Joining TCG Crypto

What’s up everyone! As you know, I’ve been writing about crypto for about two years now. It started on Twitter, eventually shifting the longer pieces over to here, but this post will be a bit different from my usual musings on the state of the crypto markets. The news? I’ve officially joined the team at TCG Crypto as Head of Research. I am extremely excited to build upon this great brand and have the opportunity to work alongside super smart people like Jarrod Dicker, Jonathan Moore, Gaby Goldberg and Dilveer Vahali. Over the past five years, I’ve been intimately invested in crypto markets but never in an official role building in this industry, so I’m psyched to be in a position that aligns my personal passions professionally.

I wanted to give some background on the thought process behind my decision, my personal crypto journey, and where I see the space headed over the next few years. Here it goes.

Personal Background

One of my favorite terms to emerge from the pandemic has been the phrase “terminally online,” which describes people who spend a large chunk of their time on the internet. Well, that has always been me. I’ve been an internet-kid for as long as I can remember, whether spending hours scrolling Tumblr or in a guild farming dungeons in World of Warcraft; if I wasn’t playing sports, most of my free time on school nights was occupied behind the desk of my computer. I’ve found there’s a massive overlap between the current crew of crypto enthusiasts and those who were overly online growing up. A large part of this is due to the fact that online experiences during our formative years unlocked potential for relationships that could not exist anywhere else. Through this, the first inklings of digital ownership and digital communities were born, and it’s with no surprise that this group of people are now the ones to see the possibilities that NFTs and web3 are creating. As blockchains are globally accessible systems that are open and economically-aligned for users, builders, creators, and developers, I believe this new wave of protocols and applications will have the ability to grow faster than their incumbents in a much more intentional, meaningful way.

I first learned about crypto in 2016 through a business class at Georgia Tech. The class, aptly named Emerging Technologies, focused on opportunistic digital innovations that could be the pathways for decades to come. One of the technologies our professors educated us on was Bitcoin. At the time I think most of my friends were skeptical about this “magical internet money,” but we did appreciate how cool it would be to send cash anywhere in the world without relying on any bank or other centralized entity. Shortly after graduation, while working as a Software Engineer, I had a mentor who led me down the rabbit hole of altcoins, and found myself spending a lot of my free time trading whatever spare cash I had on exchanges like Bittrex. Since then, all in the past five years, crypto has matured at a rapid pace – from the slew of ETH ICOs in 2017 and the clunkiness of etherdelta, to the foundational pillars of DeFi like Uniswap and AAVE, alongside the breakout of digital identity with NFTs. Through this, we’ve seen many different narratives play out during the bull market and ensuing bear market, ones that you’d only have seen coming if you have a strong grasp on the pulse of where the market is going.

It has never been more clear to me the role that crypto will play in the future, and I don’t think we’ve even gotten close to seeing how successful a lot of these dApps can be on a large scale. Currently the major blockchains each have less than 1M active daily users, most of whom are primarily focused on trading. I am excited to be at the forefront of its next evolution, working with teams who are building the dApps to service the next 100M users. I believe TCG Crypto is positioned perfectly to be at the center of this next economic renaissance.

A Look at Crypto in 2025: Modularity, Mobile, and MEV

I believe three important themes that will shape crypto markets moving forward are modular architectures, mobile-focused applications, and optimizations of maximal extractable value in blockspace.

Modularity refers to the practice of decoupling systems into individual components so that they are easily iterable and more optimized. Within crypto markets, these modular architectures usually refer to blockchain design where the execution layer is separated from the consensus+DA layer and settlement layer, or the practice of having multiple app-chains with their own specialized use cases. I believe that most blockchain architectures will trend towards some combination of these two ideas, with only a few monolithic chains efficient enough to work for the expected increase in users over the next few years. If you are bullish on crypto on any medium to long-term timeframe, then using the current size of the active user base as your measure for performance is not beneficial. With this in mind, we’ll begin to see a lot more innovation at the execution layer over the next few years, as we see competing VMs expand in the same way that the EVM was re-used everywhere over the past few years. We have started to see the first beginnings of this with Eclipse & Nitro focusing on building modular rollups using the Solana VM and teams like Fuel building their own modular execution layer with their FuelVM. In addition to this innovation at the execution layer, there are strong teams like Eigenlayer and Celestia focusing on building DA solutions for these rollups. With this modular focus, the most prominent divergence seems to be teams looking solely at scaling Ethereum and primarily focusing on EVM-compatibility (e.g. Arbitrum, zkSync, Starkware and others) vs. building different parts of the modular stack from the ground up to plug into various different architectures. I’m excited to see the friendly competition here as protocols build the infrastructure to support the next generation of internet applications.

For crypto apps to succeed at a deeper level, it is vitally important that there is a shift in focus towards building mobile-first applications with better UX for users. It should feel no different using a dApp than it does using a regular iPhone app. The core tenets of blockchain technology that center around self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, and credible neutrality are the foundations for why crypto differs from existing systems, but those are not the things that are going to influence non-crypto people to start using these applications. Vitalik wrote a bit about wallets and the need for social recovery, highlighting the need for the average user to have an experience more akin to what they are used to. Argent, the L2 focused wallet, is driving a lot of the focus towards these practices in the ETH ecosystem. Solana seems to be the chain that is focusing most aggressively on mobile, with the upcoming launch of their own mobile phone and the Coral team building their xNFT wallet Backpack as a decentralized app store.

High fees per user will never be a sustainable path to value creation for any major blockchain — dissemination of this idea promoting ETH as the most value accretive chain was one of the ideas I disagreed with the most this past cycle. I don’t believe high fees *per user are sustainable, and it's clear to me that solutions moving forward will leverage L2s or more performant L1s that provide users with lower fees and higher TPS. However, it is evidently clear that MEV opportunities will scale linearly with blockchain usage, regardless of if they are opportunities across a collection of app chains or the different forms of MEV that arise from rollup architectures. MEV, first defined in detail here as miner extractable value, refers to the various strategies that arise when it is possible to profit from reordering transactions within a specific block before it is propagated throughout the network. Some of the most prominent upcoming developments around MEV are the Interchain Scheduler for Atom 2.0 and Proposer-Builder Separation for ETH 2.0. Both of these are two very different implementations of MEV strategies but it is evident that the brightest minds in the space are thinking about how to democratize this access to MEV for users. Outside of the well-known Flashbots team on Ethereum, teams like Jito Labs, Skip Protocol, and Mekatek are focusing on MEV strategies on newer ecosystems like Solana and Cosmos, and protecting users from toxic MEV that leaches value on a daily basis.

At TCG, as the firm continues to focus on advancing the consumer layer of web3, I also believe deeply in the opportunities to unlock infrastructure and experiences that will be foundational in exposing the benefits to a broad range of users, and these themes alongside our current thesis drive our ability to give breadth and depth to the broader portfolio.

TCG x Crypto’s breakout moment

The Chernin Group’s expertise in consumer brands, media, and tech over the past decade positions the firm in an especially advantageous position given the current state of web3. Since 2010, TCG has invested in companies like Barstool, Crunchyroll, Food52, Fullscreen and others, with a clear penchant for identifying trends in media and consumer content long before others developed the same vision. These insights will prove extremely valuable to investing in the next stage of crypto startups, as this next wave of applications will need to compete with existing apps from a perspective of product market fit and UX-design, obfuscating whichever blockchain is being used underneath. It will be key for teams that deliver seamless experiences while also showcasing the advantages of true digital ownership. Platforms that users are incentivized to use as they grow with them, instead of on platforms focused on extracting as much possible data from users as possible, will enable economic flywheels that can only flourish properly within crypto networks. This has already become clear with TCG Crypto partners like Rabbithole, Altered State Machine, Hume, Glass, Guild, Arkive, OnCyber, Medallion and many others.

This past cycle was the most usage blockchains have ever seen, evidenced by the high fees on Ethereum for most of 2021. We are at the cusp of solving scaling for these blockchains, whether that be through modular architectures like rollups, more performant VMs like Solana’s Sealevel, or sharded blockchains like Near. Over the next few years, I believe we will have the infrastructure in place to support much more user activity between all of these different chains. As teams push towards solving the problems of scaling blockchains, simultaneously there are many talented teams building the new consumer-focused applications that will benefit from these new performant architectures. I believe TCG is acutely positioned to support founders and teams in this journey.

I am looking forward to working with our existing portfolio of companies as well as those that are soon to come. I believe in the power that crypto has to offer across every internet industry, whether foundationally new, or integrated in existing passions and behaviors. The moment is now to push towards this exciting future.

In addition to the major themes outlined above, I’m interested in the following general categories:

• games unlocking crypto’s global social layer, allowing on-chain worlds to grow and evolve

• app-chains specializing on individual use cases

• solana mobile stack + xNFTs

• innovation at the execution layer & improvements of dev tooling for new languages

• consumer apps that blend the experiences between digital and physical worlds

• crypto social networks that arise from the development of NFTs as digital identities

• smart protocol-design that leverages MEV solutions to reduce negative effects for users 

• decentralized perps & options protocols gaining market share

If any of the above aligns with what you are building or working on, you can always hit me up on Twitter or please don’t hesitate to reach out at zt@tcg.co

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The views and opinions set forth herein are those of the author and not of TCG Capital Management, LLC or any of its affiliates. The information set forth herein has been obtained or derived from sources believed by the author to be reliable. Nevertheless, the author does not make any representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the information’s accuracy or completeness, nor does the author recommend that the information set forth herein serve as the basis of any investment decision and has provided such information to you solely for informational purposes. Nothing contained herein should be construed as investment advice or as an offer or solicitation of an offer, or recommendation, to purchase any securities or other financial instruments, and may not be construed as such.