Alana Levin, investment partner Privacy infrastructure Privacy infrastructure is in an extremely early phase, still being built. The category is exciting from its sheer size. I firmly believe the majority of onchain state will be private in the long run, as it introduces advantages for market efficiency, security, and consumer preferences. Solutions leveraging FHE, ZK, MPC, and TEEs all come with different sets of trade-offs, making each ideal for different sets of applications. The design space at the infrastructure layer is vast, and the opportunity set is massive.

Uniswap V4 hook-enabled marketplaces One of the most exciting new design spaces in DeFi has clearly emerged: Uniswap V4 hooks, which are plugins for designing pools with unique features and functions, such as new auction mechanisms, fee designs, and much more. Onchain and offchain liquidity is becoming increasingly blurred with the release of intents-based trading protocols such as UniswapX. Thus, hooks are becoming the new frontier of mechanism design in DeFi; theyre an effort to make onchain liquidity more competitive with CEX liquidity, which DEX traders can now tap into. Derek Walkush, investment partner Attention betting apps Top creators like Mr. Beast create videos with views that rival the eyeballs of NFL games. Fantasy games and betting already exist around sports, but now social media and players of the great online game (e.g. creators) are large enough to have their own betting and prediction experiences. Think of it as sports betting for social media, on crypto

Real-world MMORPGs Stepn showcased the potential of crypto lifestyle games that leverage mobile-first web2-esque experiences, gamified IRL activity (e.g. running), and subscription-based assets (e.g. degradable sneaker NFTs). However, Stepn had flaws the game was mostly single player, used complex tokenomics, and was overly financialized. Theres room for new types of real-world games around social habits that combine incentives and verifiable offchain actions. Onchain AI agent marketplaces As crypto AI agents become more complex, developers will design agents that perform specific tasks. Rather than building an agent that has to know how to do everything, it will be easier for general agents to buy services from other specific agents. Marketplaces for crypto AI agents will allow people to purchase targeted agent services or trade trained consumer app agents within platforms or games (e.g. Parallel Colony NPCs, ASM brains, Frenrug, etc). Mason Nystrom, investment partner

Onchain reputation systems While blockchains are trustless systems by design, its still very difficult to trust the various actors onchain. I see a large opportunity to build a reputation system that leverages onchain data to help us trust the contracts with which we interact and the participants with which we engage. A reputation system not only can easily prevent bad actors such as scammers or airdrop sybil attackers, but can also reward good behavior onchain, which can be leveraged in areas like under-collaterized lending or freelancer markets. Jack Gorman, data scientist