who should lead the charge, he thinks it’s up to VCs to a certain extent. 

“I think it's also kind of the responsibility of VCs to … take care of users getting into the space,” he continued. “And not just funding VC circlejerk infra rounds, right?”

The good news is that we’re starting to see this play out a bit, at least in Dedic’s opinion. And, speaking of consumers, I also picked Dedic’s brain on SocialFi given Kaito’s success.

For him, it’s about the project focusing on utility catered to users. 

“One of the big problems that SocialFi space had so far [was its focus] on speculation and financialization of everything,” he said. Instead, it should be a feature, not the focus. 

It’s one of the areas he’s “super bullish” on, but the narrative hasn’t yet taken off. Projects like Farcaster — in comparison to something like Kaito — are “too idealistic.” And, honestly, just too close to what we already have in a platform like X, which is a fair critique. 

What would Dedic love to see in the space? Well, it’s simple: new social experiences on crypto rails. 

Oh, and making the entry barrier “as low as possible,” to actually onboard the masses. After all, we want everyone to use crypto, right?

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ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization. Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance. With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.

Learn more at ZKsync.io/empire.

• Trump-linked World Liberty Financial’s been busy buying up millions in ETH, WBTC and MOVE. 

• On the move: Mt. Gox has once again transferred $1 billion worth of bitcoin to an unmarked address, per Arkham. 

• Ripple is pledging a $50 million grant to the newly-established National Cryptocurrency Association, a nonprofit which would seek to educate about crypto and would be helmed by its CLO, Stuart Alderoty.

🕺 Making moves

Here’s a fun exclusive for you this morning: Seismic, an encrypted blockchain, raised $7 million in a round led by a16z Crypto, with participation from Polychain, Alliance and 1kx, among others. 

This was the first fundraising effort for founder Lyron Co Ting Keh, given that Seismic was his first startup. The idea, he said, came from wanting to start his own company. 

As he spoke to various app developers, it became clear that “you need encryption to be in the foundation of the chain and not just built onto it. And so we tried for many months to build on it, on the chain, but we couldn't get any of these nice properties that we wanted,” he explained. 

One of the bottlenecks in building on big L1s is creating “apps with investment vehicles that are tailored to long term positions. Apps where social experience is built into everyday payments,” Co Ting Keh continued. 

I know what you’re thinking: Co Ting Keh is entering a crowded space, but Seismic’s goal is to solve for forced transparency and limited scalability, two notable problems in crypto.

“Forced transparency [is as] big of a change as limited scalability, if someone were to solve this, and then it's something that is on the brink of consensus, and not consensus opinion right now, where most people agree that, ‘hey, these are two problems, and we've been talking about them for the last decade,” he said. 

“When I view the landscape of Seismic [among] blockchains right now, when I view it in the future, or where I'm looking to work, [there is a] distinction between transparent and encrypted blockchains.” 

The big question, of course, is when will Seismic launch its mainnet? Co Ting Keh told me that they have yet to miss an engineering deadline, and are currently aiming for the end of the year. The team — which includes six engineers and Co Ting Keh — plans to release the developer testnet in roughly a month. 

The funds will be allocated to the mainnet launch, he added.

Brought to you by:

ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization. Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance. With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.

Learn more at ZKsync.io/empire.

On our minds: Consumer apps