From Ideation to Impact: How Blockchain Founders Fund is Shaping the Web3 Ecosystem

In this powerhouse episode of The Edge of Show, host Richard Carthon sits down with Aly Madhavji, Managing Partner at Blockchain Founders Fund, to decode what it truly takes to build a successful Web3 startup in 2025. With investment experience in over 100 early-stage blockchain projects, Aly goes beyond the hype to reveal what actually stands the test of time in the decentralized space.

From dissecting the critical gaps in today’s AI x blockchain ventures to unveiling the real-world infrastructure powering sectors like fintech and supply chain, this episode is a masterclass in responsible innovation. Aly drops strategic gems on how builders can thrive amidst hype cycles, what VCs are really looking for, and how the Deepin model is about to unlock monetization opportunities using unused consumer hardware. This isn’t just another crypto conversation — it's a roadmap for the future of Web3, direct from a seasoned investor shaping the space.

Whether you're a founder, investor, or enthusiast trying to navigate the evolving landscape, this episode offers rare clarity and deep strategic insights. Don’t miss Aly’s take on regulatory risks, RWAs, decentralized insurance, and AI integration in the blockchain world.

Key Topics Covered:

• Startup Success in Web3: What Blockchain Founders Fund looks for in promising blockchain startups, including founder traits, execution speed, and tech resilience.
• Real-World Use Cases: Examples of blockchain solving real problems in fintech, infrastructure, and B2B tooling.
• AI and Blockchain Hype vs Reality: Aly explains why current AI implementations in Web3 lack depth and what true innovation should look like.
• Deepin & Underutilized Devices: Monetizing unused consumer hardware for decentralized computing power and infrastructure.
• Regulatory Navigation: Guidance for Web3 startups operating amid an evolving global regulatory environment.
• Mass Adoption & UX: Importance of simplifying onboarding and UX for non-crypto native users to fuel growth in 2025.

Episode Highlights:

“We're really here to build this space—to build a better future…a more transparent and level playing field.” — Aly Madhavji

“What you don’t want is a startup that’s just mediocre across everything. You want world-class in something.” — Aly Madhavji

“Consumers can now monetize unused CPU, GPU, and storage. That’s a game-changer for decentralized infrastructure.” — Aly Madhavji

“Right now, a lot of AI in Web3 is just plugins to ChatGPT. It’s not real innovation.” — Aly Madhavji

“Deepin and decentralized tools are unlocking global earning potential without new hardware—just your phone or laptop.” — Richard Carthon

People and Resources Mentioned:

• Aly Madhavji
• Blockchain Founders Fund
• Richard Carthon
• Validation Cloud
• NodeOps
• Credit
• Uniblock
• K3 Labs
• Zoth
• Futureverse
• Altered State Machine
• Virtuals
• Umoja
• Hivello
• Rilla

About Our Guest:

Aly Madhavji is the Managing Partner at Blockchain Founders Fund, a Singapore-based early-stage VC firm investing in high-growth blockchain and Web3 startups. With a sharp focus on real-world applications of emerging technologies like AI and IoT, Aly advises governments, financial institutions, and Fortune 500 companies. He is a recognized thought leader and frequent speaker at top-tier global conferences, bringing a no-nonsense, impact-first approach to blockchain investing. Under his leadership, the Blockchain Founders Fund has backed notable ventures like Splinterlands, BeatApp, and Credit, while also shaping the infrastructure for decentralized finance and next-gen internet solutions.

Aly Madhavji
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Transcript:

Richard Carthon: Welcome to the Edge of show. This is Richard Carthon, and it's another production of the Edge of Company, a quickly growing media ecosystem, pioneering the pioneers of Web3 tech and culture, and responsible for other groundbreaking endeavors like OuterEdge, Innovation Festival, LA, and in Riyadh. And today's feature is Ali Medhajib. who is the Managing Partner at Blockchain Founders Fund, a premier investment fund dedicated to fostering high-growth blockchain and Web3 startups. With expertise in blockchain, fintech, and digital assets, he advises governments and financial institutions on innovative technological adoption. He's a recognized thought leader, and he's also frequently speaks at global conferences that contribute to a significant discussions on decentralized finance and AI solutions. Blockchain Founders Fund is a Singapore based early state venture capital fund that invests in top tier blockchain startups globally. And the fund focuses on adding value to blockchain and emerging technology projects such as AI and IoT with real world applications. They support entrepreneurs and hands on venture programs, assisting with product market fit and go to market strategies. Some notable companies in the portfolio include Splinterlands and BeatApp. Ali, great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for having me on, Richard. Well, first one of this get into a little bit around like your blockchain investments, right? So like as being one of the leading figures in blockchain investments, like what does elevating business mean to you personally? And like with your work that you do at Blockchain Founders Fund, like how are you embodying that philosophy?

Aly Madhavji: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a really big part of my work in this space and my philosophy is that we're really here to build this space, to really build a better future for everyone, a more transparent and a more level playing field, right? And part of the reason myself and a number of others got into this space was really from an ideological standpoint of how do we actually go change the world and how do we actually make a better future? And that's really at the core of what we're doing. So while I know there's been a lot of interest, for example, in things like memes and other things, these aren't things that really build the industry, right? It's more of, Let's call it a gamble. It's something that retail even doesn't even have a good shot at anymore, given how much automation, sniping, other things are in the industry. And it's really a very quick way to, for example, lose money and also maybe even lose interest in the space because they're going to get burned. And what we're really looking at is how do we actually build companies that stand the test of time, really build up this industry and help actually change the lives of billions of people.

Richard Carthon: Yeah, I think it's important to bring that distinction because a lot of times when people think about cryptocurrency, I don't think they look at it through the right lens, which are blockchain startups. And when you're dealing with startups, unfortunately, like most startups, 90% fail. So how do you find the 10% that are going to make it that are going to have that business that stands the test of time. And so you have a lot of experience with vetting a lot of these, having invested in over 100 early stage blockchain and Web3 startups. What are some of the common pitfalls that you've observed and what are the essential qualities you look for for a successful blockchain startup in today's crazy market?

Aly Madhavji: Yeah, no, it's a really good question, right? And oftentimes, people really get swayed into, you know, hey, X startups raising a lot of money, and it's a hot startup, quote, unquote, because other VCs are in that deal. To me, it makes a lot less sense on some of these, like I get some of them could be interesting, and they are do have really good tech. But oftentimes what we're finding in this space is there's still a lack of due diligence, a lack of process. And so these startups that might be really, really hot might not actually have the fundamental pieces of the puzzle to really make a startup that stands the test of time. And so when we're really looking for backing founders, we're looking for Ideally, they've got a track record where they've done it before, they've built successful startups. If not, we want to start seeing indications towards it, right? So we want to start seeing indications towards what have they done over their career over the last little while that's had demonstrations of success that we can look at, that we can leverage off of. Are they putting themselves around a team that can really help fill in some of those gaps? And then are they extremely strong on certain aspects? Because what you don't necessarily want is a team that's mediocre, even okay, or good across everything. Ideally, they've got certain things that they're the best in the world at. So whether that's going to be on the tech front, whether that's on the sales front, those sorts of superhuman type of aspects are going to help you to to really stand out as a startup and help do certain things at a level that's you know fully world class and that's really what it takes to to go build a successful startup and then making sure that you've got like the persistence and resilience to continue to do it right it's not easy being a startup founder, I myself was a startup founder, you know, it really takes oftentimes, even, let's call it some uncanny, you know, persistence, maybe it's even delusional persistence, right? And making sure that you're staying motivated, even when things are going wrong, and you can motivate your team and others around you, even in those scenarios, to see what a brighter, better future looks like and then be able to build towards that and figure out what are those things in the short run that I can do to sort of get there towards that longer vision. And so that's all very, very important things that we're looking for in startups.

Richard Carthon: Um, definitely, um, just to double down on team experience, uh, being able to do due diligence, not only just on the project itself and what they're trying to build, but even on the people themselves, uh, to, to go and see like, uh, are their credentials really what they said, or have they potentially been part of some. previous rugs in the space. Even just going that extra layer to really dig into the people is very important, because it's good to know who you're potentially getting in bed with as you help them through their journey. And as being a previous entrepreneur yourself, we know about the cycles and roller coaster of emotions that it takes to go through and have a successful business. So when you're looking at a lot of these projects outside of, of course, what they're building and the team behind it, the technology itself, right? So blockchain technology, how is how are you seeing that drive tangible real world solutions across sectors like finance and supply chain management? And going past the theoretical applications to something that's actually working?

Aly Madhavji: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can touch on that. I mean, one of the most important things that we sort of just before I sort of fully go into answering your question, right, like one of the most important things that we can really look for is progress over time. So as a venture capital, list or as a venture capital firm or as an angel investor, one of the things you want to look for is like how fast is that company moving in as little time as possible, right? And that's going to be a really big indicator to then being able to extrapolate how far can they go or what does that sort of look like over the next little while if they continue to move at that speed, right? And oftentimes, that's when you're really early. When you start getting a little bit further, you're still looking at the same thing, but you might be able to measure it in terms of more metrics and numbers, right? So you might be able to say, hey, are they going 30% month over month or 25% month over month and stuff? At an earlier stage, it's more difficult to do that. When you talk about more tangible things that are being built, you know, when you think about infrastructure that runs a space and you take, for example, you know, node infrastructure, we've been, you know, one of the earliest investors in companies like Validation Cloud and NodeOps, which actually helped to provide infrastructure for a ton of major change in the space, right? And these might not be, you know, household B2C names as much, right? But Validation Cloud surely powers you know, a ton of major chains in the space, right? But there are B2B companies. You don't oftentimes see them sort of front and center, but they're, you know, essentially critical to a lot of this infrastructure. And then NodeOps has only been around for the past sort of year and a little bit and already made themselves a household name on the Node front, right? Then you take sort of other innovations around, for example, you know, can you actually make a ton more efficiency in different areas? So take like FinTech, for example, we invest in a company called Credit, which is essentially, you know, building remittances on USDC rails between Africa and the United States, and vice versa, and then also help to build software for banks and microfinance banks to issue loans more effectively. And they've now issued millions of loans, right? And these are microfinance loans, they've helped to change a ton of lives in the past year alone. And, you know, I've been, you know, among the fastest growing companies that we've seen sort of in the in the fintech space over the past 12 months. So these are some really, really cool examples. Then we've got things, for example, in tooling. Tooling is a really interesting space because what we found in the blockchain Web3 space is a lot of developers tend to be building the same things over and over in their startups because a lot of that infrastructure and tooling in Web3 is actually missing. And so the tooling space we found particularly interesting. So for example, and I won't go too much into it, but Uniblock aggregates all of the top APIs in the Web3 space. And so now for developers, instead of having to integrate hundreds of APIs, you integrate one, and it's got all of them already integrated. Now it's going to save you a ton of time. It's going to save you multiple FTEs as a startup. to not have to build things that are redundant. If you think about Web 2, these types of things have been built over many years. They've sort of matured. It's very common to just plug into some of these tools. In Web 3, that's been less common. And so building some of these things that aren't necessarily the core product in your startup don't make as much sense. And so plugging into someone else is just going to save you a lot of time and money. You know, K3 lab is very similar as well in the sense that, you know, it helps you to automate workflows and build out things that, you know, you don't then need to rebuild in your startup. So these things are very, very valuable. Some of the other really hot topics that, you know, we're obviously looking at is, you know, RWAs. It's something that everyone's talking about from Larry Fink at BlackRock all the way down. And we do think that this is going to transform the industry, right? And there's a lot of really, really interesting things there. We've invested in companies like Zoth and many others, you know, even companies building out infrastructure for RWAs that I think is very exciting. And you go from that all the way to even things on the entertainment side, etc. So we have a lot of really, really cool things.

Richard Carthon: Yeah, it's incredible. And you went through a full spectrum all over the place of different ways that projects are building for real world problems, providing solutions that are utilizing blockchain technology. And, you know, one of the words that you didn't mention that is absolutely one of the buzzwords of 2025, as we look at the intersection of blockchain and AI, how are you seeing that convergence of AI and blockchain in creating novel opportunities? And what are some of those like examples that you can show like innovative applications that are exciting to you?

Aly Madhavji: It's a very good question. And so when we think about AI, I guess like for us, again, like we're looking for companies that stand the test of time that are actually going to change the industry. And when I look at a lot of this, I mean, we started investing, for example, in AI and blockchain at the start of 2018. Right. So it's been many, many years, for example, where the first backup altered state machine, which has been one of the flagship projects, you know, in the space around AI, got acquired last year by Futureverse. And we've now invested in a number of companies that leverage AI at its core. Obviously, many companies across the portfolio use AI, right? I would say probably the vast majority use AI. I'd say that's probably a standard at this point that's expected across most startups. Right. My one challenge right now with what we've been seeing in AI around these trading bots and people talk about the trading bot side. To me, it's not that exciting, the AI that I'm seeing yet used in blockchain. Oftentimes, And there are interesting things, don't get me wrong, like what Virtuals is doing is very interesting. But, you know, when you see some of these trading bot technology pieces, to me, it's not very different from what we've seen since 2017-18, right? Like, if we're talking about you know, a bot that you can give it parameters and it can execute based on certain parameters, certain things you teach it, you know, and then comes back to you on execution and do you want to execute this? Like, that's not that interesting, right? Like, we've had that since 2017-18. That's just machine learning. That's not really AI. And this is a problem. I think the bar that Web3 has had right now and consumers have had right now has been so low around AI that it's not even at the standard of where the AI industry as a whole. A lot of it's just plugins to chat GPT or other things. It's not very sophisticated. I think that's going to change very, very quickly. I think a lot of people that are necessarily putting their money in some of these things that won't necessarily stand the test of time because it's not the best teams in the world. It's not the best products in the world. This can be a cycle. It can be a month. It can be two months, three months. I'm sure it might be very hyped. probably not going to stand the test of time. I think there's definitely really cool innovations that are being built right now that we're seeing from world-class AI developers, guys that have been in AI for a long time, maybe been at some of the biggest AI companies in the world. I think these types of things are going to be built much more robustly at the forefront of the intersection of AI and blockchain, not you know, probably what we would have expected to see a number of years ago and fairly nascent. So I think that's like a worry that I have when people get into these hype cycles that I don't think from a quality standpoint is where it should be or where it ought to be.

Richard Carthon: Yeah, I think you bring up a lot of really good points there that a lot of these products that are coming up solve a specific problem that AI does fix, but it doesn't mean that it'll survive the test time like you're saying like the technology is going to continue to advance it's going to continue to evolve, and a lot of problems that are being solved right now. will necessarily like newer versions of things that are haven't even been revealed yet are going to basically offshoot and overtake some of the things that these things were being solved for. So I think really looking at the infrastructure and the long term vision of what's being created is really important in that people are getting in too deep into the hype cycle that is the intersection of AI and blockchain. But one of the important pieces of all of this is how the regulatory landscape of Web3 for startups is constantly evolving. With everything that's happened in 2025 so far and what's potentially to come, what do you think are some of the most critical challenges and opportunities for companies in Web3? And what advice do you have to give for companies that are trying to maneuver through the current landscape?

Aly Madhavji: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think it's, you know, make sure it's something that you're passionate about, that you're building that can actually change the industry and try to be laser focused on that. Of course, like taking advice, taking guidance, if there's certain things you need to pivot on. But I think oftentimes, one of my challenges in this space is everyone sort of moving towards what's hot in the cycle right now. And that cycle might be a month, two months, three months, but like, By pivoting your business towards that, I think it's taking away from what you're actually trying to build that stands the test of time and maybe can be a great product for the industry. And I think this creates challenges. You know, we've got to really get away from, I think, a lot of this short-term narrative stuff. I mean, a lot of these companies, at the end of the day, and this is oftentimes why the best time to invest in some of these companies are also in the bear market, right? It's like the builders that are actually going to be building, that are actually going to stick around, that aren't trying to just move cycle to cycle. I think tend to build the best products. Right. And, you know, people are always getting lost, I think, with that. I do think that this cycle like deep in will be very interesting. I think the technology has improved tremendously where, you know, consumers can leverage some pretty amazing hardware that they've already got and monetize it, right? So if you take, you know, your RAM, CPU, GPU, file storage, like if you can leverage these things now easier than ever, without the need for new hardware, And you can monetize it, make 20 bucks a month. I mean, I think a lot of people will be very interested in that, right? And, you know, the advancement of, you know, consumer devices over the last decade has been tremendous, right? That, you know, we have very, very powerful things. And oftentimes, one of the things we look at is like, you know, the world's most powerful supercomputer in reality is probably the one that we're not using. It's the one that's like all of our devices, like my device, your device, and everyone else's devices that's listening to this. And if you, you know, if you connect all of those, are you more powerful than the world's biggest supercomputer? And the answer is yes, right? It's like, And so we've got a lot of unutilization or underutilization of resources that could, you know, change the world. Of course, there's going to be different challenges. There's a latency challenge when you're connecting all of those different devices, and that's definitely one of the things you need to solve. But, you know, that's probably the next set of, you know, potentially trillion-dollar company, right? When you start to think about how do you combine all of those resources and leverage it, And then leverage that even for the future of AI, for the future advancement of humanity, et cetera. So a lot of really, really exciting things, I think, happening around Deepin. I think we've still got plenty of room on DeFi and finance and fintech. And I think in the previous cycle, we had a lot of people think they were really using blockchain and finance, right? But they were using tools like BlockFi, Celsius, FTX, and got really burned, right? And then left the space. But I think, you know, my hope, of course, is that more people move into decentralized tools, that are generally safer for most things. Of course, you still have risks around security, like cybersecurity, make sure you're protecting your assets, et cetera. But I think this can actually help to avoid some of those centralized issues that we saw in the previous market.

Richard Carthon: Yeah, a lot of really good points. I want to spend a little bit of time addressing the deep and decentralized fiscal infrastructure. One of the things I think makes it really cool is that, you know, most people in the world don't have a computer or laptop, but most have a smartphone and being able to utilize, for example, Pi Network has been around for quite a few years and recently finally dropped its token and had a decent amount of success and it's a regional outreach and things have happened since. But point being is that someone could download an application, have it be going and then have it be worth something by just participating in that decentralized network. There's going to be more and more projects that come out and do this. And I know there was grass, there's several others, but there's going to be ways that more people can use extra storage on their devices and earn something for doing that. So I think that is also going to be a really cool opportunity, even for people who do have laptops, a lot of them don't use everything either. So a lot of opportunity there. I agree with DeFi. DeFi somewhere had its moment, but like it's not dead and there's still plenty more to come with that. And there's several other news subsets that are going to start to arise. For example, when people even think about the Bitcoin ecosystem, you had Bitcoin layer twos now coming out and ordinals and runes and all those other things. So there's going to be some other new technology or new way or advancement and some of the ecosystems that already exist. So I'm excited for how things will evolve in that capacity. But even with the rapid pace of innovation in Web3, how do you promote responsible innovation to ensure both benefit society and mitigating potential risks? Because one of the things that we just talked about with Deepin, even a company like Pi, even though they are potentially helping, they could potentially put malware on your phone, if you're not careful. Are these other companies who are doing XYZ, like, how do we make sure that as things continue to progress, and although with good intention, that people can mitigate risk while participating?

Aly Madhavji: Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, you know, I guess there's always the opportunity for, you know, someone to, you know, be a bad actor, grow it, put malware, but like, you know, at the end of the day, I think if they've got, you know, a clear vision of how they want to make the world a better place, and part of this is, you know, leveraging technology for it. I mean, I think I think there's generally good intentions around these things. Of course, there's different ways to catch these things, right? Like there are cybersecurity audits, there's, you know, different audits within the web three space that help to make sure that, you know, consumers are protected. I do think that this space needs to continue to get stronger and stronger on the audit front. It needs to be more and more real-time. Of course, there's issues when products are updated but the audits are old. Then there's misalignments in those too. But huge, huge opportunities, I think, to help people make a better living, like we were saying, right? I mean, if you think about the average person's GPU on their computer, I mean, how often are they utilizing that at 100%, right? I mean, it's probably, I'd say probably for myself, it's probably not even used 10%, right? And so there's huge, huge opportunities here around underutilization. And when you think about, you know, Uber is an example, right? People were able to start using their cars to basically pair it with themselves as a driver and help to drive. and monetize it. But now imagine you didn't even need that driver concept, right? So now it's like fully autonomous. I mean, that's essentially kind of how utilizing resource on a computer would be. Like you already have the device, you can do it fully remote anywhere in the world. Essentially, you can then contribute to a network, so you don't need the physical car, you don't need it in a physical place, and it's going to operate basically autonomously to monetize, right? So I think it's a lot more effective in that way. And this could be, you know, pretty significant, right, when you think about the resources and the improvement. You know, we've got companies like Rilla that I think is really, really cool. So Rilla is basically a peer-to-peer live streaming for sports. So when you think about like, you know, watching the Super Bowl or watching, you know, a major championship, right? You've got now hundreds of millions or hundreds and hundreds of millions of people watching it all at the same time, right? And why is everyone sort of streaming this thing directly from a centralized source when realistically you could have one person stream it and it be shared to basically thousands or tens of thousands of other people at a time, like similar to how we used to look at, you know, LimeWire, Kazaa, Napster, you know, Pirate Bay, like any of these types of things that we used to all use. it's a lot, a lot more effective, right? It's a lot less bandwidth, it cuts server costs dramatically. And so these types of things I think are actually very big, very important innovations around this type of technology. if you're helping to stream that, you might be being able to monetize that, right? And so this is very, very effective, I think, as well as we think about how do we actually scale resources more and more and more effectively.

Richard Carthon: Yeah, the scalability piece of this is one of the really amazing things around decentralization I've always gotten on board with, and just giving more people the power to have more options and to give them a way that if they are participating in helping something grow, that there is potential financial benefit with that participation and making that happen. But with decentralization, it's helping to reshape a lot of traditional industries like gaming and healthcare, real estate. What are some of the surprising applications you've encountered where blockchain has allowed for decentralization in ways that you would have never guessed?

Aly Madhavji: Yeah, I mean, the live stream one I think is a really good example that I sort of just mentioned. I mean, looking at, I think there's sort of a big opportunity around sort of like web 2.5 going into decentralization, right? Earlier I mentioned sort of credit and issuing, you know, microfinance loans to millions and millions of people, right? And, you know, these are on then USDC rails. They're able to, you know, get away from local currency depreciation much more effectively, which is a real problem in emerging markets, depending on the country. So, you know, these are, these are very, very big differences. Then you look at, for example, I think the entire RWA side, I know it's something that a lot of us have expected for many years and have looked at for many years. I myself got involved in that space, you know, in 2018 as one of the original advisors to Polymath. And, you know, we essentially invented the term, you know, security token and had an entire vision around how security tokens could help evolve the world. But I think we were just really, really early on that. idea and where it could go. But now you're starting to see a lot of the mainstream move into it. Right. So like Larry, you think from BlackRock is talking about it pretty much, you know, every other day or quite often. And I think you've got trillions and trillions of assets that are essentially end up on, you know, digitized RWA type of rails. And I think the really interesting part is, can you start to open that up to more and more jurisdictions? Right. Oftentimes, right now, one of the problems is just access to US markets or access to certain markets. Now, if you can start to open up to more of the world, you actually have a lot more demand for investment opportunities in the rest of the world that could then be investing more effectively into RWAs or other types of assets, right? I think that's a really exciting place. I think some really cool things that we've been looking at, for example, is We do think it'll be complicated for the consumer to use things like Deepin if there's a lot of different Deepin opportunities, right? Like, how do you choose between a hundred different Deepin opportunities? I think it's going to be quite complicated. And, you know, because, you know, one of them might be using GPU, one might be using like, you know, other like file storage. I mean, do you now have to start, you know, using multiple deep ends? It starts to get, I think, quite cumbersome, quite complicated for the consumer. So, for example, we invest in a company called Hivello that's basically a layer that optimizes it. So it looks at your resource, it auto-determines what are sort of the best things to be running, it runs those different things, and then the goal is for you to make $20 to $50 a month using your resources, right? And I think that is really, really cool. I think that makes it a lot more simpler for the user. And that's kind of like maybe the unexpected layer that I think really simplifies it, because otherwise it is kind of complicated, this industry, trying to leverage all these different things. So if you can turn it into one, two clicks, make it very simple for the consumer, well, now you probably opened up the market, you know, 10 times or 20 times more, because it's just a lot more simpler, easier, faster, right? So I think that type of thing is really, really cool. Yeah, those are a few sort of really, really interesting things sort of that we've been looking.

Richard Carthon: It's cool. And I appreciate you getting into some of those details. I think, you know, you mentioned since 2018, like just thinking about how real world assets have matured over the last seven years, and like a lot of the other industry and how much maturity has finally started coming to this space. We're not fully there yet. Even the concept of like some of the newer projects as they're coming in, knowing just learning from previous cycles, how important that user experience is to be truly the onboarding mechanism for not just your web three OGs who can understand this and do it in two seconds, but if you don't have any idea what crypto is, but being able to come and use a platform and having an onboarding system that's like self sustainable, you immediately have an edge on the competition that's out there. So I think really leaning into that, the new use cases, which is really awesome, but then having that seamless onboarding experience, you got something really awesome. But in that line, we're early into 2025 at the time of this recording is right before we are both going to eat Denver in February of 2025. So a whole lot of year in front of us. But what are some of the trends that you're looking out for and that you think others should be looking out for for this year?

Aly Madhavji: Yeah, I think I think we've got a very big opportunity, you know, to bring on consumers effectively into this market, you know, using things like Deepin, I think you've got big opportunities around, you know, anything sort of consumer entertainment, AI, like, I think that's one of the big things that we're at a point where this industry can now bring them on much, much more effectively. I do think there's still gaps on certain aspects, like we are missing very strong decentralized insurance. And for a prolonged bull market, realistically, we need these types of things, right? How do you actually insure around certain protocols, certain hacks, make sure consumers are protected? Without this, I think it gets very difficult because, you know, as soon as something happens, it spooks the market without effective insurance. So, you know, there are things that need to be improved. I think you've got challenges around, you know, a lot of liquidations and crypto as an example. And how do you protect people that are going into that? I think there's really interesting things being built around like liquidation protection right now with companies like Umoja. You know, so I think there's big, big opportunities right now. You know, we've kind of got the limelight. This is not something we maybe saw coming, you know, seven, eight years ago or nine years ago or anything like this where, you know, you've now got the President of the United States, super bullish. You've got an entire country with the US now, super bullish, not what we expected, you know, even as recent as last year or a number of months ago, right? And these are all really good things. I think, of course, there's some downsides, right? You've got coins that are being launched by political figures that are probably extracting value from the market rather than building the market. They probably don't have the right intentions. Oftentimes, so I think like these things can be damaging. But overall, I mean, I think we're in a really good spot where we just need to continue to have and build tools with the right intentions that are going to be able to help bring in mass amounts of consumers into the space. and not think of it as how to make a quick buck, but how to actually build a sustainable ecosystem that's going to really change the world. And if we can do that effectively, everyone can also do really well along the way.

Richard Carthon: I think that's a really good reminder for out there. Unfortunately, a lot of the DGNs that are in the space are trying to make the quick buck. But for the long-term vision, for the people that are really here, for seeing what the future of Web3 is, it's important to keep in mind what's being built and the real technological aspects around what will survive the test of time. And there's going to be a lot of companies I've been building for a while that are coming to the market this year. And some that are going to be thought of this year and start to be built through some of the new lenses that 2025 is going to bring. So I think you've given us a lot of good perspective. I think you've given us a lot of things to think about and look out for. So really appreciate your time today, Ali. But before we wrap up, I always like to give a moment for you to, we call it shout outs. So whether it's someone on your team, whether it's someone close to you, etc, that you just want to give a moment of appreciation to that you don't necessarily always get the opportunity to do, this is your moment to

Aly Madhavji: Absolutely. I'd love to give a shout out to the Edge of NFT team. Of course, we're hosting this. To our team, we've got an incredible team that works around the clock to help build this industry, help back incredible founders. And then, of course, the builders in this space, right? I mean, we wouldn't be here without you. We've come an incredible way. We've had a lot of incredible builders, both within the portfolio and across the industry. So if you are building something really exciting, definitely reach out. We're happy to help and be part of the journey. So just let us know, and we're happy to see how we can help.

Richard Carthon: Definitely, we'll definitely appreciate the shout out. And for people who are listening to this, and they're like, yo, I really want to find a way to connect with Ali and learn more about everything that, you know, blockchain, what your company is doing, how can I go do that?

Aly Madhavji: Yeah, so you can you can find us on blockchainff.com. If you're working on a startup, you can share details with us. We do look through every single one. You can also find me on LinkedIn at Ali Madabji or on Twitter, Ali underscore Madabji. So definitely reach out. We'd love to see what you're working on. And then you can also always see us at tons of incredible conferences, including Denver coming up. GDC will be at Token 2049 in Dubai and in Singapore later this year. So definitely reach out.

Richard Carthon: Perfect. So everyone make sure to go reach out to Ali and learn more about the Blockchain Founders Fund. And of course, everyone out there, thank you for listening.

Aly Madhavji: Perfect. Thank you for having me.

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