Maximum Frequency Ventures Investment Thesis
Protocols at maximum frequency.
“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”
— Frank Herbert
Most of the world’s value still moves on slow, closed systems.
Payments hop from bank to bank, batch files move overnight, and markets settle days after a trade. Your “balance” lives inside a handful of platforms that barely talk to each other. It works, but it’s fragile, opaque, and built for a world before phones, APIs, and AI.
Now imagine a world where every digital interaction, every data flow, and every automated decision runs on an invisible but unbreakable backbone—not today’s opaque, centralized systems, but open, programmable protocols that quietly power everything.
This isn’t sci-fi or a distant horizon. It’s the natural next phase of the internet, and we’ve already crossed the inflection point.
Protocols are emerging as the invisible force of the next economy and are operating at maximum frequency and powering everything from global value flows to autonomous agents, identity, and how communities form and coordinate online. This transition rhymes with past shifts: the internet rewired information, mobile rewired participation, and now protocols are rewiring value exchange and coordination.
Something fundamental has changed. The groundwork is finally in place. Programmable protocols now carry the potential to reshape how value moves, how ownership works, and how people organize across borders.
A new digital renaissance is forming. The boundary between physical and virtual space is blurring, and people are gaining more control over their digital lives than ever before. The most influential builders of this era will be the ones who recognize the quiet strength of systems that work out of sight—running constantly, enabling entire ecosystems before the rest of the world even realizes what happened.
At MFV, we frame it simply:
Applications are interfaces. Protocols are the product.
The biggest long-term outcomes won’t accrue to the next shiny interface. They’re in the protocols that harness the core primitives of money, markets, identity, and coordination to deliver products that finally scale.
This thesis lays out how we see the next 5, 10, and 20 years—and where MFV chooses to play.
What we believe about the next 20 years: All value will be on-chain
Today, hundreds of billions of dollars already circulate as “stablecoins” – digital dollars issued on blockchains and backed by cash and short-term government debt. For most people, that still sounds niche. In practice, stablecoins have become the default way money moves inside crypto and a growing way it moves across borders.
We believe that over the next five years, stablecoins and tokenized cash products will become the primary internet rail for dollars and other major currencies. Cross-border payments, corporate treasuries, remittances, and even consumer apps will quietly start routing through these rails because they’re faster, cheaper, and easier to integrate than legacy bank plumbing. This is happening and accelerating.
Over 10–20 years, the lines between “bank deposit,” “stablecoin,” and “money market fund share” will blur. They’ll be different regulatory wrappers on the same basic thing: tokenized claims on safe assets that can be moved, composed, and programmed in real time.
On-chain market structure eats fintech
Fintech gave us better front-ends on top of old rails. Crypto gives us new rails. New front-ends will follow; we don’t pretend to know exactly what those look like yet.
DeFi (decentralized finance) protocols already handle lending, borrowing, trading, and derivatives on-chain, without traditional intermediaries. Today that still feels experimental and mostly crypto-native. Over the next decade, we expect these systems to settle into something more boring and more important: core infrastructure.
Money markets, perpetual swaps, credit lines, and even parts of repo and FX will increasingly be priced and cleared on programmable rails. Banks, brokers, and exchanges won’t disappear; they’ll sit on top as distribution, compliance, and brand. But underneath, the pipes will be different.
In that world, “fintech” that only rearranges user interfaces on top of legacy infrastructure starts to look limited. The more interesting opportunity is to own the protocols that determine how risk is priced and how collateral moves.
Protocols under every AI agent and social graph
AI is turning software into a swarm of agents that see, decide, and act on their own. Those agents will hold keys, send payments, manage portfolios, negotiate contracts, and coordinate with each other. They will need open, programmable money and identity rails as much as humans do.
We don’t believe the future of AI-native finance and coordination is a patchwork of private APIs controlled by a few platforms. We think it’s a set of protocols that define:
How an agent proves who it represents
How it gets paid and pays others
How it accesses credit, insurance, compute, and data
The same is true for social and consumer products. If your social graph, game inventory, or identity live only inside a single company’s database, your AI agent is locked in by design. Protocols provide a way out.
Across all these trends, our through-line is simple:
The world is moving from slow, closed, institution-mediated value flows to fast, open, protocol-mediated ones. We want to back the protocols that make that shift real.
Where MFV Comes In
We’re not tourists to this transition.
Our team helped build and scale a Layer 1 blockchain from whitepaper to tens of millions of monthly active users across dozens of countries. We have shipped core protocol upgrades, wallets, and developer infrastructure under real stress: bull and bear markets, regulatory uncertainty, public scrutiny, and adversarial conditions.
We’ve been in the room with regulators, banks, and exchanges when answers weren’t obvious and there was no playbook to copy.
MFV exists to bring that experience to founders who are building the next layer of infrastructure.
We do that in two ways:
Deep, focused sprints. We run MF sprints – one to two intense days working side-by-side with a team on product, token design, go-to-market, market structure, and regulatory path. Work that would normally drag out over months gets compressed into a concrete, testable plan.
Hands-on help with the hard parts. After we invest, we stay close on the things that are genuinely hard to outsource: structuring tokens, navigating capital markets, bridging East and West, and speaking both “crypto” and “regulator/bank” fluently.
We think of ourselves less as commentators and more as co-architects of the rails we’re betting on.
And as builders, we recognize the clarity and resilience that turn early protocols into enduring ones. That’s why we focus on four lanes we believe will create durable value over the next 5–20 years.
MFV invests across four interconnected frontiers:
Founder-protocol-fit: visionary builders with deep alignment to the problems they’re solving
Financial markets & payments: stablecoins-era rails that render legacy fintech obsolete.
Next-gen consumer & community apps: cultural and entertainment models powered by meaningful token design.
AI-crypto convergence: autonomous agents, coordination protocols, and AI-native marketplaces reshaping digital interaction
What We Look For in Founders
We care more about earned scars than perfect polish. The founders we back tend to share five important traits:
Protocol-first thinking. You can explain clearly why this needs to be a protocol or rail at all, who pays, who earns, and what the steady-state economics look like once incentives calm down.
Culture-native but bilingual. You’re comfortable in crypto culture, new social sub-cultures – online, onchain, and in the trenches – but you can also walk into a room with a bank, regulator, or enterprise and explain your product in plain language.
Narrative backed by numbers. You have a simple story about why your project matters and a spreadsheet under it: market size, path to users, and why you win instead of the next team.
Cross-domain pattern recognition. You borrow from games, social networks, financial market microstructure, logistics, and AI – and remix those patterns into something that only works because money and markets are programmable.
Antifragility. You expect bear markets, policy shocks, hacks, forks, and social backlash. Your design – and your personality – is set up to get stronger under stress, not crack.
Most of all, there is a must-build idea that will not leave you alone. You’d work on it with or without outside capital.
This is the world we’re underwriting at MFV: one where money and markets move at maximum frequency on open protocols, where applications are just the visible tip of much deeper infrastructure, and where the biggest value accrues to the rails the world ends up depending on.
Our job is to find the people building these things and help them move faster.