Event Recap - InnovateDenver 2026, Presented by The Tie
On Tuesday, February 18th, 2026, The Tie hosted InnovateDenver during ETHDenver week. Fourteen panels. Speakers from Dragonfly, Haun Ventures, CoinFund, Coinbase Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, J.P. Morgan, S&P Global, Broadridge, Gemini, and dozens of other funds and foundations.
Here's what the room kept coming back to.
1. Crypto venture has a math problem
Three panels hit this from different angles, and it was the clearest theme of the day.
The $500M fund panel opened with the question nobody dances around anymore: can mega funds actually return capital to LPs in this cycle? Partners from Dragonfly, Archetype, and Greenfield were honest about it. Exit paths are narrower. Token launches have been underwhelming. M&A is picking up but not fast enough to change the math for most portfolios. The playbook of backing a project, waiting for TGE, and riding the wave doesn't work the way it used to.
The post-TGE panel got more specific. Speakers from Haun Ventures, Neoclassic Capital, No Limit Holdings, and Outerlands Capital walked through the mechanics: supply overhang, emissions schedules, and the persistent gap between private round valuations and where tokens actually trade. The debate was whether this is a token design problem or a structural one. If VC fund timelines and incentives are fundamentally misaligned with how liquid markets work, better vesting schedules alone won't fix it.
Then the VC vs. liquid funds panel pointed to the imbalance underneath all of it. Venture funds have significantly more capital than liquid funds. That means private investors are setting the price for assets that liquid managers then have to trade around. Speakers from Arca, Castle Island Ventures, Hashed, and Blockchain Capital wrestled with whether that dynamic can change, or whether the market just keeps favoring early-stage participants.
The capital is there. The problem is that the pipeline from fundraise to public market keeps producing bad outcomes for everyone who isn't in the first round.
2. The industry still doesn't have a shared language for what's investable
The metrics panel and the equity vs. tokens panel arrived at the same place from opposite directions: there's no consensus on how to evaluate a crypto project.
TVL is still the most-cited metric in the industry, and speakers from XSY, 6th Man Ventures, and ether.fi made the case that it's also the least reliable. Revenue sounds like the obvious alternative, but it often doesn't flow to token holders. Buybacks are popular right now. The panel questioned whether they're real value accrual or just a story that works until it doesn't. Community is the one everybody calls a moat but nobody can measure.
On the capital structure side, some speakers got into why tokens are structurally hard to underwrite. They don't compound the way equity does. The reinvestment mechanisms don't exist. The panel laid out three possible futures: tokens develop equity-like properties, tokenized securities eventually replace native tokens, or the two permanently coexist in separate lanes. No one was confident in a single answer, but there was agreement that the current ambiguity is keeping institutional allocators on the sidelines for anything outside the top tier.
For institutions, this is the core issue. They want to deploy capital into crypto. They just don't have reliable frameworks for deciding where.
3. Most onchain growth is still subsidized and the industry knows it
The airdrops panel started with the moderator saying he could only think of two airdrops that clearly worked: Hyperliquid and Uniswap. That set the tone. Speakers from Kronos Research, Monarq Asset Management, ConsenSys Mesh, and Wintermute got into the mechanics of why incentive programs keep failing. They attract people who are there for the reward, not the product. When the rewards stop, the users disappear. That's a problem for institutions trying to underwrite growth numbers.
The chain moat debate showed the same dynamic at the infrastructure level. Leaders from Ava Labs, Hedera, NEAR, and Monad were asked: if your chain got forked tomorrow with no switching costs, how many users stick around? Some of the answers were more honest than the audience expected. Points programs and grants are driving a real share of current onchain activity, and a few panelists said as much. Technology matters, but distribution and builder loyalty matter more, and nobody has cracked how to build those without subsidies.
Speakers from CoinFund, Further Ventures, Borderless Capital, and Grayscale added to this during the narratives panel. Protocols that do well over time tend to be the ones that can tune out market noise and focus on hiring, shipping product, and managing capital. The ones chasing the narrative of the month usually pay for it later.
The industry has gotten very good at manufacturing activity. The harder problem is proving it's real. Institutions are watching closely, and they can tell the difference.
4. Institutional crypto is getting specific
This is where the afternoon conversations felt different from a year ago. Less theoretical, more about what's actually working.
The institutional trade panel brought speakers from Stacks Endowment, Strive, J.P. Morgan, and Reserve together to talk about what comes after ETFs. Tokenized equities, structured products, and the composability that onchain rails unlock for financial engineering.
The tokenization panel drew clear lines. Tokenized treasuries at $10 billion are a proven use case. Crypto-native yield products like Pendle and Ethena work. Real estate tokenization, despite years of attempts, doesn't. The panel's conclusion was straightforward: if a token doesn't convey real rights or create new market behavior, it's not worth building.
Privacy came up as infrastructure, not ideology. Speakers from Canton Foundation, Midnight Foundation, Aleo, Matter Labs, and Paradex talked about what institutions actually need to operate onchain. Not total privacy, not total transparency, but selective confidentiality for specific workflows. The tech is mature enough now that pilots are realistic.
The day closed with stablecoin yield, moderated by The Tie's Sacha Ghebali. Speakers from Gemini, Re7 Capital, Triton Capital, and Qapture walked through what "institutional-grade" actually means. The message: as more capital flows in, the easy returns compress. Know what you're getting paid for and what has to go right for it to continue. Don't chase the number.
5. AI and crypto is further along than the skeptics think, but not where the narrative says it is
The AI panel was productive because it didn't pretend everything at the intersection is working. Speakers from CoinFund, Coinbase Ventures, LongHash Ventures, and 0G Labs pointed to decentralized compute and agent commerce as the areas closest to real traction. But they were also clear that not every part of the AI stack needs to be decentralized, and that forcing crypto into problems where centralized solutions work fine doesn't help anyone.
The more useful part of the conversation was about what decentralized AI looks like when it stops trying to replicate centralized models. The argument was that the interesting outcomes won't come from doing the same thing on decentralized rails. They'll come from use cases that centralized systems aren't designed to serve.
The speculation vs. utility panel picked up a related question. Speakers from Pantera Capital, ME Foundation, Succinct, Polkadot Capital Group, and Broadridge debated whether crypto can sustain itself on utility alone or whether speculative cycles are just part of how this market grows. The fact that "utility" meant something different to every panelist probably says more about where the industry is than any individual answer did.
The Day Overall
People showed up to InnovateDenver to compare notes and pressure-test ideas, not to hear predictions. The questions that drove the day are hard ones. Can venture economics sustain themselves? What makes crypto investable? How do you separate real adoption from subsidized activity? These don't have clean answers yet, and the panels didn't pretend otherwise.
That's what made the conversations useful. The room was willing to be honest about what's not working, and that honesty is what makes the optimism about what is working actually credible.
Thank you to our speakers, sponsors, blockchain partners, and attendees. We're looking forward to what comes next.