Crypto spent fifteen years fighting for the right to exist — and won. Gary Gensler is gone. The laws the industry bled for are passed. Wall Street, supposedly the enemy, is underwriting crypto IPOs and hunting for exposure.
So there is more money standing outside crypto's door than at any point in its history — and it's almost entirely unclaimed. Claiming it requires something rare: becoming readable to that money without giving up the energy that built everything worth reading about.
My thesis is that narrative is capital — consensus built out of words shows up on the balance sheet, and in crypto it shows up in the multiple. Projects institutions can read trade at premiums to better tech they can't. That's not a moral claim. It's an arbitrage, and the teams that take it first take a lead that compounds.
Robinhood is the proof you don't have to choose. The establishment called it a casino; it's an S&P 500 company now — and it got there without getting quieter, by being a story retail loved and institutions could underwrite at the same time. I helped run communications for Robinhood Crypto and led go-to-market for its self-custody wallet through that run.
Now Robinhood has launched a chain, and the connection is direct: the playbook that made Robinhood legible to institutions is the playbook that will separate the winners on its chain from everyone else. The chain starts with what other ecosystems never get — institutional trust upstairs, distribution in the tens of millions of accounts, a tokenization mandate that's exactly what the money outside the door wants to buy. Days in, it has the attention and liquidity too. What no team on it has yet is the translation layer: the narrative institutions can repeat, the positioning that reads as infrastructure, the credibility that clears listings and opens doors. Whoever builds that first inherits the chain's head start.
That's what I do. I ran the playbook inside Robinhood; I run it for the teams building on top — on Robinhood Chain and across crypto.
I founded Dimes Square Advisory to do it independently — homage to a place that was more narrative than neighborhood, reappropriating the acronym of NYC's ascendant political class for my own deeply capitalistic purposes.
The practice is a narrative engine run like an investment book. I take venture-style positions in the most promising early teams — compensated in the upside I help create, not just fees — and I close the arbitrage myself: finding quality institutions can't yet read, and doing the work that makes them legible. The spread between illegible and legible is the return. Underneath it all is institutional-grade research, published openly — on where finance is going, tested with my own capital, equities and onchain.
The research sources the conviction. The conviction earns the positions. The positions mean I win when the thesis does.
If you're building something worth making legible, the door is open — and the reasoning lives on the ideas page, in public, before it's ready for the world.