Cycle Tested: Volume 1

Introduction:  I have spent the last 25 years professionally trading, investing, and building products. This has been across different organizations, asset classes and economic environments. I experienced the dot.com bubble, the subprime mortgage bubble, the creation and implosion of CDOs, the breaking of the buck, TARP, Brexit, and more

Why We Were Early Investors in Zama

By Harrison Dahme and Alex Botte, Partners at Hack VC Some ideas take time to become obvious. Confidentiality in blockchains is one of them. For years, the industry treated radical transparency as a feature rather than a tradeoff. Previous administrations also enforced this view. In practice however, that assumption has

Why We Were Early Investors in Sentient: Building the Open-Source Intelligence Network

The future of AI should be open, transparent, and shared by everyone. It should not be controlled by a small number of companies. It should not be locked behind closed models. And it should not require enterprises to hand over their data to platforms they do not fully trust. That

Hack VC 2025 Wrapped

We went into 2025 with high expectations, both for our firm and the broader industry. In our 2024 Wrapped post, we wrote that we believed 2025 would be remembered as the year the crypto industry truly turned a corner. “A year when foundational investments, thoughtful regulation, and technological convergence began

Ambient and Abundant: Intelligence Beyond the Scaling Era

By Harrison Dahme, CTO and Partner at Hack VC Executive Summary The AI landscape is approaching a significant inflection point. Recent signals - such as including Ilya Sutskever's observation that "the scaling era is over; we're back in the era of research" - and

From Bits to Atoms: Synthetic Intelligence in Physical Space

By Harrison Dahme, Hack VC Partner and CTO Artificial intelligence has made astonishing progress over the past decade, driven in large part by the era of scaling - larger data, more parameters, and higher energy draw. But when you put AI into a body - a robot, a drone, a

Turning Compute Into Capital: Why Hack VC Led GAIB’s Seed Round

By Alex Botte and Herbie Fu, Partners at Hack VC Last year, we led the seed round for GAIB, one of the first teams building the financial infrastructure for the AI compute economy. At the time, we believed that the most valuable resource of the AI era (compute) was on

Why We Led the Seed Round of Moonwalk

By Alex Botte and Ro Patel, Partners at Hack VC At Hack VC, we back founders building products that are both technically novel and culturally resonant. We led the seed round of Moonwalk, a fitness accountability app that turns daily movement into a social, rewarding, and crypto-native experience. Today, Moonwalk

Why We Led the Pre-seed Round of Zero Gravity

By Alex Botte (Partner) & Rodney Yesep (Partner) Two years ago we led the pre-seed round of Zero Gravity, or 0G, because we believed that the future of artificial intelligence belongs on open networks. Today 0G has grown from a focused storage and data availability provider into a full L1

Crypto’s Killer App: the US Dollar

Since I began focusing on crypto in 2016, there have been a handful of shifts in overt US digital asset policy; and the significance of the most recent shift cannot be overstated. The bipartisan passing of the GENIUS Act, signed into law on July 18th, signals a clear 180-degree reversal.

Why I’m Joining Hack VC as Partner and CTO

By Harrison Dahme, Partner and CTO at Hack VC I first met Alex Pack, the founder of Hack VC, on a chairlift at the best crypto unconference out there. Aside from being a great skier (there’s a high correlation between great skiers and people I want to spend time

Why Hack VC Led SatLayer’s Seed Round

By Alex Botte, Partner at Hack VC SatLayer is building the economic layer for Bitcoin. Just as Ethereum’s ecosystem was unlocked by the rise of restaking platforms like Eigenlayer, SatLayer brings that same programmability, flexibility, and composability to one of the world’s most pristine assets: BTC. SatLayer enables

The New Scarcity: Theses for the Post-Foundation Model World

By Harrison Dahme, Research Partner at Hack VC We're in the early-medium stages of a phase shift in the labor market. Programmatic execution is no longer a scarce resource. GPT-3.5 was only ~2.5 years ago and the stochastic flow of attention has crystallized into an undeniable

Why Hack VC Invested in Stable: The Future of Stablecoins

By Rodney Yesep (Partner) and Alex Pack (Founder & Managing Partner) At Hack VC, we invest in crypto projects building at the technical cutting-edge, in the markets that matter the most, and that are most likely to change the world. Stable, a blockchain designed specifically for stablecoins, fits all three,

Why Hack VC Led SOON’s Seed Round

By Alex Botte (Partner), Alex Pack (Founding Partner), & Harrison Dahme (Research Partner) For years crypto developers have faced a dilemma. If they wanted to optimize for user experience (fast finality, low fees), they shipped on Solana. If they wanted the deepest pools of assets and the broadest wallet distribution,

Tari Investment Thesis

By Ed Roman and Alex Pack, Managing Partners at Hack VC We’re excited to announce that the Tari protocol has launched its mainnet.  We are proud to have supported this project from its early days. Our first investment was nearly four years ago and was one of the first

Initia: Appchains As They Should Be

Why Hack VC Co-Led Initia’s Seed Round By Sean Brown, Partner at Hack VC The Issue with Appchains Over the past few years, hundreds of projects have chosen to spin up their own application-specific rollups or “appchains,” searching for customizable infrastructure, isolated blockspace, and tighter verticalization of value capture.

Why Hack VC Led the Series A of Hyperlane

By Sean Brown and Alex Botte, Partners at Hack VC At Hack VC, we believe in partnering with visionary founders who address the fundamental barriers impeding the broader adoption of blockchain technology. Hyperlane is tackling one of the biggest challenges in Web3 today: interoperability, which is why we led their

Why Hack VC Led Babylon's Series A: Our Investment Thesis

By Ed Roman, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Hack VC Today we are very proud to see Babylon's network launch. In late 2023, we at Hack VC led Babylon’s Series A financing round, and we’ve been proud supporters of the team since those early days. At

Hack VC Is a Community-Aligned VC: Why We Launched an Echo Group

By Alex Pack, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Hack VC Last week my crypto VC firm launched an Echo group. We are one of the first U.S.-based, regulated, large fund managers to do so. We did it for a simple reason: we believe in democratizing access to crypto

Why Hack VC Led Nillion’s Series A: Our Not-So-Private Investment Thesis

By Alex Botte, Partner at Hack VC At Hack VC, we partner with the boldest founders in Web3 – folks who are building the most cutting-edge blockchain technology. This is exactly why we led Nillion’s Series A. Nillion is developing "humanity's first blind computer," tackling privacy-preserving

Why Hack VC Led the Series A for Berachain

By Peter Hans and Rodney Yesep, Partners at Hack VC At Hack VC, we invest in early stage Web3 infrastructure, AI and decentralized finance projects, backing founders that push the boundaries of what’s possible. Berachain is a great example of this dynamic across Web3 infrastructure and a perfect fit

Why Hack VC Co-Led Solayer's Seed Round

By Alex Botte, Partner at Hack VC At Hack VC, we focus on investments that drive innovation and scalability in the blockchain sector. Over the past few years we have made several investments in the shared security / restaking category. These projects allow users to stake the same tokens they’ve

Hack VC 2024 Wrapped

By Alex Botte, Partner at Hack VC 2024 was a big year for Hack VC. Our mission is to back hackers at the earliest stages that are building the future of the internet. In this recap, we highlight some of the bets we made in that pursuit, and the work

Crypto

Making Moves: Hack VC’s Movement Investment Thesis

By Ed Roman, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Hack VC Today marks an important milestone for one of our portfolio companies, Movement Labs, which today launched its mainnet beta and native token. At Hack VC, we joined its Series A financing round.  This post shares our investment thesis on Movement.