My quant estimates there's been about $23B in cumulative ICO funding 2017 and 2018 were the biggest years by far, and account for over half of the total. Since then, funding has largely plateaued Pump fun and World Liberty Financial drove a brief spike in 2025, but the ICO market is still nowhere near its prior peak An entirely new market structure is needed. One that protects investors and aligns teams with the success of their business This is what MetaDAO is building. We will deliver on the original promise of ICOs

A new paper found that 88% of venture-backed founders receive zero exit value VC makes sense for a narrow set of founders. But for most, it's a bad fit bc it locks up founder liquidity - all for a slim chance at a unicorn outcome MetaDAO offers a more founder-friendly path 🧵

MetaDAO Roadshow A new series of private conversations with top founders launching on MetaDAO First up: @nftimm We'll dig into The Syndicate team, the business, and their live raise on Backable Tomorrow (Thurs 10/8) · 11am PT / 2pm ET Invite-only. Luma link below:

Some personal news: I recently joined MetaDAO. Working at Colosseum with Matty, Clay, Nate, and Max was a dream job. I learned a tremendous amount from each of them, and I will miss the team deeply. Colosseum represents the very best of our industry -- running the world’s largest hackathons, writing checks before ideas are fully formed, and building open-source tools so a thousand flowers may bloom. It’s been an honor to work with our founders, and I’m excited to keep supporting them from my new seat. Ever since I got oneshotted in 2023, I've thought about MetaDAO every single day -- with only a few notable exceptions. And along the way, I’ve tried to help. At Delphi, that meant writing slightly verbose research reports to spread the gospel. At Colosseum, it was STAMP, the Inaugural MetaDAO Owners Meeting, and [redacted]. Now, it’s time to go all in. I love this industry and am optimistic about what we will build. But we haven’t lived up to our own expectations. The blockchains work. And the stablecoins work. So where are all the generational businesses? It’s not that crypto is useless. It’s that too often, we reward launching tokens more than building lasting companies. I believe MetaDAO can help change that by giving founders a better way to raise money and build businesses on the internet. Fundraising is how we will bring decision markets to the world. Our ambition goes beyond helping founders raise money -- it’s to change how companies are run and, ultimately, how institutions and perhaps even AIs make decisions. For three years, I’ve believed in what MetaDAO could become. Now I get to help build it alongside Prophet, Kollan, and the rest of the team. Long live the Meta DAO

Introducing Tapkit Tapkit is a Mac app that lets your agents use your iPhone. Tell it to do anything and it can use your phone to do it. We've been iterating on Tapkit over the last few months with our earliest users and finally feel like it's ready for general use. Today it is easy to use, supports any agent, and can even use multiple iPhones at the same time. There are so many great things that we can do with this new primitive, but I didn't want to wait any longer to share it with you. Try it now:

colosseum's core belief is the best builders are drawn to the arena. to the lights. the competition. the chance to prove themselves against the very best opening colosseum to everyone is a natural next step for the world's largest startup arena all glory to the builders

while our engineers shipped a new website, I did the real work of selecting a colosseum avatar: a unicorn 🦄 (some people have pointed out that it's actually a pegasus but fwiw it still self-identifies as a unicorn)

Today, we're proud to introduce the new If you visited our website any time since our launch, you were greeted with an edgy hacker theme, complete with glitchy ASCII graphics and all-caps fonts. The cyberpunk terminal window brought to life. That was a good fit when we launched Colosseum in early 2024. Crypto was in a smaller corner of the Internet, Solana was ascending from the depths, and we were aiming to attract weird and innovative product ideas. In many ways, nothing about Colosseum has changed. We're still inspired by the devs, the experiments, and the irreverent founders. But as crypto grows, and our arena with it, we felt our brand was due for an update. Beyond just the modern hacker, we're also inspired by history. We drew from the great innovative periods and contests of the past which have been featured in our writings and hackathon themes: The Renaissance, the Volta Prize, and the World's Fair. So we wanted something not completely old, and not completely new, but a little of both. And most of all, we wanted to capture the spirit of competition. After all, Colosseum runs the largest hackathons in the world, where the most ambitious crypto founders compete. Lastly, a huge thanks to our design partners @AirfoilStudio for all of their hard work. We welcome you to the new Arena, and can't wait to see what you build.

We’ve helped 15 startups raise $45,000,000 from over 137,000 people on the internet. Now we want to help consumer app founders do the same. On top of giving them up to $10k/mo in marketing/ad spend! DM me if you want to win