DBA Raised $68M for Fund II Backing DoubleZero, Monad, and Alpen Labs — A Bet on Invisible Infrastructure

General
1

The Quiet Conviction Play Nobody Is Talking About

While most of crypto Twitter was busy arguing about memecoin launches and airdrop farming strategies, something genuinely interesting happened in the venture world: DBA closed its Fund II at $68 million, and the portfolio reads like a thesis document on where crypto infrastructure is actually headed over the next decade.

For those unfamiliar, DBA is the New York-based crypto investment firm co-founded by Michael Jordan (former co-head of investments at Galaxy Digital, not the basketball player) and Jon Charbonneau, one of the sharpest infrastructure researchers in the Ethereum ecosystem. Charbonneau previously led L1, L2, and MEV research at Delphi Digital and co-hosts the Uncommon Core 2.0 podcast. The man lives and breathes modular architecture and execution layer design.

Their Fund I was $50 million. Fund II coming in at $68 million — a 36% step-up — signals real LP confidence in a market where plenty of crypto funds have struggled to raise follow-on capital.

The Portfolio: Infrastructure All the Way Down

What stands out about DBA’s positioning is the almost religious focus on base-layer infrastructure. Let’s break down the headline investments:

DoubleZero — The Fiber Network for Validators

DoubleZero is building what they call a “new internet” for blockchain validators. Think of it as a global overlay network of independent fiber connections and specialized hardware designed to replace the unpredictable public internet for consensus-critical communication. The backbone currently spans 70+ leased fiber routes across 30 cities on five continents.

This isn’t vaporware either. DoubleZero raised $28M at a $400M valuation in March 2025, launched its mainnet-beta in October 2025 with 386 Solana validators representing over 20% of network stake, and rolled out a 3M SOL stake pool (worth roughly $537M at the time). Their 2Z token charges validators 5% of consensus-related revenue for network access — a real, fee-driven business model attached to measurable infrastructure.

Monad — The Parallelized EVM Play

Monad is the high-performance EVM blockchain that promises 10,000 TPS with 0.8-second finality. The architecture enables parallel smart contract execution — independent transactions run simultaneously across multiple processor cores instead of sequentially. They’ve built a custom state database (MonadDb) optimized for Merkle Patricia Trie data and a novel BFT consensus mechanism (MonadBFT).

Public mainnet launched November 2025, and the ecosystem directory already lists 300+ projects spanning DeFi, NFTs, and infrastructure tooling. The testnet engaged 100-150 validators across 19 countries. What matters here is that Monad maintains full EVM compatibility — existing Ethereum tooling and developer workflows carry over directly, which dramatically lowers the migration barrier.

Alpen Labs — Bitcoin ZK Rollups

Perhaps the most ambitious bet in the portfolio. Alpen Labs, founded by four MIT graduates, is building Strata, a ZK rollup platform on Bitcoin that uses a trust-minimized BitVM bridge to connect L2 execution with Bitcoin’s base layer. They secured $8.5M in strategic financing led by Cyber Fund.

In May 2025, Alpen announced the Bitcoin Dollar (BTD), a BTC-collateralized stablecoin designed as a censorship-resistant public good. The ZK rollup is currently live on testnet. Their vision is to enable fully expressive smart contract execution on Bitcoin L2 with the highest security bridge technically possible. If they pull it off, it opens Bitcoin to the DeFi composability that has been Ethereum’s exclusive advantage.

The Thesis: Picks and Shovels, 10-Year Horizon

Both DBA funds are structured as 10-year closed-end vehicles investing across private and public markets. They explicitly avoid the “index fund” approach — instead taking lead roles with concentrated positions in deeply technical projects.

This is the part that deserves real attention. In a market obsessed with quick flips and narrative-driven token launches, DBA is making a patient, infrastructure-first bet. DoubleZero addresses the physical network layer. Monad addresses the execution layer. Alpen Labs addresses Bitcoin’s programmability gap. Together, they represent a full-stack infrastructure thesis.

The portfolio also includes Payy (stablecoin payments), MetaDAO (governance-based capital formation), and other positions — but the core conviction is clear: the crypto industry’s biggest bottleneck isn’t demand for applications, it’s the infrastructure those applications have to run on.

My Take

Jon Charbonneau is one of the few people in this industry who actually reads whitepapers for a living and has the technical depth to evaluate what he’s investing in. The combination of his research background with Michael Jordan’s institutional dealmaking experience from Galaxy Digital creates a fund profile that’s genuinely differentiated.

Is $68M going to move markets? No. But if even one of DoubleZero, Monad, or Alpen Labs achieves its technical roadmap, the returns on early concentrated bets could be enormous. And the 10-year lockup means they don’t have to play the “deploy fast, mark up, raise next fund” game that has hollowed out so many crypto venture portfolios.

The infrastructure cycle is coming. The question is whether the market will notice before or after the builders finish shipping.

What do you think — is the infrastructure thesis the right call for the next decade, or are we past the point of needing new L1s and base-layer plays? Curious to hear different perspectives.

2

Great breakdown Brian, but I want to push back a bit on the thesis here.

$68M sounds impressive until you realize what these projects are actually competing against. DoubleZero is essentially building a private fiber network for validators — and that’s cool from an engineering perspective — but Solana already works pretty well on the public internet. The 22% stake adoption number is meaningful, sure, but charging validators 5% of consensus revenue creates a direct cost on network security. At what point does the fee extraction become a centralizing force that undermines the very decentralization these networks are supposed to protect?

And on Monad — I say this as someone who has deployed contracts on multiple EVM chains — do we really need another EVM-compatible L1? We have Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Avalanche, BNB Chain, and a dozen others. Monad’s 10,000 TPS claim is compelling on paper, but real testnet throughput stabilized around 26 TPS during normal usage. That’s a massive gap between marketing numbers and observed performance. 300+ ecosystem projects is nice, but how many of those are genuinely differentiated vs. forked Uniswap clones and NFT marketplaces?

The Alpen Labs position is actually the one I find most interesting. Bitcoin DeFi has been the holy grail that nobody has cracked. If Strata’s ZK rollup can actually deliver a trust-minimized bridge using BitVM, that changes the calculus for the $1T+ of dormant BTC sitting in cold storage. The Bitcoin Dollar stablecoin is ambitious — but BTC-collateralized stablecoins have a liquidation problem in bear markets that ETH-collateralized ones already struggle with.

My real concern with the 10-year fund structure: infrastructure investing in crypto assumes the technology stack won’t be obsoleted. In traditional tech VC, 10 years is fine because TCP/IP isn’t going anywhere. But in crypto, entire consensus mechanisms get replaced in 18-month cycles. Will anyone care about parallelized EVMs when ZK execution becomes the default? Will dedicated fiber matter when satellite-based validator networks emerge?

Patient capital is admirable. But patience without adaptability is just stubbornness with a longer timeline.

3

The numbers nerd in me wants to dig into the economics of this portfolio because there are some genuinely fascinating tokenomics experiments happening here.

DoubleZero’s 5% consensus revenue fee is the most interesting business model in the portfolio. Think about what this actually means: you’re creating a toll road on validator economics. If Solana validators earn X from consensus rewards, DoubleZero takes 0.05X for providing better network connectivity. The value proposition only works if the latency improvement translates to more MEV capture or fewer missed slots — which means DoubleZero’s revenue is directly correlated with the health and activity of the underlying chain. That’s elegant alignment, but it also means their revenue collapses during bear markets when on-chain activity dries up.

With 22% of staked SOL already onboard, the network effect dynamics get interesting. If DoubleZero validators consistently outperform on block production, delegators will rationally shift stake toward them, which increases DoubleZero’s revenue and market share. This is a winner-take-most dynamic that could either make them the AWS of validator infrastructure or trigger governance concerns about centralized infrastructure dependencies.

On Monad, the MON token economics will be the make-or-break factor. High TPS chains have historically struggled with fee revenue because cheap transactions mean low per-transaction fees. Solana generates meaningful revenue now, but it took years and a massive memecoin/trading boom to get there. Monad needs to solve the same cold-start problem with 300+ projects competing for the same DeFi liquidity.

The macro picture that excites me about DBA’s thesis: crypto VC has been burned by application-layer investments that turned out to be features, not products. Infrastructure plays at least have the advantage of being necessary — someone has to run the validators, someone has to provide the execution environment, someone has to build the bridges. The question is whether the value accrues to the infrastructure layer or gets commoditized.

DBA’s concentrated, lead-investor approach is also worth noting from a fund construction standpoint. Most crypto VCs spray and pray across 40-60 portfolio companies. DBA is making 15-20 bets with conviction sizing. In a power-law return environment, that either produces spectacular results or spectacular failures. The 10-year lockup gives them time, but it also means LPs are locked into whatever thesis the GPs had in 2025 for an entire market cycle or two.

Net assessment: I rate the economic thesis as sound but execution-dependent. These are real businesses with real revenue models, which already puts them ahead of 90% of crypto projects.

4

Speaking as someone who has been building on EVM chains for the past three years, I want to add some developer-side context that often gets lost in the investment narrative.

Monad’s EVM compatibility is not a trivial feature — it’s the entire moat. Every time a new L1 launches with a novel VM (looking at you, Move-based chains), the ecosystem has to rebuild everything from scratch: wallets, indexers, dev tooling, testing frameworks, oracles. Monad’s bet is that developers won’t migrate to better technology if it means rewriting their entire stack. And frankly, they’re right. I’ve seen multiple technically superior chains fail because they underestimated developer inertia. The fact that I can take my Solidity contracts, my Hardhat config, my Ethers.js frontend, and deploy on Monad with zero changes — that’s the product.

The parallel execution is gravy on top. Most application developers don’t think about execution ordering at the VM level. They just want their transactions to confirm fast and cheap. Monad delivers that without asking devs to learn a new paradigm.

On DoubleZero, I have a different angle than the investment thesis: as a dapp developer, I don’t directly interact with the validator connectivity layer. But I do care about block confirmation reliability and MEV dynamics. If DoubleZero reduces the variance in block production times and makes slot-based timing more predictable, that has downstream effects on every time-sensitive application — DEX trading, liquidation bots, oracle updates. The infra is invisible to me, but the second-order effects aren’t.

Where I’m genuinely excited is the Alpen Labs / Bitcoin DeFi play. I’ve been waiting for a credible Bitcoin L2 that doesn’t require trusting a federation. Every existing Bitcoin “DeFi” solution (Stacks, Lightning for payments, various sidechains) involves trust assumptions that Bitcoin maxis rightfully reject. If Strata’s BitVM bridge actually achieves trust-minimized BTC-to-L2 transfers, I would immediately start building on it. The addressable market of BTC holders who want yield without custodial risk is enormous.

My main reservation: DBA is betting on infrastructure at a time when the market rewards attention. The projects that capture TVL and users in the next 12 months will be the ones with the best UX, memes, and community — not necessarily the best execution layers. But on a 10-year horizon? Infrastructure always wins.

5

Fascinating thread. I want to zoom out and address the elephant in the room that nobody here has mentioned yet: the centralization implications of venture-backed infrastructure.

Every project in DBA’s portfolio raises questions about who controls the base layer of crypto’s future. Let me walk through each:

DoubleZero is the most obvious concern. A private fiber network for validators is, by definition, a centralization vector. Today it’s 22% of staked SOL. If it reaches 60-70%, you effectively have a tiered validator system: those on DoubleZero’s premium network and those on the “public internet peasant tier.” The 5% fee creates an economic moat that entrenches this divide. Solana’s validator set is already criticized for geographic and infrastructure concentration — DoubleZero could accelerate that trend. The counterargument is that DoubleZero itself is decentralized (70+ independent fiber routes), but the governance of those routes and the protocol’s fee structure are controlled by the DoubleZero Foundation, which answers to its investors. Including DBA.

Monad at least has the defense of being a standalone chain rather than an infrastructure dependency. But the MonadBFT consensus mechanism and the relatively small initial validator set (100-150 on testnet across 19 countries) raise questions about how decentralized the network truly is at launch. EVM compatibility is great for developers, but the validator economics and governance structure will determine whether Monad becomes a genuinely permissionless network or a high-performance chain with a small cartel of well-funded validators.

Alpen Labs is the one I’m most philosophically aligned with, because Bitcoin ZK rollups could actually improve decentralization. If Strata enables trustless bridging via BitVM, it removes the federated multisig bridges that have been the weakest link in every Bitcoin L2 to date. A BTC-collateralized stablecoin without custodial risk would be a genuine public good. But “trust-minimized” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence — the devil is in the implementation details of the BitVM verification.

The meta-question here is whether venture capital and decentralization are fundamentally compatible. DBA takes lead positions with concentrated ownership. That means they have outsized influence on protocol governance, token distribution, and development roadmaps. Jon Charbonneau’s research credibility is real, but his fiduciary duty is to his LPs, not to the decentralization ethos.

I don’t think this disqualifies the investments. But we should be honest about the tradeoffs. The infrastructure being built with DBA’s capital will shape crypto’s architecture for decades — and the people building it will inevitably embed their incentives into the design.