Catrina Wang

Wang worked at Deloitte early in her career; she and Portal Ventures founder Evan Fisher discovered blockchain around the same time and tried to persuade their employers to show interest in the field. In 2017 she was among the founding members of Deloitte Consulting’s Blockchain Program, and she co-founded Deloitte’s blockchain venture program before moving to the crypto industry. Before joining Portal Ventures, she also worked in operations at Protocol Labs and Apple and invested at Hivemind Capital.⁠[1][1][1][2][1][2]

At a University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry alumni event during the Stanford Blockchain Conference in 2024, Wang met Justin MaJustin MaJustin Ma is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Vest Labs, a New York–based trading technology startup that operates Vest Markets, a perpetual futures trading and retail prop trading platform.Open the full entry, a fellow Penn alum, who pitched her for the first time on Vest, the trading technology company he had founded, beginning a conversation between the two.⁠[3][3]

In November 2024, Portal Ventures was close to the final close of its second fund, a $75 million vehicle; Wang was the firm’s other general partner besides Evan Fisher. She summed up Portal’s approach as finding projects ahead of formal deals and writing first checks into them (the “deals before deals”), and said she was looking at the tokenization of “dormant asset classes” such as air rights, as well as tokenized uranium, which could spur trading of yet another commodity, saying, “There’s really nothing that’s too early for us.”⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

On March 11 and April 12, 2026, Wang published the essays “Pattern Matching the Impossible” and “The Great Attrition of Crypto VCs,” respectively, on the Portal Ventures website.⁠[2][2]

On October 7, 2026, Vest LabsVest LabsVest Labs is a New York–based trading technology startup that operates Vest Markets, a 24/7 venue for perpetual futures on stocks, indices, commodities, foreign exchange, and crypto assets, and offers “prop trading” accounts that let retail traders who pass an evaluation trade with company capital and share in the profits.Open the full entry announced a $13 million funding round led by Portal Ventures. Wang said that Vest’s appeal lies in giving ambitious traders without much money access to company capital rather than requiring them to fund their own accounts, which she called “super differentiated” for user acquisition; she also said Vest had done this with no ads and no token incentives, out of a belief that the best product can sell itself.⁠[4][3][3][4][4][4]

As of October 2026, Wang organizes the annual UPenn Blockchain Conference, mentors university accelerators at schools such as the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, and the University of Texas at Austin, and designed the crypto curriculum of the Wharton School. She spoke as a general partner of Portal Ventures at ConsensusConsensusConsensus is an annual cryptocurrency, blockchain, and Web3 industry conference hosted by the crypto media outlet CoinDesk (not the consensus mechanism of a blockchain). It was first held in New York in 2015 and later moved to Austin and Toronto; a Hong Kong edition was added from 2025, and since 2026 the main conference has been held in Miami.Open the full entry 2025, hosted by CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry.⁠[2][5][5]

Portal Ventures: Official website: https://www.portal.vc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/dotcuriouscat (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catrina-wang-93194164/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]