“Back early-stage crypto founders creating products and primitives for an open financial world. A builder-first, Ethereum-heavy fund that publishes its own code and expects technical credibility from the founders it backs.”
Sector split covers all twelve companies named on nascent.xyz. Chain split covers only the eight companies whose chain we could verify or reasonably infer (Ethereum-mainnet-native protocols, one Optimism L2 and one Bitcoin-adjacent DeFi protocol); the remaining four (security, data and indexing tools that are not chain-specific) are left out of the chain split.
Nascent is a builder-first crypto fund, historically associated with Dan Elitzer and Matt Walsh, that runs venture investing alongside liquid strategies. Its stated thesis is spare: back early-stage crypto founders building products and primitives for an open financial world. What distinguishes it from a typical direct-outreach fund is that Nascent maintains its own public GitHub, github.com/nascentxyz, and has contributed to open-source tooling adjacent to the Foundry ecosystem, which means the team evaluates technical credibility from a position of having shipped code themselves.
The portfolio, twelve named companies, is almost entirely Ethereum-mainnet-native. Morpho and Ethena are DeFi lending and stablecoin primitives. Aztec is a privacy-focused L2. Optimism, Obol Network, Socket and Initia are infrastructure spanning rollups, staking and interoperability. Spearbit, Etherscan and Messari are developer and data tooling. Mezo is a Bitcoin-adjacent DeFi protocol, and Blink Cash touches payments. The pattern is consistent: mechanism-heavy, technically defensible primitives rather than consumer-facing applications.
There is no public application form. Nascent lists hello@nascent.xyz as a direct inbox and describes itself as "always looking to connect with visionary builders," which, combined with the GitHub presence, signals that a technically substantive cold email is a real path in, not a formality before a warm intro is required.
Key stats:
Individual current partner names beyond the fund's founding association with Dan Elitzer and Matt Walsh were not independently re-verified on the site in this session. Use hello@nascent.xyz as the contact channel; the fund did not surface a dedicated team page with current roles at last check.