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Featured Report
Kill your customer: The death of KYC and the rise of ZK-TLS
By
Anil LullaKYC is finally meeting its match. Traditional checks cost North-American institutions $64 B a year and still expose users to sprawling data leaks. Our newest Delphi Pro deep-dive shows how Zero-Knowledge TLS (ZK-TLS) replaces slow document uploads with instant, math-backed proofs. Giving platforms compliance and users privacy.
Inside, we unpack the three ZK-TLS architectures (TEE, MPC, and Proxy) and spotlight live pilots from Reclaim, ZKPass, and Onflow that already let you prove balance, age, or full KYC once and reuse it everywhere. The result: quicker onboarding, lower fraud risk, and composable identity rails that can unlock new DeFi flows.
Read the full report to see which model scales, how regulators are reacting, and what this means for your next trade
Latest Research
view allUnsecured lending is arguably the biggest missing puzzle piece in DeFi's vision to upend and rewire the financial rails of the world. In our latest research piece, “Engineering Real Credit On-Chain: The 3Jane Bet,” digs into how 3Jane blends major infrastrucutre, cryptographic and mechanism design ideas: zk-proofs (zkTLS and zk-coprocessors), dynamic credit pricing, and a modified Morpho-style money market to tackle what the first wave of under-collateralized protocols simply couldn’t - balancing trust, incentives, and enforcement in one design.
Inside the report we discuss:
- How the previous Crypto credit cycle led by CeFi and its blowups undermined the previous generation of protocols
- Build a simple framework for evaluating under collateralized lending systems
- Deep dive into the design of 3Jane blending the right onchain and off-chain elements
- Metrics to monitor and judge whether 3Jane will be able to deliver on its promise
Humanity Protocol stands out in the identity landscape not by competing directly with World, but by redefining the market. Where World focuses on vertically integrated hardware + consumer identity, Humanity is composable infrastructure targeting enterprise use cases from day one. Their horizontal scaling strategy, with SDKs and real enterprise integrations, feels far more practically feasible than hardware-bound, consumer-first alternatives. Governance mechanics, incentive design, and economic sustainability are still unproven. But the core thesis is plausible, demand is visible, and the risk is asymmetric. For now, that’s enough to take Humanity seriously.
What began as a bold balance sheet directional bet has matured into a repeatable financial structure. Public crypto accumulation is no longer confined to Bitcoin, and it is no longer limited Microstrategy (now Strategy). A new class of companies is now using capital markets to systematically acquire crypto assets as part of their treasury strategy.
This report, the first part in a two part series, explores how Ethereum, Solana, and XRP are being absorbed into corporate capital frameworks. From Strategy’s leveraged accumulation engine to Upexi’s discounted Solana lockups, a new financial primitive is taking shape - one that uses public equity, shelf registrations, and validator yield to convert market infrastructure into crypto exposure.
We examine the mechanics behind this shift, the infrastructure enabling it, and the signals investors should track as public accumulation moves beyond Bitcoin and into the altcoin core.
A new corporate archetype is forming … and it is being built on crypto.
Key Highlights Include:
Trump’s Tariff Impact: The report details how Trump’s tariff policies disrupted global trade and financial markets, driving volatility in risk assets—including crypto—and sparking a subsequent recovery, offering lessons for managing market shocks.
Fiscal Sustainability & Bond Yields: It explores rising global fiscal concerns and spiking bond yields, with implications for safe-haven assets and portfolio allocation amid a shifting economic paradigm.
Institutional Crypto Adoption Trends: A surge in Bitcoin ETF inflows and emerging crypto treasury strategies signal crypto’s growing integration into mainstream finance.
Crypto Regulatory Progress: Advances in U.S. stablecoin legislation and state-level Bitcoin reserves reduce uncertainty, potentially paving the way for broader traditional finance participation.
Tokenization Potential: The report spotlights tokenization as a transformative force for financial instruments, hinting at future opportunities in 24/7 global markets.
Wemade’s journey offers a glimpse into what it takes to bring Web2 gamers and Web3 economies together. While their core business continues to deliver strong, compounding cash flows, Wemix still hasn’t reached its full potential. The year ahead will be pivotal in determining whether Wemade can forge a deeper connection between player engagement and token economies, or whether its blockchain efforts will remain ancillary to the core business.
Plasma isn’t just a response to technical limits. It’s the thesis that stablecoins have grown large enough to justify infrastructure designed for them alone – the same way AWS built dedicated services for specific compute needs. Last year, stablecoins facilitated over ~$5 trillion in adjusted transaction volume, over 1/3 the volume of traditional payment giants like Visa and Mastercard. For crypto-natives, stablecoins represent a fiat-pegged asset to denominate in. For the broader population in emerging markets, it represents a hedge against hyperinflation, a source of savings and payment rails for the unbanked. This points to a future where stablecoins won’t be defined strictly by APYs or protocol incentives, but by infrastructure that can scale to meet real-world usage. If Tether continues to lead that thesis, Plasma may prove to be one of the most direct, high-leverage exposures to the next wave of stablecoin adoption; especially in the parts of the world where crypto isn’t just a trade, but a necessity.
The internet is becoming a house of mirrors.
Those concert tickets for your favorite artist that sold out in seconds? Snatched up by scalper bots. That attractive dating profile you just matched with? Probably a catfish. Even the integrity of social media debates have collapsed, with comment sections flooded by armies of AI accounts pushing identical talking points with just enough variation to seem like different people (sometimes it’s not that hard to tell). World aims to tackle this problem by building what Sam Altman has called “one of the only trillion-dollar opportunities left” – a global proof-of-personhood (PoP) system creating a verified human-identity layer for the internet.
Their mission: build the largest global identity and financial network, owned by humanity rather than corporations or governments.
The transition to RoG-based frameworks reveals two fundamental vulnerabilities within the centralized cloud computing model. The first is blind trust: current cloud platforms do not provide hard evidence verifying that inference outputs are correct and have not been tampered with. The second is brittle scaling: the sophisticated but centralized GPU clusters that hyperscalers rely on lose efficiency once workloads extend across diverse geographies, heterogeneous hardware setups, or regulatory boundaries.
Decentralized AI (DeAI) networks, which leverage verifiable compute and semi-synchronous (or fully asynchronous) distributed training methods, are uniquely positioned to address these twin issues.
The regulatory environment for crypto has never been more bullish. With the SEC dismissing case after case against DeFi and crytpo, as well as Paul Atkins becoming the new SEC chair, the growing demand for 24/7 financial market access means blockchain technology is poised to take over.
The tokenization of securities and real world assets represents the future for onchain applications through bringing high-friction, high-barrier-to-enter financial vehicles to the blockchain for 24/7 cross-border trading.
Pump.fun is vertically integrating Solana's memecoin economy through PumpSwap, capturing billions in trading value previously flowing to Raydium. Now controlling both token creation and trading, Pump.fun's strategic power play has forced Raydium's defensive LaunchLab response. Will Pump.fun's streamlined approach maintain dominance, or can Raydium's creator-aligned strategy gain traction? Explore the battle reshaping Solana's memecoin infrastructure.
We are witnessing the slow, structural inversion of crypto’s power dynamics. From infrastructure-heavy protocols with bloated valuations and abstracted use cases, to application-first ecosystems that own the user, the orderflow, and increasingly, the revenue.
The next cycle won’t be led by chains racing to 100,000 TPS. It’ll be driven by focused, composable applications that prioritize usage over architecture, and sustainability over speculative hype. The winners will be those who sit closest to where demand originates – not where blocks get finalized.
This conversation features Yan Liberman (Delphi Ventures), Oleg Ivanov, and Omar-Shakeeb (SecondLane), and addresses common misconceptions, deal logistics, valuation dynamics, best practices, and regulatory nuances as it pertains to these types of transactions. The goal of this collaboration is to educate the industry as part of a broader research series on secondary markets, exploring their function, mechanics, and impact on spot markets.
Daily Brief
Delphi Daily - 7th May 2025
A daily summary of all Delphi content, spanning reports, AF posts and Reads.
Sector Performance
View all sector performance data (30+ assets) on the Delphi Sector Performance Dashboard
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Unlocked Pro Research
AIHumanity Protocol: The Identity Solution Going after Meta
By
Anil LullaHumanity Protocol stands out in the identity landscape not by competing directly with World, but by redefining the market. Where World focuses on vertically integrated hardware + consumer identity, Humanity is composable infrastructure targeting enterprise use cases from day one. Their horizontal scaling strategy, with SDKs and real enterprise integrations, feels far more practically feasible than hardware-bound, consumer-first alternatives. Governance mechanics, incentive design, and economic sustainability are still unproven. But the core thesis is plausible, demand is visible, and the risk is asymmetric. For now, that’s enough to take Humanity seriously.
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Explore All Unlocked Reports
view allKey Highlights Include:
Trump’s Tariff Impact: The report details how Trump’s tariff policies disrupted global trade and financial markets, driving volatility in risk assets—including crypto—and sparking a subsequent recovery, offering lessons for managing market shocks.
Fiscal Sustainability & Bond Yields: It explores rising global fiscal concerns and spiking bond yields, with implications for safe-haven assets and portfolio allocation amid a shifting economic paradigm.
Institutional Crypto Adoption Trends: A surge in Bitcoin ETF inflows and emerging crypto treasury strategies signal crypto’s growing integration into mainstream finance.
Crypto Regulatory Progress: Advances in U.S. stablecoin legislation and state-level Bitcoin reserves reduce uncertainty, potentially paving the way for broader traditional finance participation.
Tokenization Potential: The report spotlights tokenization as a transformative force for financial instruments, hinting at future opportunities in 24/7 global markets.
Plasma isn’t just a response to technical limits. It’s the thesis that stablecoins have grown large enough to justify infrastructure designed for them alone – the same way AWS built dedicated services for specific compute needs. Last year, stablecoins facilitated over ~$5 trillion in adjusted transaction volume, over 1/3 the volume of traditional payment giants like Visa and Mastercard. For crypto-natives, stablecoins represent a fiat-pegged asset to denominate in. For the broader population in emerging markets, it represents a hedge against hyperinflation, a source of savings and payment rails for the unbanked. This points to a future where stablecoins won’t be defined strictly by APYs or protocol incentives, but by infrastructure that can scale to meet real-world usage. If Tether continues to lead that thesis, Plasma may prove to be one of the most direct, high-leverage exposures to the next wave of stablecoin adoption; especially in the parts of the world where crypto isn’t just a trade, but a necessity.
This conversation features Yan Liberman (Delphi Ventures), Oleg Ivanov, and Omar-Shakeeb (SecondLane), and addresses common misconceptions, deal logistics, valuation dynamics, best practices, and regulatory nuances as it pertains to these types of transactions. The goal of this collaboration is to educate the industry as part of a broader research series on secondary markets, exploring their function, mechanics, and impact on spot markets.
The agentic economy may prove to be the most lucrative investment theme of our generation. With the value of your labor going to zero, the train only leaves the station once. The industrial revolution provoked changes in societal organization - from farms to factories - which demanded institutional reform - from feudalism to markets - which, in turn, required new legal and governance arrangements to cope with, and capitalize on, these fundamental shifts. Looking at our current trajectory, AI's impact on the economy will be more meaningful: transforming society not in two centuries, but in as little as two decades.
Software is eating the world. AI is eating software. AI is largely the combination of data, compute and talent. The entity or network which most effectively organizes these resources is set to own the 21st century. Whether you or I have any role to play in this future may very well be decided by how efficiently the long-tail can coordinate. Distributed training, efficient routing, verifiability, privacy, and effective developer incentives may will decide the difference. DeAI will live or die based on this test. The test of composable compute.
Dive into the Infrastructure Layer of the Decentralized AI (DeAI) crypto stack in part 2 of our DeAI series. Learn about Compute projects like Render, Gensyn, io.net and more, plus whether the "Airbnb for GPUs" narrative has legs. Then focus on Data: Scaling Data, Synthetic Data, AI Search and how Agentic Protocols like DataDAOs and DePIN fit in. Finally, the enablers of these data ecosystems like marketplaces, Lakehouses Storage and Retrieval. Will DeAI helps us achieve Digital Liberalism?
Can decentralized AI (The Square) compete with the behemoth that is centralized AI (The Tower)? The following report is an exploration into the AI value-chain: a peek into the awesome resources being deployed by the hyperscalers and the emergent decentralized AI ecosystem, assisted by cryptography & distributed incentives, aiming to present a viable alternative.
Are we heading for a world of a few 10 trillion parameter models governed from four thrones in the Pacific Northwest? Or are we destined for a tapestry of models in the millions underpinned by open source communities and collective ownership? An internet of agents? A Hivemind.
Telegram trading bots burst on the scene last summer, offering the market a much-needed fun new concept in the midst of a lethargic bear market. Trading bots were a major driver in the memecoin rally that pushed PEPE to $1.5B market cap in Jul. 23.
The bot narrative lost steam as the memecoin phase subsided, but trading bots have continued to gain users and add new features. In this report, we will unpack the impressive fundamentals of Telegram bots, and discuss their role in the DEX landscape moving forward. Are telegram bots a profitable niche, or income giants just getting started?
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