Katie Haun
@katie_haun
Founder and CEO @HaunVentures. Alum @Coinbase Board, @a16z, @TheJusticeDept, @Stanford, @USSupremeCourt w/Justice Kennedy. Teach from time to time @StanfordGSB.
817 Following 122.3K Followers
Throwback to exactly 5 years ago @RonConway @brian_armstrong @iampaulgrewal and I were in DC making the case for common sense crypto regulation. Today CLARITY cleared the Senate Banking Committee on a bipartisan basis. Patience pays –congrats to everyone who made this possible.
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Today, we’re announcing Route 66 (a new initiative co-led by @coinbase to make it faster and cheaper to connect to specialized blockchains) and a strategic investment from @cbventures.
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Haun Ventures CEO @katie_haun says we’re entering a new economy defined by three structural shifts: financial rails, new asset classes, and the agentic future.
"We're taking this new fund of $1B and backing founders who are building what we're calling the new economy. When I say the new economy, I'm thinking about three structural shifts we're seeing right now."
"The first is new financial rails and infrastructure. Think companies like Erebor. Gone are bankers hours and wire cut-offs. I mean, you're talking about global from day one, 24/7. This is a bank that opened on a Sunday."
"Second are new assets and markets. It started as stablecoins, but we're now talking about tokenizing the stock market. You see companies like BlackRock, Coinbase, and Robinhood doing that. But it's also opened up new markets like prediction and perpetual markets."
"The third structural shift is what we're calling the agentic future. It's not just AI broadly, it's where AI and crypto intersect. We're talking about building for a world where the end user is not necessarily a human of a financial product or service, but is a computer or an agent. How does that impact things like privacy? How does it impact things like provenance and trust? What form will they use? How will agents pay for things or subscribe to services?"
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It was great to join @BloombergTV this morning as we unveiled our new funds and talked about the future as we see it at Haun Ventures. Wonderful to chat with you, @CarolineHydeTV
Banking hours and wire transfer cutoffs will be a thing of the past thanks to agentic finances, says Crypto-focused investor Haun Ventures CEO Katie Haun
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We’re doubling down on @OfficialXFX's $17m Series A alongside @CastleIslandVC and @cbventures.
Santi, Beto, Jason, and the team go from strength to strength. In less than a year since we led the seed, the company has reached $5b in annualized volume and become the primary cross border settlement provider for their customers.
XFX is helping money move as seamlessly as information, and we’re excited to continue supporting them in their mission.
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The 9th Circuit (which governs the 9 western states) recently heard oral arguments in the Kalshi prediction markets case. At issue: does the CFTC or individual states get to regulate sports-related prediction markets. There are ≅50 judges on the 9th Circuit. The 3 judges Kalshi drew seemed ideal for them — all relatively young and appointed by Trump in what’s historically been the most liberal circuit in the country.
And yet, it didn’t matter. Kalshi’s argument that its sports event contracts are federally regulated derivatives under the exclusive jurisdiction of the CFTC landed flat. The panel appeared consistently skeptical. My prediction: Kalshi loses this one. Counterintuitively, that may be the best outcome for them over the long term. More on that another time.
(Full disclosure used to work with and know 2 of these judges and also clerked on the Ninth Circuit)
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The SEC just gave DeFi frontends a meaningful signal: if you're not custodying assets or executing orders, we won't come after you. Most detailed safe harbor yet. But it's not a rule, it expires in 5 years, next administration can pull it, etc. More substance than we’ve seen in a staff statement. Still not a rule. Still expires. But it’s solid progress in the right direction.
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Anthropic just lost its bid to pause the government's supply chain designation while the legal fight plays out.
A 3-judge DC Circuit panel (one level below SCOTUS) ruled the "equitable balance cuts in favor of the government." To win a stay, you need to show (1) you're likely to win the underlying case and (2) you'll suffer irreparable harm beyond just money. The court shot down both — and used Dario's own words against him on the irreparable harm question.
The panel of judges they drew couldn't have been better for the Administration if they'd picked themselves.
So what's next? Anthropic could push for full en banc review — all 11 DC Circuit judges weighing in. But given the expedited briefing schedule set for May, it's hard to see the full court stepping in before the 3-judge panel rules on the merits which I expect could come in June.
TLDR – at a minimum Anthropic’s relationship with the DoW will likely remain in limbo for another two months, unless the parties settle sooner.
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Continuing to stack our stablecoin portfolio as we double down on @OfficialXFX. Congrats to this talented team that we're proud to work with as they help architect the future of finance.
We’re doubling down on @OfficialXFX's $17m Series A alongside @CastleIslandVC and @cbventures.
Santi, Beto, Jason, and the team go from strength to strength. In less than a year since we led the seed, the company has reached $5b in annualized volume and become the primary cross border settlement provider for their customers.
XFX is helping money move as seamlessly as information, and we’re excited to continue supporting them in their mission.
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Tokenised stocks are coming, and ideally nobody will notice | opinion
In other words just because something is inevitable doesn’t mean it’s imminent. Agentic finance is a huge area, the question is about the timing.
Agentic payments will be a huge trend. But it's not here yet. I had the most bearish take in this article, and I want to explain why, because crypto has a bad habit of getting high on its own supply and giving unrealistic timelines about technology.
Take the mouse. This is what the first computer mouse looked like. Imagine seeing this thing and peering into the future--no more terminal interfaces, now GUIs would onboard billions onto personal computers.
You'd be right! But the first mouse was invented in 1964. It took many years before the mouse would be widespread and commercialized.
This is where agents are right now. OpenClaw gives you a tantalizing picture of where we're going. But if you've actually used OpenClaw, you know it's buggy, complicated, and is not smart enough to have it manage your money. It routinely ends up going bankrupt doing stupid shit.
That will change. Right now OpenClaw is using models out of the box on tasks effectively outside of the training distribution. That's why it feels so broken.
But none of the labs have RL'd against OpenClaw traces yet--and those traces are rich with signal. Once you see the first lab-released Claw-style model and harness, expect a huge jump in performance and consistency. Every lab has tons of OpenClaw data now, and they're all working on this, because they see how big the prize is.
Expect this to take some time. Right now it's just the tinkerers playing around with this stuff. x402 is only doing a ~million in volume a day (and MPP much less), which shows that right now it's just tinkerers.
But a next generation of models will likely be released within months. That will spell the end of the tinkering era and the start of early adopter phase.
But even that will be early. The early majority will take years. This is a long-term story--the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and then the late adopters. But agents are coming for everyone, and they will change how all money moves.
As the @cdixon mantra goes: what smart people are doing on their weekends and evenings, everyone will be doing in 10 years.
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Hot take on today’s AI framework: these issues are so complex that even a pro-AI administration is deferring the hardest calls to Congress and the courts.
This framework signals momentum and kudos to those who did such important work on it. But it still leaves open some thorny questions:
-Federal preemption sounds clean, but could the undefined “traditional state police powers” carveout swallow it whole?
-LLM copyright? Handed to the courts—leaving massive, open-ended risk on both liability and damages. SCOTUS likely won't take up the issue until there's a circuit split which will take many years. Meanwhile the race is on to file in district courts, as happened again in San Jose just this week (BMG case).
Translation: clarity on paper, uncertainty in practice.
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Great to be on @SquawkCNBC with @andrewrsorkin. My take:
--> AI will drive increased financial activity
--> AI agents will eventually transact and exchange value on our behalf
This means we'll need new financial rails designed for machines. The future of finance will look very different.
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Haun Ventures CEO @katie_haun on the promise of stablecoins, crypto regulation & the future of agentic finance:
Congrats to our portfolio company @BVNKFinance on their acquisition by @Mastercard. The competition to own new financial rails has been building for years, as stablecoin growth continues to accelerate. Excited for Jesse, Don and Chris on this milestone 💪
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Celebrating @ereborbank, the largest charter ever issued w/ @PalmerLuckey
SCOTUS majority clear in Learning Resources that IEEPA doesn’t give carte blanche authority for executive action. We’ve written previously that the Court would be wary of overextending this 50-year-old statute (when Biden’s Treasury Dept tried to use IEEPA to sanction open source software).
Two things of note (1) the Court left the door fairly open for tariffs under non-IEEPA authorities and (2) the Court doesn’t always split along ideological lines as everyone tends to suggest. Today is a prime example with two Trump appointees (Gorsuch and Barrett) ruling against his position. People forget that a Republican appointee wrote the majority in the original Roe v. Wade and a Democrat appointee wrote a dissent (!), Scalia provided the deciding vote against broad government searches in Kyllo and again in favor of the marijuana industry, etc. The list goes on.
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Congrats to the founding @ereborbank team, @PalmerLuckey, Owen Rapaport, Jacob Hirshman, Trevor Capozza, and Aaron Pelz on launching a bank built for the fast-growing innovation economy across AI, digital assets, aerospace, defense tech and more.
We have known Owen since the early days of @HaunVentures and were so impressed with him and his cofounders that we became an early supporter through the Seed, Series A, and now Series B round of Erebor. Doors are open!
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