Boris Revsin, managing partner of Tribe Capital, believes that DeFi projects can recover some of its former glory. I expect DeFi to have a major resurgence towards the end of this year or early next year, Revsin told journalists. He believes that a first wave of DeFi regulation in the U.S. will push DeFi projects to operate in more open zones such as Dubai and Singapore. Infrastructure projects such as layer 1 and layer 2 blockchains and rollup technology could continue to flourish in the U.S.
Revsin’s origin story began at age five when his parents arrived in the U.S. as Jewish refugees from Russia. He grew up in a computer science household and spent a couple of years formally pursuing that path himself at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before dropping out to work as a programmer for Mitt Romney’s first presidential campaign in 2008. Revsin then went on to co-found gamified marketing firm Dailybreak; VentureApp, the precursor to tenant engagement platform HqO; and Game Theory Group, an investment firm that backed early-stage blockchain companies and wrote and sold research reports.
In late 2018, the crowdfunding platform Republic acquired the team behind Game Theory Group and Revsin was brought on to head its new Republic Capital arm. By the time Revsin left in April 2022, Republic Capital had raised more than $600 million, held about $1 billion in assets under management and had invested in more than 80 startups.
Revsin then took a role at Tribe Capital as a managing partner overseeing the $96-million early-stage Tribe Crypto Fund I and its early-stage incubation project, as well as a partner on the firm’s approximately $400 million in equity investments. Tribe Capital has a data scientist-driven quantitative approach to startup evaluations and focuses on Series A to Series D investments.
Revsin said Tribe is most interested in investing in products and protocols that become part of the developer stack. He believes that ample developer tools lead to more projects and the potential for more Web2 users to migrate to Web3. The world has changed in the last six years, and I think the next six years will usher in that massive developer group that we need in order to be a $10 trillion industry, he said.