# Trends and Trading: How to Be Early for the Next Cycle | Erick Pinos (Nibiru) & Evan Feng (Coinfund) - Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver) - Date: 2026-03-09 - Duration: 18:09 - Topics: ETHDenver, Crypto, Web3, Blockchain, Event, Conference, ETHDenver 2025, ETHDenver 2024, Bitcoin, Ethereum - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-qYgBYjzj3sI - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYgBYjzj3sI ## Description πŸš€ Get Ready for ETHDenver 2026! πŸš€ We're already hard at work preparing for next year's biggest Web3 event! Keep your eyes peeled for more info on ETHDenver 2026β€”it’s going to be epic! 🌟 ## Transcript Okay, so this one's going to be really exciting. We're going to be talking about trends and trading, how to be early for the next cycle in well, it's 2026. Memecoins are boomer, infoi is dead, and protection markets are mainstream. So our panel is going to be talking about where the diggents and VCs going to be looking next and how to stop chasing trends and also stop um and spot where the the next cycle where it starts. So welcome our next panelist. We have Evan Fen from Coin Fund and then we have Eric Pinos from uh Nibiru. Come on in. All right. Thanks everyone. >> All right. All right. Yeah, it's going to be a good talk. I'm looking forward to it. >> Yep. Do you want to start with our backgrounds real quick and then jump into the topics? >> Yeah. So, uh, my name is Eric. Um, I've been in crypto since 2014. I started with mining Bitcoin and Dogecoin in my dorm room until the RA had to shut down the computers for making the dorms too noisy and hot. I was the president of the MIT Bitcoin Club in 2017. I started going to ETH Denvers in 2018. This is my eighth or ninth ETH Denver. And uh I invested a lot of crypto projects and I'm currently uh at Nibiru which is a multiVM layer 1 and SAI which is a uh perex. >> Thanks Eric. Hey everyone, Evan Fun. I'm a partner at Coin Fund which is an early stage VC. Uh we're in our 10th year of business and I've been there 5 years. We do uh preede and seed investing up to five million uh series A's and beyond up to 10 million uh 10 million and beyond. Uh prior to web 3, I actually in case you couldn't tell from the suit jacket, I do come from a trad background. I did uh long short equities at Citadel and then 72, but self-repilled into crypto in early 17 via the Bitcoin white paper. So I was actually a libertarian with a small L before uh Wall Street. So Bitcoin was always uh pretty close to the values I held in my heart. So yeah, why don't we get into it? Um, I think maybe the first question is we can look retrospectively at 2025. What do you think worked in the year? What was broken? And what do you hope is different uh about 2026 as we hopefully find our way out of the the bare market that we're in. >> Yeah. Well, I think that I mean 2025 is definitely the year of the prediction markets and stable coin. I think that uh with the heavy institutional interest, right, we've seen more crypto's always been very um I guess like anti-establishment, but we knew we'd have to like grow up sooner or later, right? And I think that this is something that I wanted to I guess like see see from how the VCs have kind of approached this because you guys have invested in projects that have been building these rails for a long time while a lot of crypto people were just kind of like having fun with like memecoins and all this, but now it's starting to come to fruition. Now the institutions are starting to get onboarded through those like rails that were set up. >> Yeah, that's a great point and um you know Jordan who spoke before us actually uh highlighted one of the unique attractive elements of crypto. It is fun. Um, but I think we are in this transitory phase where we we do have to grow up somewhat as well in the sense that I think if we want all of our bags to pump, we now need to realize we're in a world where some of the same lens of financial analysis in terms of revenue growth or god forbid margins, right? Like being profitable um are things we at least certainly our port hosts feel more pressure to make progress towards. Not even from us. I mean, good VCs uh aren't everyday micromanaging their founders. I think it's more taking a look at how token launches go and the kinds of engagement that Wall Street is uh you know targeting in terms of partners and realizing that there's still more that can be built or at least um we can as an industry raise the bar because otherwise we're we're kind of screwed and there no more incremental buyers. >> Yeah. Do you think that token launches are still the way to go or are people moving now more towards equity acquisitions, IPOs? >> Yeah, I I think the way I mentally model this is it's a pendulum, so it swings from one side to the other in terms of market favoring equity versus tokens. I do think at this very moment in time based on what we're seeing, equity is favored, but it's only because, you know, if you look backwards the last six months, it's kind of been a terrible time for tokens to launch. no matter which exchanges are listed day one often you do see a lot of sell pressure as a result of lack of retail enthusiasm but I think that can change in a heartbeat whether it's led by Bitcoin finding a bottom maybe some reversion coming back from people that have been bidding up metals um I wouldn't count tokens out either I think that would be premature and you know you've been in crypto even longer than I think we tend to get max doomer and max pessimistic kind of right before uh things turn around so I who that's my copium I guess but uh we certainly you know put our money where our mouth is in terms of coin fund we're very actively deploying and often historically have found are some of our best investments uh during a time period where people start writing off the industry or attendance is down or something. >> Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to say that I think that even if even when it looks like maybe there's no new future narratives in the horizon there's always something new. There's always something new. In 2018 after Bitcoin had crashed right from that first initial amount like tens of thousands down back down to the thousands people thought it was over. People had been they had moved on from ICOs to go invest in weed stocks and an income share agreements and it's like uh there's nothing there was nothing left for crypto. There was never going to be anything else for crypto. And then DeFi came out and it was like you know that was like the biggest thing that crypto has seen. So there's always something else. there's always something beyond the horizon and I do think we'll see a swing back towards tokens. I like like the fee switch that projects have been doing these buyback and burn models. I think it adds a more like modelable um you know uh valuation for these projects. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean there's a logical extreme where you have convergence between equities you know however they're kind of custodied or transferred or bought and sold today. Um and I and kind of the way that DeFi works or real world assets work on chain today. I think the vision of blockchains and crypto starting with even Bitcoin has always been um global accessibility kind of totally permissionless access. And I think um that's still very much the the end result that you know I think we're all playing for the best uh most deepest markets for really all assets at any time whether it's humans or maybe agents to use another topic dour AI agents participating I think ultimately those price signals should help allocate the scarce resources of whether whether it's labor or block space or really anything else time compute. Yeah, I guess speaking of agents, do you think that somebody could make a really good quality uh VC investable product entirely through vibe coding? >> Oh, this is a great question. Um, so speaking as myself, um, you know, coin funds comprised of individuals who have different views. I think the answer is actually yes, maybe. Um, I think certainly for a prototype, we actually are already seeing that be the case. the bar has gone higher for us when we consider what to invest in because um I think I can say that the days of just having a a deck and an idea um to get funding in real size I think are it's probably in the rearview mirror and that's probably for the best because now there's really no excuse whether you use you know cloud code or uh maybe are you know able to use orchestration software you really should be able to do some kind of prototyping mockups maybe even using, you know, dummy users to get a sense of how the actual product would work. So, I I think yes, I mean, I'm open to that. I you walking the floors at this conference or early this week, I think I see more complete um demos or early, you know, productization progress being made now thanks to AI. So, I think our bar has gone higher. I'm sure customers and users have their bars having their bars have also gone higher. So, I I think it's actually possible. Maybe you know you need to have a separate deliberate systems designbased approach for security but I don't see a reason why a prototype can't be vioded for something that can be very big >> and do you think do you think that AI and crypto are very complimentary or people just trying to like force those two things to to work together >> I think both are true so self-critically VCs and founders that want VC money I think are very good at finding what narratives are hot in our defense we actually published our web through AI thesis um and made our first investment in a decentralized inference and training network called Jensen before chat GPT was released to the public in 2022. But right now, yes, I think AI is having its continuous moment in the sun. This time in the form of agents and openclaw, etc. Um, I think we as institutional investors are definitely trained to look beyond the hype. There are certainly um founders with good backgrounds asking very high valuations you know right now in the market and I think we're balancing our excitement for what could be in terms of non-human users of blockchain and you know developing new infrastructure for those use cases balanced by you know we've we've seen this we've seen hype before like we in crypto myself included we're very susceptible to getting nerds typed we you know see tokens do well and then suddenly want to full port into things But um you know on behalf of our investors, our LPs, we certainly want to balance that. But I I mean personally I I think excitement is almost always a good thing. But we do have a responsibility to convert that into durable technology and not just, you know, fleecing people, having people go to jail, you know, rinse and repeat because every time that happens, you burn the goodwill of new entrance, people that paid money out of their pocket to come to eat Denver. And I think we should do better as an industry. >> Yeah. Uh I wanted to shift gears a bit to think about uh privacy projects. So those are also very hot. I have had some issues with privacy projects in the past like for example one project I really like was tornado cashache and so I had the the torn token and there was all the memes on Twitter about about torren and like you know being part of this this future which I really liked and then when tornado cashache started getting in trouble and all the addresses that ever used to cash started getting blacklisted everyone was a torn holder. we were also just freaking out. We're like, I I don't want to get roped into this. So, do you think that like privacy is an area that's investable and and that's as an institutional level and then also as individuals? >> Oh, man. This is a really thoughtful question. I think privacy is hard to invest in institutionally, but it's also really important for people to disagree with me and maybe for us to take a stand in certain cases. Like you mentioned Roman Storm and Tornado Cash and I mean some people at Coin Fund we've actually as individuals not as the firm like gone to um the you know the legal court case kind of hearings and proceedings in New York to support uh technology that helps perfect freedom and kind of act as a barrier against government overreach. There's actually a pretty core cipher punk soul to a lot of people even people wearing suits on stage in crypto which I love. But I think putting that aside and maybe putting the politics aside from a is this a good return on investment potential perspective, privacy has always struggled to be more than a feature and to really be a full, you know, product. I mean, we've we've seen and evaluated layer 2 blockchains that have have privacy elements or individual products. There are more um maybe front-end uh wallets and other types of applications that also put privacy first. But I think privacy taking off probably has to be embedded into other, you know, killer use cases, too. But I I actually think maybe the the subtle correlary is I think there's a Trojan horse element to it where it can be a feature in something that is really widely adopted and then all of a sudden, you know, it's too broadly distributed. Uh politicians love to enforce um you know state monopoly on a lot of things including you know surveillance and physical force but I think if enough of their constituents actually like something um and are going to get upset when it's taken away that's actually when most politicians will um maybe drop the issue. So I actually am optim uh optimistic about that happening over the long term. But um you know daytoday it's it's hard to see something be part of a sufficiently useful uh user experience with when when they put privacy first, but I know it's a bit of a copout, but maybe feel free to disagree with me on that. >> No, I I I agree. I think that it is it is hard to um it is hard to look at privacy tech and be able to invest in it and have it grow to the point where um it's without it compromising too much, right? I do think a lot of uh we we talked about this we talked about this before the idea that like I mean a lot of people are just kind of here to make money and to trade and so you do kind of have to cater that to that a bit because if you just go with a pure tech solution or pure privacy solution you know that might not draw in as many people's interests and that goes along with like the complaints that people have about how everything is becoming gambling everything is becoming casinos so I guess like kind of one of the I mean towards the last question do you think that it's going to stay that way where people those ideas are the ones that always get the most attention and the most funding and that we just kind of have to Trojan horse like these ideals that we have into it or do you think that people will start to optimize for other vectors besides just how much revenue can the protocol make? >> Yeah. Um yeah, idealistically I would I would I wish more of the market would price in um some of these I think properties that are really important to freedom but are hard to quantify. But cynically maybe I I do think the including privacy or other key freedom preserving features as part of other products is probably the better way to get distribution. Um, but I would love to be proven wrong. And in fact, you know, if anyone in the audience is building something uh that is, you know, maybe going to dis uh disprove what I'm saying, you know, feel free to come find me after. Um, I did want to bring the discussion, Eric, back, you know, with some of the minutes that we have left to the overall question of how do we maybe have our audience make sure they don't miss uh the next big secular theme or wave. And I think my advice on that topic is really uh you should try to get your hands on whatever the experience is you're evaluating. So don't don't only you know follow what the large YouTube accounts or ex accounts are saying but really you should have um your own views on a product because ultimately for something to be successful and valuable especially in a world where fundamentals matter more I think it needs users right so you should shouldn't be afraid to trust your own guts about whether something's fun or not fun or valuable to you for your you know financial life so um even we as investors like we love we love to um roll up our sleeves and uh really get into the user experience ourselves to have a view beyond what's in the slide decks. >> Yeah, I echo this like every trend I've been early to has been something that like I've just been doing anyways and then like the industry like eventually caught up like I was doing u metaverse land. I was making games for Oculus and then I just happened to have a lot of sandbox land and Facebook rebranded to Meta, right? And I remember from like my MIT friends I that he has so much one of my one of them it was the previous president of the club he had so much Bitcoin and I'm like how do what do you think about the fluctuations he's like some days I I have a little more some days I have a little less but that helps you weather the storm especially during like bare markets. So just try new things like whatever whatever is the latest thing that comes out. Go give it a try and then you'll just be at the cutting edge long enough. Money usually comes as a byproduct, especially these things that are like tokenized. Look at that. We made it 20 minutes without talking about prediction markets, without having to resort to that. >> Should we talk about it for 90 seconds? >> Yeah, let's talk about prediction markets. >> Um yeah, I mean I I think it's probably a topic that comes up a lot. Uh short view from our side. You know, we're active investing in this vertical um in applications building in adjacent areas. I I believe in futarchy like I think maybe that's the important point to go out there with. I do think there's a lot of signal in all markets whether it's information markets or markets for um you know labor for compute etc. So I think anything prediction markets included that uh makes it easier for everyone to have access to the same information to formulate views and have skin in the game I think that's a net positive and I actually don't have any caveats to that. I know some people exclude certain types of markets, but I actually think those types of markets are perhaps quite interesting. So, we can talk about that offline. >> Yeah. And one of the main areas that I'm looking at for the next narrative is uh prediction markets for insurance. I think prediction markets have proven out the model of being like truth indicators and reputation scoring for uh elections and and politics. I think that could be applied to insurance policies. It could be applied to smart contract safety. It could even be applied I mean people are already using it for weather and like uh taking out flood insurance by betting on whether or not you know there's going to be a flood flood warnings and stuff. So I think that's one cool area. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think the fact that we already seen AI uh be pretty good at being predictive um and really supplying liquidity and views also really helps bring that future into sharper focus quite quickly. And with that we're out of time. Thank you everybody. Uh we'll be around if you want to come find us in the back. Thank you. Bye.