Crypto is not cool (again).
Public sentiment around crypto has hit a fresh local low (yet again). With this as the backdrop, I wanted to publicly share an excerpt from our latest update to Colosseum's limited partners. There's so much to be optimistic about happening across the ecosystem and time will absolutely reward those who choose to build quietly.
LP Update | Q4 2025
February 17, 2026
Dear Limited Partners,
We hope you and your families are well and having a great start to the new year. We are excited to share an update on the fund, the portfolio, and what we are seeing across the ecosystem.
One pattern has held across every cycle. The work that ends up mattering rarely starts where people are paying attention.
DeFi’s foundations were laid in the post-ICO drawdown. Stablecoins found their footing after FTX. This time doesn’t feel different.
In December, we announced the results of the Cypherpunk hackathon. More than 9,000 participants across 150+ countries submitted 1,576 projects, making it the largest crypto hackathon to date. But what stood out wasn’t the scale. It was the composition. Cypherpunk looked fundamentally different from Renaissance, Radar, and Breakout. There was no dominant theme. No single narrative captured the field. Projects spanned infrastructure, consumer, DeFi, stablecoins, RWAs, and a long tail of things that didn’t fit neatly into any category.
Sitting in our seat, you couldn’t actually tell that prices had drawn down based on the breadth of what builders are working on. The absence of a consensus theme can be read two ways. Either there are no good ideas left in crypto, or we’re seeing a new expansion phase whose impact is only going to be obvious in retrospect. We believe it’s the latter.
That conviction is also shaping how we think about the infrastructure around investing itself. In December we introduced the Colosseum STAMP (Simple Token Agreement, Market Protected), a new investment instrument we developed in partnership with Orrick.
For years, crypto venture has relied on a SAFE + token warrant structure borrowed from traditional startup investing. It works, but it creates a dual equity + token structure that is at best confusing for tokenholders and at worst extractive. The token should be the sole economic unit of a crypto-native business. The existing instruments don’t reflect that.
The STAMP gives investors a legally enforceable claim on a project’s token supply while protecting both sides during the period from initial investment to an onchain ICO. It integrates directly with MetaDAO’s decision market governance, which means tokenholders get real protections, not just contractual ones. We were the first fund to invest in MetaDAO, and we’ve seen firsthand how well these mechanisms work in practice. We’re now offering the STAMP as an alternative to the SAFE + token warrant for founders raising capital from Colosseum, and we drafted the contract so it can be used across the venture ecosystem as a standard. The full document is available at colosseum.com/stamp.
From the Cypherpunk winners and our rolling Eternal program, we selected 11 startups for Cohort 4. That’s an acceptance rate of roughly 0.67% from the combined pool of 1,576 hackathon submissions and 64 Eternal submissions in H2 2025. The cohort spans six countries and includes teams working on agent payment infrastructure, hardware wallets, prediction market aggregation, privacy, onchain lending, stablecoin remittance, and more. Not variations on a single theme, but experiments across the full stack of what permissionless systems enable.
These companies are currently midway through the 8-week accelerator in our new San Francisco office, building toward mainnet. Demo day is March 12th and will be streamed live as always. This time around, we’re also hosting a limited viewing at Colosseum’s new office in San Francisco. If you’re going to be in town, we’d love to have you join us. More details to follow this week and we will share a full update on the cohort and our investments in the next letter.
The experimentation we’re seeing right now across the portfolio and the current cohort is as diverse and ambitious as anything we’ve seen since launching Colosseum. The themes aren’t obvious yet. Based on our experience, that’s usually when the most important work is happening.
As always, we’re available anytime to discuss the fund, the portfolio, or the ecosystem more broadly. Don’t hesitate to reach out.
Best,
Clay, Matty, and Nate
