Primitive Ventures

The Primitive Ventures website gives 2018 as the firm’s founding year.⁠[1]

When Theta Labs announced that Dovey Wan would join its Theta Blockchain Advisory Council, it described Primitive Ventures as a long-term-focused cryptoasset investment fund that she co-founded with Eric Meltzer, with Wan as founding partner. Before Primitive Ventures, Wan was a managing director at DHVC (formerly Danhua Capital), where she took part in DHVC’s investments in Theta Network and other blockchain projects including OmiseGo, Cosmos/Tendermint and Kyber Network.⁠[2]

On January 15, 2019, the crypto outlet Unchained introduced “Dovey Wan and Eric Meltzer of Primitive Ventures” and published Wan’s written answers. They covered Korean trading volume in 2017 and its change during the crypto winter, the “kimchi premium” and possible wash trading on Korean exchanges, Japan’s bitcoin-focused and tightly regulated market, and crypto gaming projects in Asia; the piece noted that Wan sat on the board of, and had invested in, Theta Network.⁠[3]

On March 18, 2024, Dovey Wan announced on Primitive Ventures’ Medium publication that Allen Day was joining as a venture partner. Day holds a PhD in human genetics from UCLA, was chief scientist at MapR and spent 11 years at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, where he founded its web3 team and built BigQuery public datasets for public blockchain data and BlockchainETL. At Primitive Ventures he was to lead areas including the intersection of AI and crypto, decentralized data and compute stacks, and next-generation cryptographic and validation mechanisms.⁠[4]

The same post said Primitive Ventures invests its own money as an evergreen fund rather than raising outside capital, so it does not use the standard venture capital fee structure; it summed up its thesis as “long substance, short status” and said it backs anonymous founders and crypto-native experiments. It called crypto “the new socioeconomic primitive that will redefine individual sovereignty and financial paradigms.”⁠[4]

On January 24, 2025, an anonymous author who said they represented a project that had sought cooperation with BinanceBinanceBinance is a global digital asset trading and multi-asset financial platform launched in 2017 and co-founded by Changpeng Zhao and Yi He. Its business has expanded from spot trading to derivatives, wallets, payments, a public blockchain ecosystem, market data, traditional securities, and artificial intelligence interfaces; its history also includes security incidents, regulatory enforcement across multiple jurisdictions, a 2023 U.S. criminal settlement, and subsequent compliance restructuring.Open the full entry or Binance Labs published a long Medium post accusing Binance Labs and related executives of running back doors in investments and listings. It named five women including Dovey Wan and alleged that Wan used a claimed close friendship with Yi HeYi HeYi He is a Chinese entrepreneur and the co-founder and co-chief executive officer of Binance. She helped found OKCoin and served as vice president of Yixia Technology, joined Binance in 2017 to take charge of business, brand, and operations, and has also led Binance Labs.Open the full entry to help projects get listed; the allegations were unverified. On February 2, 2025, Yi He posted that Binance Labs operates independently and said people were exploiting claimed personal ties to her.⁠[5]

On February 4, 2025, Wan denied the claims in an AMA, saying she had no close personal relationship with Yi He and that one of them was an investor and the other a founder. She said Primitive Ventures had invested in Hooked Protocol at a $30 million valuation, with the same token unlock schedule as other venture firms, starting at the end of 2023, and no special treatment; she also said she had been surprised when Binance announced the HOOK listing.⁠[6]

On May 27, 2025, SharpLink Gaming announced a $425 million private placement to launch an EthereumEthereumEthereum is an open, general-purpose smart contract blockchain that launched in 2015, and its native asset is ether (ETH). The project was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and advanced jointly by eight co-founders; the network now uses proof of stake and centers on the EVM, the account model, a rollup scaling roadmap, and the open EIP process.Open the full entry treasury strategy, led by Consensys; the participants it named included ParaFi Capital, Electric Capital, Pantera CapitalPantera CapitalPantera Capital is an investment management firm focused on digital assets and the blockchain industry, founded by Dan Morehead in 2003. Its investments span corporate equity, early-stage tokens and liquid digital assets, and it manages a bitcoin fund, venture funds and multi-strategy blockchain funds.Open the full entry and Primitive Ventures.⁠[7]

On July 18, 2025, MEI Pharma announced a private placement of about $100 million to start a Litecoin treasury strategy, selling 29,239,767 shares of common stock or pre-funded warrants at $3.42 each, with Charlie LeeCharlie LeeCharlie Lee is a software engineer, the creator of Litecoin, and the head of the Litecoin Foundation. While working at Google, he designed and fairly launched Litecoin in 2011; he later joined Coinbase and has continued to help coordinate Litecoin protocol upgrades such as SegWit and MWEB.Open the full entry and GSR as lead investors and participation from the Litecoin Foundation; the other investors it named included MOZAYYX, ParaFi, Hivemind and Primitive. MEI Pharma appears in the portfolio on the Primitive Ventures website.⁠[8][1]

On August 5, 2025, The Block recorded that MEI Pharma had bought $100 million of Litecoin as a treasury asset and listed Primitive among its investors.⁠[9]

On August 25, 2025, Sharps Technology announced a private investment in public equity of more than $400 million, aiming to build the largest SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry digital asset treasury; the investors it named included ParaFi, Pantera, FalconXFalconXFalconX is a digital asset prime brokerage for institutional clients, providing crypto asset trading, financing, custody, and other services; in 2025 it acquired 21Shares, an issuer of crypto exchange-traded products.Open the full entry, RockawayX, CoinFund, Arrington CapitalArrington CapitalArrington Capital is a firm that invests in digital assets and Web3 and manages funds including Arrington XRP Capital Fund; since 2025, through that fund, it has served as sponsor of the special purpose acquisition company Armada Acquisition Corp. II, driving its merger with the XRP treasury company Evernorth.Open the full entry and Primitive Ventures. On August 28 the company announced that the placement had closed, again listing Primitive Ventures among the subscribers.⁠[10][11]

In early November 2026, a screenshot from a social group chat circulated on X, touching on Yi He’s personal relationship with Dovey Wan and Binance listings. On November 2, Yi He said she knew Primitive Ventures co-founder Dovey Wan but that the two were not close friends; she said that not even her own mother could get a project listed on Binance through personal relations alone, and that if a project had been listed that way, it would show Binance’s own review capability was insufficient.⁠[12]

The Primitive Ventures website describes the firm as a partner-owned global investment firm that invests its own capital across public and private markets in technology it expects to become foundational, under the tagline “Conviction before consensus,” with a presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and San Francisco. Its team list comprises founder Dovey Wan, investment partners Allen Day and Yiting Shan, liquidity partner Sean Tan, chief operating officer Claude Bronte and research manager Wildon Wu; Shan focuses on AI and the systems it enables, and Wu researches Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain.⁠[1]

Primitive Ventures’ Medium publication describes the firm as “A frontier prop investment firm with mandate to fund a better future for both IQIQIQ is a blockchain project that grew out of the online encyclopedia Everipedia. It runs IQ.wiki, an encyclopedia of blockchain and crypto assets, and launched the IQ token in Seoul in 2018; in 2025, IQ and Frax launched KRWQ, a stablecoin pegged to the South Korean won.Open the full entry 50 and IQ 150.”⁠[13]

The portfolio on the Primitive Ventures website includes projects such as Cosmos, Monad, Berachain, Blast, Nansen, Movement, Ethena, Fluent, Drift, DODO, Impossible Finance, Sentient, Optimism, StarkWare, Particle Network, Messari, Irys, Merlin, GMX, BounceBit, Orderly, LooksRare, OpenMind, Hooked and SpaceComputer, as well as listed companies including SharpLink, Sharps Technology and MEI Pharma.⁠[1]