Make Money with the Blockchain | Matthew Le Merle

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5d ago 33:59

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Guest: Matthew Le Merle — CEO & Co-Founder of Blockchain Coinvestors, global blockchain VC, early investor in 1200+ startups (Coinbase, Kraken, OpenSea), author, and Silicon Valley board veteran.

Background & Early Lessons:
- Matthew began his working life delivering newspapers as a child in rainy London, developing a lasting sense of responsibility and the importance of “seeing things through.”
- Earned a scholarship to Oxford for his academic and athletic excellence, then completed an MBA at Stanford. Built a career as a global advisor, executive, private equity leader, and later immersed himself in blockchain innovation.
Blockchain Thesis:
- With 30+ years in Silicon Valley, Matthew saw the digital transformation of communication and content, but recognized a “missing link” for moving value securely over the internet.
- Blockchain/distributed ledger technology solved foundational challenges for digitizing finance — enabling secure, trustless, peer-to-peer transactions globally, overcoming flaws in traditional banking rails.
- Co-founded Blockchain Coinvestors, which invests via a fund-of-funds model across hundreds of VC funds and directly into more than 1,200 blockchain startups worldwide, spanning over 110 unicorns.
Bitcoin’s Future & Role:
- While he acknowledges that Bitcoin was a catalyst, Le Merle stresses it’s the underlying technology’s impact on payments, finance, and commerce that’s world-changing.
- Believes Bitcoin (BTC) has enduring value as a store of value and “sovereign alternative” for people in unstable economies — sees it as “inevitable” that native digital finance will continue to grow globally.
- However, he notes BTC’s long-term future depends on further technical evolution to enable faster, lower-cost, mass payments — real innovation will be when it is also digital money at global scale, not just a store of value.
AI and the Arms Race:
- Sees both risk and opportunity in the intersection of blockchain, AI, and quantum computing: as threats emerge (e.g., AI-powered codebreaking), blockchain protocols must evolve, and the most secure blockchains—especially Bitcoin—will continue to improve.
- AI/quantum also unlocks new use cases (micro-payments, automated value flows) that legacy finance simply cannot address, making blockchain infrastructure and security ever more valuable.
Venture Landscape & Defensibility:
- Le Merle’s strategy: back the best VC fund managers, who in turn back top founders at the earliest stages, spreading risk and betting on the mavericks who build breakthrough companies.
- Warns that in AI (and other tech cycles), even groundbreaking startups can be displaced instantly by a new feature from a giant (e.g., OpenAI, Apple), so founders should build beyond “just a feature”—focus on defensible, deeply integrated solutions.
Big Picture & What’s Next:
- Digital assets, payments, and financial systems will become natively digital—blockchain is still in “early innings.” The best investment opportunities are at the convergence of Web3 and new agent/AI toolkits.
- Massive tech incumbents (Apple, Google, Microsoft) will keep acquiring—so both quick exits and rare breakout “escape velocity” stories are possible for top startups.

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