Guest: Matthew Le Merle — CEO & Co-Founder of Blockchain Coinvestors, global blockchain VC, early investor in 1200+ startups (Coinbase, Kraken, OpenSea), author, and Silicon Valley board veteran.

Background & Early Lessons:

Matthew began his working life delivering newspapers as a child in rainy London, developing a lasting sense of responsibility and the importance of “seeing things through.”

Earned a scholarship to Oxford for his academic and athletic excellence, then completed an MBA at Stanford. Built a career as a global advisor, executive, private equity leader, and later immersed himself in blockchain innovation.

Blockchain Thesis:

With 30+ years in Silicon Valley, Matthew saw the digital transformation of communication and content, but recognized a “missing link” for moving value securely over the internet.

Blockchain/distributed ledger technology solved foundational challenges for digitizing finance — enabling secure, trustless, peer-to-peer transactions globally, overcoming flaws in traditional banking rails.

Co-founded Blockchain Coinvestors, which invests via a fund-of-funds model across hundreds of VC funds and directly into more than 1,200 blockchain startups worldwide, spanning over 110 unicorns.

Bitcoin’s Future & Role:

While he acknowledges that Bitcoin was a catalyst, Le Merle stresses it’s the underlying technology’s impact on payments, finance, and commerce that’s world-changing.

Believes Bitcoin (BTC) has enduring value as a store of value and “sovereign alternative” for people in unstable economies — sees it as “inevitable” that native digital finance will continue to grow globally.

However, he notes BTC’s long-term future depends on further technical evolution to enable faster, lower-cost, mass payments — real innovation will be when it is also digital money at global scale, not just a store of value.

AI and the Arms Race:

Sees both risk and opportunity in the intersection of blockchain, AI, and quantum computing: as threats emerge (e.g., AI-powered codebreaking), blockchain protocols must evolve, and the most secure blockchains—especially Bitcoin—will continue to improve.

AI/quantum also unlocks new use cases (micro-payments, automated value flows) that legacy finance simply cannot address, making blockchain infrastructure and security ever more valuable.

Venture Landscape & Defensibility:

Le Merle’s strategy: back the best VC fund managers, who in turn back top founders at the earliest stages, spreading risk and betting on the mavericks who build breakthrough companies.

Warns that in AI (and other tech cycles), even groundbreaking startups can be displaced instantly by a new feature from a giant (e.g., OpenAI, Apple), so founders should build beyond “just a feature”—focus on defensible, deeply integrated solutions.

Big Picture & What’s Next:

Digital assets, payments, and financial systems will become natively digital—blockchain is still in “early innings.” The best investment opportunities are at the convergence of Web3 and new agent/AI toolkits.

Massive tech incumbents (Apple, Google, Microsoft) will keep acquiring—so both quick exits and rare breakout “escape velocity” stories are possible for top startups.

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