Tribe Capital’s Boris Revsin Says Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Is Heading For A Big Resurgence

Decentralized finance (DeFi) projects flourished in the summer of 2020, fueled by a rapid market-driven cascade of venture capital funding, and the following plunge brought total value to a high of $248.84 billion. The crypto winter began less than two years ago, however, with a number of industry-threatening scams and hacks adding to the chill. Can DeFi start to reclaim its former glory now?

Boris Revsin, managing partner at Tribe Capital, an investment firm with more than $1.6 billion in assets under management, believes that as more infrastructure is developed in more open markets outside the US, it will be easier to create new projects.

I expect a big resurgence in DeFi later this year or early next year,” Ravsin told CoinDesk during a recent interview.

Revsin hopes that the first wave of DeFi regulation in the US later this year will spur DeFi projects to operate in more open regions such as Dubai and Singapore. However, infrastructure projects such as Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain and Rollup technology may continue to flourish in the US.

Revsin sees the new infrastructure and developers behind the projects as the key to turning crypto into a $10 trillion industry. The current global cryptocurrency market capitalization is approximately $1.22 trillion, according to coingeco data,

Ravsin’s origin story began at the age of five when his parents arrived in America under chaotic circumstances as Jewish refugees from Russia. My parents are heroes, says Revsin.

He grew up in a computer science family and formally spent a few years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before dropping out in 2008 to work as a programmer for Mitt Romney’s first presidential campaign. Ravsin then became co-founder of the gamified marketing firm DailyBreak; VentureApp, the precursor to tenant engagement platform HqO; and Game Theory Group, an investment firm that backed early-stage blockchain companies and wrote and sold research reports.

In late 2018, crowdfunding platform Republic acquired the team behind Game Theory Group and Revsin was brought in to lead its new Republic Capital arm, separate from the more advisory and builder-oriented Republic Crypto Group. By the time Revsin left in April 2022, Republic Capital had raised over $600 million, had nearly $1 billion in assets under management and invested in more than 80 startups, including Avalanche, Polygon, Blockdemon and Kraken.

But Revsin reached a point where he felt he had the experience and position to move forward with a big brand in the crypto ecosystem and a multi-stage investment strategy with a multi-asset fund in crypto and equities. He also took on a role as a managing partner at Tribe Capital overseeing the $96 million early-stage Tribe Crypto Fund I and its early-stage incubation projects, as well as participating in the firm’s nearly $400 million in equity investments.

Founded in 2018 by Arjun Sethi, Jonathan Hsu and Ted Maidenberg, Tribe Capital has a data scientist-driven quantitative approach to startup valuation. When considering a company for potential investment, Tribe seeks as much quantitative data as possible from a startup, which is driven through Tribes’ proprietary framework to produce a 60-page, color-coded report featuring key metrics for investors.

Tribe focuses on Series A to Series D investments in more established but growing companies, and separately operates a pre-seed incubator that helps guide companies through their early stages of development. The company wishes to lead or co-lead the round. Revsin explained that individual investments can be as small as $500,000 and go as high as $5 to $7 million.

Revsin said Tribes’ strongest operational support includes go-to-market advice and a protocol for portfolio companies and quantitative data about how its existing competitors are performing.

Revsin said Tribe is most interested in investing in the products and protocols that form part of the developer stack. This is because sufficient developer tools lead to more projects and more Web2 users are likely to migrate to Web3.

Developers have to make a wide range of infrastructure decisions, Ravsin explained, including which developer tools and layer 1 and 2 blockchains and Oracle data solutions to use. Developer access provides a revenue stream for infrastructure projects that can use that capital to continue improving products regardless of raising venture capital, and better products bring even more developers into the sector.

The world has changed in the last six years, he said, and I think the next six years will mark the beginning of the huge developer pool that we need to become a $10 trillion industry.