Part 2: Code is the Asset Class

Why Programmable Infrastructure Is Eating the Capital Stack

Jun 30, 2025

I’ve joined the Cadenza family of funds as a partner, investing across AI, Web3, liquid strategies, and token events. But this isn’t just about capital deployment. It’s about turning a multidimensional platform into an ecosystem that supports both founders and allocators at the edge of what’s next.

Alongside Max, Kumar, and Harris, I’m helping scale a network that includes Together AI, the former Chief Scientist of Siri, and the original BitMEX team. These aren’t consultants in vests. These are real builders backing real innovation.

At the same time, I’m still building with the platform. Nautilus and Mustaa are deeply aligned with Cadenza’s thesis, and both will grow in step with the ecosystem we’re composing.

This journey unfolds in The Double Helix Thesis. Part 1 shares why I joined and what we’re building. Part 2 explores how code became capital. Part 3 dives into AI agents and intent-based infrastructure. And Part 4 zooms out to map the evolution of venture itself into a multiplayer network.

If you’re a founder building at the frontier, or an allocator looking for signal over noise, we’d love to coordinate.

Are you ready to browse the strategies that matter? Explore curated investment plays at Nautilus.Finance, and follow Tom Serres on X.com or LinkedIn for real-time guidance.

From Ledger to Logic: Why Code Now Carries Capital

The first time I watched a Bitcoin transaction confirm in real time, it felt like watching capital tunnel its way out of a maximum-security spreadsheet. It was escaping the cage of traditional finance. No signatures, no wire delays, no suspicious compliance officer named Linda squinting at your memo line and flagging your payment to an offshore DevOps contractor. Just raw, uncut value moving across the planet with nothing but math and consensus.

Then Ethereum showed up and said, "That’s cute, but what if capital could think?" Suddenly, we weren’t just transferring value. We were encoding it. Smart contracts didn’t just automate tasks. They replaced institutions. Lending became code. Governance became logic. Your entire product stack could live inside a protocol and never once require a PDF, a notary, or a junior associate billing by the hour to explain why the docs were late.

Now we’re living in a world where your identity, access, coordination mechanism, and revenue stream are all software-defined. Code isn’t just the backend anymore. It is the asset class. A token isn’t just a bet on upside. It’s a container for rules, for yield, for behavior. And the protocols aren’t waiting for regulators to figure it out. They’re shipping primitives that function today. In some cases, the law is still rebooting while the protocol already has liquidity and governance online.

Cadenza isn’t observing this shift like it’s an interesting phenomenon to write thought pieces about. We are built around it. This is not some retrofitted crypto strategy tacked onto an old-school fund. It’s the core DNA. We believe code is the new capital stack. That programmable systems are not an edge case. They are the new foundation. We back founders who don’t ask if the market is ready. They build the market. They mint it, they govern it, they burn it, and they ship another version before your deck even loads.

You don’t need a quarterly memo to understand what’s happening. You need a wallet. You don’t need deal flow curated by consultants pretending to have taste. You need composability, liquidity, and the ability to fork when you get blocked. Capital is no longer allocated from on high. It is deployed by contributors. It flows through logic. It votes. It earns. And it doesn’t wait for permission.

The next great asset managers are not going to be the ones sending out PDF updates with decimal-point performance charts. They’re going to be writing code that executes positions based on intent. The next wave of coordination doesn’t start with a term sheet. It starts with a protocol. And the next fund isn’t a fund at all. It’s a platform, made up of capital, code, and coordination.

If you're still describing your Web3 strategy as “early stage with optionality across L1s and applications,” then I hate to break it to you. You’re not early. You’re already on the wrong layer. The capital stack is moving. The logic is live. And if you’re not reading contracts, you’re going to miss the next market entirely.

From Capital Stack to Protocol Stack: Wrappers Are Dead

In TradFi, the capital stack was sacred. Equity, debt, convertibles, SAFEs, like a four-tiered wedding cake served cold with a side of red tape. Every layer was designed to manage control, distribute upside, and avoid responsibility. And it mostly worked, as long as you had a lawyer, a banker, and a blood sacrifice to the gods of compliance.

But let’s be real. That stack was always a patch. A PDF-mediated duct tape job passed off as innovation. You sent the wire, you waited six days, and maybe, just maybe, someone acknowledged receipt. This wasn’t capital efficiency. It was bureaucratic cosplay, dressed in pinstripes and priced in basis points.

Web3 changed the equation. We stopped trying to duct-tape new ideas onto old formats. Instead, we started encoding coordination into the base layer. The protocol stack replaced the capital stack, not by wrapping old models in new buzzwords, but by rethinking ownership, governance, and value flow from first principles.

That’s what gets me excited about the projects Cadenza backs. You’re not looking at wrappers. You’re looking at new forms of native value systems. FalconX isn’t just a trading firm, it’s part of the liquidity infrastructure powering global markets. CoinDCX and Rain are onboarding entire populations into crypto through jurisdiction-aware platforms that meet people where they are. Lemon is streamlining access across Latin America, and Zebedee is exploring what value transfer looks like inside games. Casa is giving people a self-custody experience that doesn’t feel like assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded.

Each of these projects approaches architecture differently. Some are more protocol-native. Some operate closer to trusted intermediaries. And that’s fine. This isn’t about purity. It’s about direction. The arc of innovation is bending away from wrappers and toward composability. Away from dependency and toward autonomy.

The wrapper isn’t just inefficient, it’s increasingly irrelevant. When you can encode logic into contracts, manage coordination through tokens, and express ownership without intermediaries, you don’t need a special-purpose vehicle. You need a working keyboard and a thesis that doesn’t crumble when the market shifts.

This is what Cadenza understands better than most. We’re not just investing in software. We’re backing systems that turn capital into code and code into coordination. That’s the protocol stack. And that’s why we’re not here to preserve the old model. We’re here to render it obsolete.

Real Activity, Real Yield: Speculation is Overrated

Crypto’s critics love to say there’s no real use case. But they’re staring at the wrong dashboard. While they argue about whether JPEGs are art or scams, DePIN protocols are routing actual trucks on real roads. Token treasuries are allocating capital on-chain with the kind of operational transparency that makes most corporate budgets look like a magician’s ledger. Communities are not just voting on memes or changing their PFPs. They’re making real decisions about treasury spend, resource allocation, and strategic direction with stakes that actually matter.

That’s not speculative fluff. That’s economic infrastructure. It is live, composable, verifiable, and most importantly, working. It might not come with a press tour or an “As seen in Forbes” badge, but it’s laying down the rails for how future economies function. If you’re squinting at prices while this is happening, you’re watching the shadows and missing the signal.

Cadenza backs the primitives that make this activity not only possible, but scalable. Casa is rethinking self-custody, making it usable without requiring a PhD in cryptography or three hardware wallets duct-taped to your dog. Hivemapper is turning drivers into decentralized cartographers, paying them in tokens for the kind of data Google used to gobble up for free. Zulu is coordinating capital, time, and on-chain reputation in a way that makes you wonder why we ever trusted calendars and credit scores to begin with.

When real value flows through these systems, the token stops acting like a proxy for hype. It becomes something else entirely. It becomes a unit of economic throughput. A signal of trust, coordination, and utility. And that shift, from meme to mechanism, is the clearest indication that we’ve entered the era of real yield.

We are not here to speculate on vibes. We are here to underwrite the infrastructure of programmable economies. If you want to build there or invest there, the door’s open.

A Liquid Market That Actually Runs

The market doesn’t wait for your Monday morning investment committee. It does not pause for your quarterly thesis review or your multi-page memo filled with charts no one reads. Token rails settle in minutes. Sometimes seconds. And when events are structured properly, they don’t just raise capital. They ignite communities, generate network effects, and turn idle tokens into circulating value with actual utility.

Liquidity isn’t some happy accident or downstream bonus. It’s part of the architecture. When you build the system right, liquidity is native. It flows with purpose. It reflects conviction. It moves at the speed of belief turning into action.

That’s why Cadenza is bringing a liquid vehicle to life. Not to toss another acronym into the mix or spin up a ticker just to say we did. This is a serious tool for serious allocators who want programmable access to capital without getting trapped in the molasses of legacy finance. We’re not here to build something that trades on vibes. We’re building actual infrastructure. Infrastructure for rebalancing in real time. For dialing up or down exposure based on strategy, not sentiment. For dynamic allocation across cycles and theses, without asking permission from someone who still thinks “digital gold” is cutting edge.

No third-party broker standing between you and execution. No twelve-step redemption ritual that ends with you emailing someone named Craig who is out of office until next Tuesday. Just real liquidity. Built into the system. Synced with your conviction. And moving fast enough to matter.

Participation is the Moat: From Users to Network Governors

In Web2, you were a user. A metric on a dashboard. A monthly active. Maybe, if you were lucky, an “engagement cohort” discussed in a meeting by someone holding a Soylent. You clicked, scrolled, shared, and made someone else’s LTV graph look pretty. That was the extent of your influence. Ownership? Not a chance.

In Web3, the premise flips. Users become contributors. They provide liquidity. They validate. They govern. They shape protocol direction and earn from it. They are not just in the room. They are the room. And this isn’t some aesthetic pivot or branding refresh. It’s a structural transformation in how networks accrue value and how that value is distributed.

The upside doesn’t just belong to the cap table anymore. It flows to the people who participate, operate, and show up. That’s what Mustaa encodes with its time tokens. Access becomes earned, not bought. Participation becomes economic. Builders coordinate through logic, not hierarchy. The rules aren’t whispered behind closed doors. They are encoded and visible to everyone.

This isn’t an airdrop gimmick dressed up like decentralization. It’s the new coordination layer. The network effect is no longer powered by ad spend and algorithmic dopamine. It is powered by participation. That’s not branding. That’s the moat. That’s protocol design.

The Builders Who Got There First

Let’s skip the buzzwords and cut to the only metric that matters in crypto. Who moved early. Not who tweeted early. Not who hosted the panel. Who actually showed up before the crowd, took the risk, and bent reality toward their thesis. That’s the difference between trend-chasing and trend-shaping. And it’s the difference that defines Cadenza.

This platform doesn’t wait for narratives to be obvious. It helps write them. Together AI was in the portfolio before open-source inference became a Twitter bio accessory. FalconX was a bet before liquidity was considered sophisticated. Zebedee was moving payments in games before anyone could explain what "gamefi" meant without laughing. Casa was laying the foundation for self-custody infrastructure before custody became a board-level panic.

That’s not luck. It’s edge. And edge like that doesn’t come from reading market maps. It comes from building. From being close enough to the metal to know what still needs to be forged. Cadenza is a builder-investor platform by design. The ideas don’t get vetted by consultants or massaged into decks. They get tested, shipped, and scaled.

When the rest of the market catches up, the work is already done. The relationships are already deep. The architecture is already live. And the real question becomes not whether it will happen, but whether you were in early enough to matter.

Code Is Product, Capital, and Narrative…All at Once

Founders, let’s not sugarcoat it. If your capital strategy still revolves around “pre-seed, seed, Series A” like it’s a scavenger hunt through LinkedIn intros, you’re already behind the curve. This isn’t 2012. You’re not building a SaaS dashboard for dentists. You’re building a protocol, and in that world, the token is the product. The treasury is the operating system. The community is the sales engine. The coordination layer is your only real moat.

The days of raising capital, building quietly, then hoping someone cares are done. Code is not just backend logic anymore. It is the financial instrument. It is the narrative container. It is the architecture of your cap table, your roadmap, and your brand, all in one.

That’s why at Cadenza, we don’t just write checks. We co-architect systems. We work with founders on token design like it actually matters, because it does. We map out go-to-market routes that don’t require a VC influencer to retweet your pitch. We help build liquidity scaffolding that is sustainable, not gimmicked. And yes, we think through the legal stack so you’re not explaining to a grand jury why your Discord server has a multisig.

The truth is, if you're building in this world, you don’t need someone who “gets it” in theory. You need someone who speaks protocol as their native tongue. Someone who can look at your tokenomics model and immediately spot the flaw before it becomes your postmortem. Someone who understands that capital, product, and coordination are now one and the same.

If that’s what you’re building, and that’s what you’re looking for, we should probably talk.

Web3 for Allocators: Edge Without the Cosplay

Allocators, welcome to the part where we stop pretending your consultant's ChatGPT-generated memo is worth reading. This isn’t about another “emerging manager” trying to win your heart with some half-baked buzzword stack and an Airtable of recycled decks. You’re not here for mood boards. You’re here for edge. You want context that cuts through the noise. You want conviction that isn’t driven by whatever Andreessen posted last week. You want actual exposure to the protocols, products, and primitives defining the next cycle.

Cadenza was built with that in mind. We offer access across token events, seed-stage equity, governance rights, and eventually a liquid vehicle that won’t require a Sherpa to redeem. This isn’t some duct-taped generalist fund trying to moonlight as a crypto native shop. This is a multidimensional platform operated by people who helped write the rails, build the infrastructure, and ship the code. It is not cosplay when you were there when the chain launched.

We’re not just showing you a cap table after the deal is done. We’re pulling you in before consensus, when the price is right and the design still has edges to smooth. You want exposure to programmable liquidity? We’ve got it. You want early access to networks before the airdrop? That’s on the roadmap. You want a partner who isn’t quoting macro narratives like they are narrating a nature documentary? You’re in the right place.

If you're still allocating off the same five slide decks and hoping someone has a real opinion, now is the moment to level up. Get in touch and we’ll show you what real edge feels like.

The Bridge to Part 3: Intelligence Is Coming Online

So far, we’ve traced how code graduated from backend infrastructure to full-blown capital architecture. We’ve followed its transformation into financial primitive, governance tool, and programmable distribution layer. But that’s only one half of the strand. The other is intelligence. And it’s coming online faster than most are ready to admit.

Because once code can move money, the next logical step is code that can decide why. AI agents are already surfacing across networks, making routing decisions, managing liquidity, and fine-tuning governance dynamics with a level of nuance that would make most investor memos look like cave paintings. These aren’t tools. They are participants. They are showing up, taking jobs, coordinating actions, and soon, they’ll be forming preferences and pursuing outcomes.

In Part 3, we’ll explore what happens when infrastructure starts to think. Not in some abstract sci-fi way, but in very real, on-chain behavior. We’ll talk about autonomous agents that don’t just optimize, but govern. Protocols that aren’t run by sleepy multisigs, but by intent-based machines with mission memory. And we’ll look at what happens when capital itself becomes intelligent, not just reactive. When venture capital decisions are no longer made in partner meetings over cappuccinos, but co-simulated by agents who remember every cycle, every exit, and every false signal.

This isn’t the beginning of the end. It’s the beginning of autonomous coordination. And if you’re not building or allocating with that in mind, you’re already trailing the signal.

Stay tuned. The agents are real. They are already working. You just haven’t met yours yet.

Smart investors don’t wait for the signal, they browse it. Prepare to explore tactical Web3 strategies at Nautilus.Finance. Stay ahead by following Tom Serres on X.com or LinkedIn.

crypto[native]

Discussion about this post