BlockTower VC is now Strobe.

After years of building one of crypto's most trusted investment platforms, we're starting a new chapter with a sharper focus on what matters most: backing founders who are building things that last. 

Our approach is intentionally different. We’re a lean team by design, invest pre-consensus, and take a hands-on approach with fewer founders. With over $235M in assets under management and significant dry powder ready to deploy, we're actively searching for partners who share our vision. 

Over the last few cycles, some patterns have become clear. The hype, the subsequent crash. Fortunes made, fortunes lost. Users flood in, users vanish. The same mistakes repeat, preventing the industry from reaching its potential. 

We believe in crypto – that’s why we’re here. But for crypto to reach its potential, we need to overcome the seven deadly sins that are holding the industry back.  

The Seven Deadly Sins of Crypto

Greed
The pursuit of quick returns over sustainable value. Projects launch with inflated valuations and low floats, using tactics that benefit insiders at the cost of innovation. We've normalized practices that would raise red flags in any other industry.

Insularity
Crypto can sometimes feel like an echo chamber of crypto natives selling to each other. Capital circulates between protocols – when one DeFi farm winds down, users migrate to the next one. We're building complex solutions for 50,000 active users while missing opportunities to serve billions.

Opacity
Despite blockchain's promise of transparency, the industry runs on hidden complexity. Projects operate behind anon teams while managing billions in user funds. Simple concepts get wrapped in convoluted tokenomics. Key information about ownership and governance stays buried in dense documentation. At this rate, we’re recreating the opacity of traditional finance without its accountability.

Short-Term Narratives
We tend to run on narratives, not fundamentals. One week it's NFTs, the next it's Bitcoin L2s, then it's an entirely new scaling solution we realized we needed overnight. Projects launch, pump, and fade before delivering real value.

Laziness
We see more copypasta projects than real innovation. Successful protocols spawn dozens of forks with minor parameter changes. Teams would rather launch another marketplace clone on a new chain than tackle tough technical challenges. True breakthroughs require original thinking – but why bother when you can fork existing code and still capture value?

Deceit
Companies tout metrics without painting the full picture. “Active user” metrics mask the reality that most operate multiple addresses. "Partnerships" amount to little more than shared chat groups or token swaps. Marketing trumps transparency.

Arrogance
Teams raise $100M on pitch decks, then focus more on narrative than code. Self-proclaimed "thought leaders" with limited experience try to reshape entire industries. We've built a system where meme-making often matters more than product-building.

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And yet, we have more conviction than ever in crypto’s potential. That’s why we’re starting Strobe. 

You might ask – how?

Because beneath the noise and speculation, there are founders who are charting a different path. They're asking the hard questions: What if we built for the next decade instead of today’s narrative? What if we measured success by user adoption rather than token price? What if we replatformed entire industries by leveraging crypto rails and onchain primitives?

At Strobe, these are the types of founders we back. 

But don’t just take our word for it. Our portfolio companies have demonstrated what's possible when a team embodies the virtues that drive lasting impact.

The Path Forward: Seven Virtues

Integrity
Building with integrity and transparency. When the 2022 credit crisis hit, Maple Finance faced a critical decision: sugar-coat the losses or confront them head-on. They chose transparency, restructured their business, and emerged stronger than ever. Today, they’ve scaled their overcollateralized lending business back to $600m in TVL, after a near complete reset to $15m at the depths of the bear market, and are a bonafide backbone of institutional DeFi lending.

Patience
Taking the time to build strong foundations. While others rush to launch marginally differentiated products, Ethena spent months perfecting their framework. They resisted pressure to launch prematurely, focusing on security and sustainability. Their patience paid off – they’re now one of the industry’s highest-earnings projects, have grown to become the third-largest stablecoin in the market, and have successfully navigated industry wide security incidents. 

Humility
Letting execution speak louder than words. Chronicle's team spent two years building their oracle infrastructure in relative quiet, focusing on reliability over hype. They didn't announce their product until it was battletested across multiple chains. As the second largest oracle platform, they secure billions in value across the leading DeFi protocols and are expanding into groundbreaking partnerships with the world’s largest asset managers.

Action-Oriented
Moving beyond whitepapers to working products. TYB identified a clear problem in brand engagement, and moved fast to solve it. Instead of endless theorizing, they rapidly iterated with cult-like brands (e.g., Glossier, Poppy, L'Oréal), gathered real user feedback, and built something consumers actually use. Their platform now powers real-world communities across streetwear, beauty, and CPG, and is laying the tracks for the future of onchain commerce. 

Boldness
Tackling fundamental challenges instead of chasing trends. Morpho didn't just build another lending protocol – they reimagined lending from first principles. Enabling fully permissionless market creation, Morpho Blue became a new lending primitive with $5B in total deposits. As a core piece of DeFi infrastructure, Morpho launched Bitcoin-backed loans with Coinbase, allowing exchange users to borrow USDC against their Bitcoin holdings. This DeFi mullet marks a pivotal and bold step into bringing decentralized protocols to mainstream users and traditional fintech experiences. 

Obsessed
Deeply passionate about their specific problem space. The founders of Winston and Artory (launching Summer 2025) spent more than 25 years in traditional art markets before realizing blockchain could not only solve art's fundamental authentication and provenance challenges, but also create entirely new design spaces for how art functions in collectors’ portfolios. This deep domain expertise led them to build solutions that the world’s largest art collectors actually want to use. Oftentimes, our founders come to crypto because it’s the only way to help solve a problem they have been obsessed with for decades. 

Contrarian
Willing to challenge consensus and explore uncharted territory. While everyone was building clones of [insert current meta on crypto twitter], our founders were tackling harder problems: restructuring archaic industries, building new financial and internet primitives, and creating tools that work for users outside crypto.

Building Together

At Strobe, we're looking for founders who embody these virtues. 

Our approach is high-conviction, patient, and focused: we make fewer investments but engage deeply with each team. 

We believe crypto can do better than short-term thinking and incentives. If you're building something meaningful for the long term, we want to hear from you. Come build with us.