Don Ho 🦇🔊🍊

It's a low moment in crypto: prices are down sharply and many once hot narratives have fallen flat. At @ycombinator, here's some reasons we're optimistic. If you're a builder, our fall application deadline is July 27.

Today's our initial deadline for @ycombinator's Summer 2026 batch. We're excited for crypto teams to fund especially focused on trading, stablecoins, tokenization, and agentic commerce. All of finance is going to run onchain. We want to back the founders making this reality.

I'm joining @ycombinator as a Visiting Partner, with a focus on crypto. If you're an ambitious founder building in crypto that's interested in applying, ping me (DMs open). Y Combinator has been critical to foundational crypto builders: from @coinbase to @axiomexchange to @opensea (and 70 more). In the next decade, we expect there to be hundreds more companies building on blockchains: defi protocols, social networks, new blockchains, stablecoin-powered financial apps, games, infra, wallets and more. They'll need to navigate security, regulatory, global expansion, token issuances, onramps/offramps, usability, and more. In the past, I've supported founders with everything from brainstorming initial company ideas (@OpenSea) to auditing their smart contracts (@dYdX) to helping lead some of their most innovative bets (@coinbase). On a personal level, YC was transformational for me in 2012, giving me the hard lessons to build ambitious early stage ideas. It served me well when helping nurture products like USDC, @coinbasedev, and x402. Excited to give back to the YC community that has given me so much.