David Hoffman

Hoffman has said that his investing team began to see Ethereum as “programmable money” in 2016, became bullish on decentralized finance in 2019, and on Ethereum layer-2 networks in 2020; before founding Bankless Ventures, he, Ryan Sean Adams, and Ben Lakoff invested in crypto projects as angel investors.⁠[1][1][1]

In March 2020, Bankless launched a podcast alongside Adams’s newsletter, with Hoffman helping to produce it; at the podcast’s first anniversary in March 2021, the two co-hosted an introductory special episode of about three hours. Hoffman later said that he and Adams had, without outside capital, taken Bankless Media from zero to a profitable business with eight-figure annual recurring revenue within a year.⁠[2][3][3][3][1]

On May 4, 2021, Hoffman and Adams jointly announced their support for the community-initiated Bankless DAO, calling it the first media DAO, with its tokens distributed entirely to the community.⁠[4][4][4]

In April 2023, Hoffman and Adams founded the early-stage venture fund Bankless Ventures, led full-time by Ben Lakoff, with Fund I under $40 million; Hoffman and Adams were rewarded solely according to fund performance and did not draw salaries.⁠[1][1][1]

On February 18, 2025, Hoffman wrote that Bankless Ventures Fund I was about 90% deployed and that the firm was raising Fund II with a target of $50 million. He summed up the fund’s advantages as “narrative liquidity” and “network liquidity”: using Bankless’s influence to spread industry narratives and introducing key people to portfolio companies.⁠[1][1][1]

In May 2025, Hoffman announced that Bankless would spin off its artificial intelligence and frontier technology content into a new show feed, while the main feed would again center on Ethereum. He said that the last time he had personally written such a member letter was in 2020, that he now felt the same energy again, and that an Ethereum “renaissance” was underway.⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

On November 22, 2025, Hoffman wrote a rebuttal of the claim that “if Bitcoin dies, crypto dies with it,” naming Nic CarterNic CarterNic Carter is a crypto venture capitalist and researcher who founded the venture firm Castle Island Ventures and co-founded the blockchain data company Coin Metrics; he has long written about Bitcoin, stablecoins, and the crypto industry’s access to banking.Open the full entry as the latest person to revive this trope. He argued that the threat quantum computing poses to the ECDSA signatures used by early Bitcoin wallets is Bitcoin’s own problem to deal with; Ethereum has hidden public keys behind hashed addresses from the start, and its roadmap includes switching to quantum-safe signature schemes, so even if Bitcoin declined because of quantum attacks, Ethereum would keep running.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

On December 17 of the same year, in his predictions for 2026, he forecast that tokenization would be the theme of the year and that initial coin offerings (ICOs) would return in full force, and expected fears of quantum attacks to ramp up: he believed that millions of long-dormant bitcoins would be the first attacked once someone had a sufficiently capable quantum computer, but that in 2026 this would still be a niche topic.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

According to Bankless’s holdings disclosures, as of October 2026, Hoffman holds tokens including ETH, MATIC, BANK, IMX, MAGIC, and DBL, has made angel investments in projects including Aztec, L2Beat, Matter Labs, Optimism, POAP, and Scroll, and holds advisory roles at organizations including Matter Labs (zkSync), Moonbirds, MyCelium, and Optimism.⁠[8][8][8][8][8]

Bankless: Official website: https://www.bankless.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

X: Public account: https://x.com/TrustlessState (opens in a new window)⁠[8][6]

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/david-hoffman-326945160/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]