Announcing Credibly Neutral
Lisa Cuesta and I are incredibly proud to launch Credibly Neutral, a $5.5m builder-led early stage venture fund investing $50–250k in protocols, infrastructure, and crypto SaaS solutions.
The Future is Crypto
The world is pretty good today, but we think it’ll be even better when it’s powered by decentralized technologies. When we got into crypto in 2017, we saw that there was a better path, one that redistributed power from centralized entities back to the individuals. Now, in 2023, following several recent bank failures, a potential repeat of “Too Big To Fail” looming, big tech getting bigger, and the rise of artificial intelligence, decentralization is an imperative counterbalance to these centralizing forces. Crypto enables people to opt out of fragile or oppressive systems to become sovereign individuals. The ability to opt out is the vital health check these systems desperately need.
In our heart of hearts, we believe crypto is the future. We envision a world that is built on top of new infrastructure that is decentralized, permissionless, and unstoppable — powerful new defaults that will fundamentally change how we live our lives and how we interact with the world around us.
Our personal mission, and that of Credibly Neutral, is to help create the most powerful foundation for the crypto ecosystem, and in turn, the global economy.
This foundation must be built with the right principles: sound economic policy, sustainable business models, censorship resistance, decentralization, credible neutrality, rough consensus, privacy, trust minimization, and immutability. It is on all of us to invest, build, and support the ecosystem with these principles in mind.
Credibly Neutral exists to build the future we all want to see — one in which crypto changes the world for the better. Much better.
Who we are
First and foremost, Lisa and I are builders. We will remain builders as we run Credibly Neutral and don’t aspire to be full-time VCs. We’ve invested part time over the last few years and have written more than 30 angel checks into teams like EigenLayer, Turnkey, Spruce, Socket, and POAP that build industry-leading infrastructure for the crypto ecosystem.
We started Credibly Neutral to invest our time, experience and networks in the next wave of builders. It is the highest leverage way to translate our expertise into advancing the crypto ecosystem and creating the world we want to see — powered by credibly neutral protocols and infrastructure. Having Credibly Neutral on your cap table is a signal of value alignment and an ambitious commitment to better tomorrow’s systems with aggressive GTM, real technology, and sound incentive design.
Now, an introduction. I’m the industry’s first Protocol Specialist, a role I created as an early employee of Bison Trails (acquired by Coinbase in 2021) that has now become an industry staple at organizations like a16z and Blockdaemon. Since 2019 I have helped 30+ protocol teams design incentivized testnets, governance, incentives, and network parameters, as well as launching their mainnets. I drove the governance effort to launch NEAR’s mainnet, led the first decentralized protocol merger between Keep & NuCypher to create Threshold Network, and created the Flashbots Eth2 Working Group. As a community leader, I hosted a podcast on decentralization and credible neutrality with Brian Armstrong and Vitalik Buterin, served as one of the lead organizers of ETHDenver, and spoke at Devcon and other events. Currently, I lead the Protocol Operations team at Coinbase Cloud, the largest staking infrastructure provider.
Lisa Cuesta Bunin is COO at Aztec Protocol, which is building a fully programmable encrypted zkRollup. She joined as the first business hire and has worn multiple hats while scaling the team from 9 to 45 employees globally and raising $120M in funding. As COO, Lisa oversees commercialization, finance, operations, and people. She drove adoption of Aztec Connect through governance proposals and grant funding with partners including Compound, Lido, and Aave. She launched Aztec’s grants program and co-authored the Grants Program Playbook. She also spearheads the ZK Legal Working Group to coordinate legal and policy efforts across projects that are building on chain privacy and using zero knowledge technology. Before joining Aztec, Lisa was an investor at NextGen Venture Partners, a multi-stage venture fund and subsidiary of Brown Advisory, an investment management firm with $150B AUM. Lisa is a Google alum with a background in product strategy.
Our thesis
Lisa and I are not generalist VCs. We have deep, extensive expertise in a few niche areas, and nothing beyond that. We only invest in protocols, infrastructure, and crypto SaaS solutions because that is what we know better than anyone and where we can provide massive value to our founders. We don’t invest in gaming, NFTs, DAOs, consumer apps, and anything else that lies outside of our core competency.
Our thesis for Credibly Neutral is that credible neutrality is a tactical, practical, and actionable competitive advantage for protocols, infrastructure, and crypto SaaS companies. In the case of protocols, credible neutrality means the protocol is fairly distributed, censorship resistant, and does not discriminate for or against any specific people. In the case of infrastructure and SaaS, it means developing tools and products that enable innovation and provide open access, with companies like Cloudflare serving as a powerful example. Over time, credibly neutral protocols and platforms will become the foundation of the crypto ecosystem and key drivers of growth because their most important users are other builders (not consumers!), and builders overwhelmingly optimize for credibly neutral solutions over one that aren’t.
We invest in core infrastructure that will power not just the crypto ecosystem, but the global economy. Within the infrastructure stack, this includes low level protocols such as L1 and L2 blockchains and higher level protocols such as DeFi and MEV. Beyond protocols, we invest into all the infrastructure needed to onboard users and businesses to crypto, including developer tools like APIs and SDKs, security software that reduces user risk, analytics tools, fiat rails and more.
Backing founders
We support founders in three primary ways.
First, our investment is more than a check — it’s a deep commitment to developing a meaningful relationship with founders and their teams. With that comes a level of open and honest feedback that founders won’t typically get elsewhere. We are kind, but direct.
Second, we bring to bear our unique experience launching dozens of protocols and building the largest infrastructure company in crypto. We’ve sold to decentralized organizations, run nodes, served on DAO councils, designed protocol incentive models and grant programs, and scaled global teams. We have encyclopedic knowledge of past efforts and outcomes, and because we’re still building full-time, we’re always ready to provide up-to-date guidance on product strategy, industry trends, and new innovations.
Third, we have a stellar, curated LP base of the leading founders and investors in the crypto ecosystem. Founders of Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Bison Trails, Lido, POAP, Daily Gwei, Alluvial, and others are all on board. These are not the “set and forget” institutional LPs — they are friends and ethos-aligned active contributors to the crypto ecosystem.
We are a strategic tool in a founder’s arsenal. We roll our sleeves up and help, backing founders the way we’d want to be backed, and aim to have the highest “help per dollar invested” ratio of any investor.
What’s next
We’ve made six investments to date, including Hyperlane, Skip Protocol, Monad, Towns, Blockaid, and one team in stealth. Although being in a bear market feelsbadman.png, it is an opportune time to invest, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to back the next wave of founders.
If you’re a founder or want to be one, we’d love to talk to you. We’re most active on Twitter and Telegram so reach out there, but email works well too — gm@crediblyneutral.com. Don’t feel pressured to get a warm intro either — we respond to cold outreach and have made several investments this way.
Thanks everyone, see you onchain.
