Weekly Newsletter, 24 October 2025

Berkshire Onchain?

An interesting idea that has been gaining traction is to use private equity to bring businesses onchain. Not through pilots or partnerships, but by acquiring companies and quietly rebuilding their infrastructure with blockchain rails. Several groups are working on this but the one coming up with the idea and furthest ahead is our underlying portfolio company Inversion.

At our Legends4Legends conference last week, Catrina Wang from Portal Ventures sat down with Inversion founder Santiago Roel Santos to unpack this model. The discussion captured a bigger theme running through the event: how blockchains are becoming rails for the real-world economy.

Inversion flips the usual playbook. Instead of creating a blockchain-native company and trying to acquire users, they acquire a traditional company with a lot of users and transform it using stablecoins and other blockchain protocols under the hood to cut costs, reduce chargebacks, settle faster, and overall provide a better service. Blockchain technology becomes invisible to the end user, but valuable to the bottom line.

One of their first moves? Acquiring a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and integrating it with a decentralized wireless network (Helium). By offloading mobile data to Helium infrastructure, they expect to cut telecom costs by up to 50%. It’s a textbook example of how blockchain infrastructure can boost margins, reduce reliance on incumbents, and create real onchain economic activity in the process.

It’s also a response to a broader challenge in private equity. With high rates and fewer exit opportunities, there’s only so much room left for financial engineering. Blockchain in this framing is a new route to efficiency, a way to modernize existing businesses while building ownership in the networks that power them. And it could quietly bring millions of people onchain without ever mentioning the word “blockchain.”

Also this week

Relevant financial updates

Tempo, a layer‑1 blockchain purpose‑built for stablecoin‑based payments, has raised $500mln in a Series A funding round with investments from Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, SV Angel, Thrive Capital and Greenoaks Capital
Turtle Club*, a distribution protocol designed to monetize Web3 user activities such as liquidity deployment, swaps, staking, and referrals, has raised $5.50mln in a funding round announced with investments from GSR Investments, SNZ Holding, Amber Group, Bitscale Capital, Flowdesk and 14 others
Limitless*, a decentralized prediction market built on Base, has raised $10mln in a Seed funding round with investments from Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Arrington XRP Capital, 1Confirmation, Collider Ventures and 4 others
Sign*, a platform for global token distribution and credential verification, has raised $25.50mln in a Strategic funding round with investments from YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs) and IDG Capital
Tesser*, a payments infrastructure provider offering banks and fintechs a platform for stablecoin‑based pay‑ins and pay‑outs, fiat‑to‑stable and stable‑to‑fiat conversion, custody services, compliance workflows and reconciliation data, has raised $4.50mln in a Seed funding round with investments from Castle Island Ventures, Strobe Ventures and Anthemis Group
BitcoinOS, a blockchain infrastructure platform enabling token bridging and high‑throughput compute that settles on Bitcoin’s base layer, has raised $10mln in a Strategic funding round with investments from Paul Taylor, Greenfield Capital, UTXO Management, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, FalconX and 6 others

*Underlying TBV portfolio position | Prices as per 24/10

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