Early Riders Mid-Year Investor Update
In the spirit of everything we do at Early Riders, we're open-sourcing the market sections of our mid year investor letter.
Bitcoin has retraced 53% from its high, and the drawdown is doing what drawdowns always do: separating the durable businesses from the ones that were only ever levered to the cycle. In the letter, we walk through why the dispersion in public digital asset equities is the real signal, from Coinbase's shift toward subscription revenue to specialized infrastructure names trading down 70% or more from their IPOs.
We also dig into the venture data, where deal count has fallen roughly 49% year over year while three headline transactions accounted for nearly half of all capital that entered the category in Q1.
At the same time, the lines between traditional finance and digital assets keep blurring, with Citi, Morgan Stanley, Schwab, and a nine-bank consortium all moving into custody, trading, and stablecoins this year.
AI As Bitcoin's Strongest Competitor
And we address the elephant in the room: AI has absorbed nearly 80% of every venture dollar, and we explain why we see that concentration as an extension of our thesis rather than a threat to it, including the four categories in the agentic stack where we're actively looking.
Fund-specific performance and portfolio detail remain reserved for our investors, but the market analysis and our H2 outlook are all here.
If you're building in these categories, or thinking about where digital asset infrastructure goes from this point, we'd genuinely like to hear your perspective.
You can find the mid-year update here.
About Early Riders
Early Riders is investing in digital infrastructure at the frontier. The firm invests in pre-seed to Series A businesses building across custody, financial services, payments, treasury, savings, artificial intelligence, and digital asset infrastructure. Learn more at earlyriders.com.