Hack VC partner on the evolution of the crypto market

Roshun Patel, Partner, HackVC

Episode 21 of Season 6 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block's Frank Chaparro and HackVC Partner Roshun Patel.

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Roshun Patel is a partner at the Web3 venture capital firm HackVC.

In this episode, Chaparro and Patel discuss the recent crypto market volatility and the trends shaping crypto's venture capital landscape.

Outline

Intro
Market Volatility
Caution in the Funding Market
The Intersection of AI and Crypto
The Future of Tokenomics

The conversation comes shortly after Hack VC closed roughly 150 million dollars in new capital for early-stage crypto investing, a notable vote of confidence at a time when venture funding across the industry had pulled back sharply from its 2021 peak. Patel discusses the recent volatility rippling through crypto markets and what it reflects about investor psychology more broadly, as well as the more cautious, selective approach venture firms including Hack VC had adopted toward deploying capital compared with the freewheeling checks written during the last bull cycle.

A significant part of the discussion focuses on the growing intersection of artificial intelligence and crypto, a theme that had rapidly become one of the most active areas of venture interest as founders explored decentralized compute networks, on-chain data provenance, and token-incentivized AI infrastructure as alternatives to centralized cloud and AI providers.

Patel shares his perspective on which parts of that convergence represent durable technology shifts versus opportunistic narrative-chasing, and how Hack VC evaluates founders working at that intersection. Chaparro and Patel also spend time on the future of tokenomics, discussing how token design has matured since earlier cycles and what founders and investors have learned about aligning incentives, avoiding excessive early unlocks, and building sustainable value accrual into token models.

The episode offers a venture investor's ground-level view of a crypto market working through a difficult stretch while still attracting fresh institutional capital to its next generation of infrastructure bets, and a candid read on which parts of the AI-crypto narrative Patel expects to outlast the current hype cycle. Patel also touches on how Hack VC's own underwriting process has changed since the firm's founding, with more emphasis on technical diligence and slower-moving, higher-conviction bets than the pace of dealmaking common during the 2021 boom.