Published on September 11, 2025
Watch the full panel discussion on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel
Panel discussion with Evan Szu (Co-Founder & CEO at Gamma Prime), Colin Allison (Managing Partner at Konect Partners), David Norris (CFO & CSO at Near Foundation), Shubham Badola (Manager Strategic Partnerships at SuiHub), and Kirubakaran Reddy (Founder & Investor at AlphablockZ Ventures)
In this episode, you can see a discussion with industry leaders from various ventures engaged in Web3 and blockchain development. The discussion covers the evolution from meme coins to more substantial technology applications, focusing on venture investments, ecosystem development, and future trends. Key themes include building projects with real-world applications, improving scalability, enhancing user experience, and fostering vibrant community ecosystems. The session wraps up with thoughts on the current market and its impact on driving meaningful innovations.
Evan (Gamma Prime)
Again, for those of you that haven’t seen me before, I’m Evan, one of the co-founders here at GammaPrime. We have been talking, at least the panels I’ve been doing, at several different levels. We’ve had hedge funds, people that are actively trading. Then we’ve got secondary markets. And this group, they’re the builders. They’re the ones that actually stick their fingers in the mud.
Come on up, Dr. Sweet. Please come on up, join us. And build.
Now, building doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re directly involved with companies. It could also be through venture investment. It could be through specific ecosystems. But we’re going to be getting their particular perspectives on how things have been shifting in that space.
As you know, we’re not in meme coin land anymore. So what’s coming next? What’s replacing that? We always like to say, where do you think the puck is going? You may not be right, but you have to have a plan. And that’s going to be the theme for this panel.
So before we start, I’d like to ask each of you to introduce yourselves and tell me a little bit about your project as well as your background.
Colin Allison (Konnect Partners)
Hey, my name’s Colin. I’m a partner at Konnect Ventures. We’re a venture studio and advisory firm. We work a little differently than most typical VCs or venture incubators. We work exclusively with family offices.
We identify, based on their current portfolio, assets, and connections, what are the businesses that we could build where we have an unfair advantage by partnering with them—not just for their capital, but for all of the other access they have.
We focus on Web3 because that’s where we believe the future really is and where we can create the most value with these partners. But everything we build has to have some sort of real-world application and has to create real value outside of Web3 itself. That’s the lens I look at it through.
David Norris (Near Foundation)
Hi there, my name is David Norris. I am CFO and Chief Strategy Officer at Near Foundation. We work with Near Protocol, which has three main components: a super-fast, scalable, sharded blockchain; chain abstraction and signatures that allow interaction with other chains, enabling cross-chain swaps seamlessly; and we’re building the future of AI agents right now.
Our job at the foundation is to nurture the ecosystem and make sure we have fantastic partners to further its growth.
Kirubakaran (AlphablockZ Ventures)
Hi everyone, this is Karan from AlphaBlocks. At AlphaBlocks, we have an early-stage fund and liquid token fund. We invest in early-stage projects as well as projects already listed in the market.
We also have a venture studio, a venture building arm under which we build projects in Web3.
Shubham (Sui Hub)
Hi, I’m Shubham. I lead partnerships at Sui Hub. We are essentially the venture analyst wing, or what we call the capital deployment wing, for Sui.
We have a very founders-first approach. We help project founders get deployed on Sui chain. Our headquarters are here in Dubai, in Expo City, so feel free to come say hi anytime.
We want to invest a lot into early-stage projects and founders who want to build value and scale on our layer one, Sui chain, and then eventually develop more into the ecosystem side of things.
We have Move as our prime language, and we focus on educational content, helping founders integrate easier on chain with engineering support and marketing support. That’s what we do, and we hope to expand more as the conversation flows and as we find more great projects to build on the chain.
Evan
I always say that deployment is king, because you’re putting your money where your mouth is. You can’t have an opinion that isn’t backed by that action.
This is why prediction markets work so well. Because if you watch news, people all have all sorts of opinions. But are you willing to put your money on that?
So what are you guys putting money towards now? There’s been a pretty big shift in the way capital deployment has been. Where do you see things going? Where are you looking forward in terms of the next stage?
Colin
When I first got involved in blockchain and Web3, it was 2014. I was working with a lot of the high street banks in the UK. We came up with all kinds of use cases for the banks that utilized the technology.
The business leaders would tell us, this makes a ton of sense. It would save us money. It would solve this process. But when we got more advanced in the proposals, they would say, well, we can never take this to the board. Why? Because it’s blockchain. It’s a dirty word.
So even though they agreed it was a great solution, they wouldn’t take it forward.
I think that has fundamentally flipped now. If you are not thinking about your solution around blockchain, then the board’s going to get mad at you. That’s the most exciting part, because now all of these ideas we’ve been sitting on, we can bring them to market.
Because we’re a venture studio, we’re at the earliest stage—literally idea stage or even pre-idea. Here’s a problem we want to solve. How are we going to do it? We have to look beyond cycles.
It’s always been frustrating. When we raise for our portfolio companies, we have a long-term vision and understand where a venture is going, but people are focused on the six-month flip. What’s the short-term cycle? Is it going to get traction, narrative, liquidity?
But now, with the market bottoming out in terms of liquidity, people have seen previous cycles and understand what may or may not last. Now both the capital and the people using the technology are lining up and saying: is it real utility? Is it driving revenue? Is there a sustainable model beyond speculation?
That’s gratifying, and I think it means we’ll see a lot of new and different propositions coming to the market. What those are, we don’t necessarily know.
David
I think we’re seeing a shift right now. There’s been a big PVP game going on with everyone fighting over the same projects, some questionable value coming through some of them. There’s been a very long tail of projects that got grants and disappeared across Web3.
Now we’re really seeing a fight for quality. We’ve noticed from our roadmap—we’ve always been trying to do frontier tech, building what needs to be done for 10 years’ time. That comes with risk.
We’ve seen what’s happening in AI, huge companies building powerful models that can actually be dangerous for our future in terms of monetizing you as the product. So we’ve accelerated our roadmap to focus on bringing a rival for that within Near.
We see AI agents as a major driver of the future. If we want systems and applications that work for you as an individual, then only a few players can do that. That’s why we’re investing a lot of money there.
We believe the sweet spot is between Web3, blockchain specifically, and AI. That’s where we’re putting resources, making sure as a user you don’t care what chain you’re on, or if it’s fiat. Agents will work on your behalf.
There’s an unlimited number of use cases—telcos, shopping experiences, and more—that we can lean into. That’s where we see the future going.
Kirubakaran
Yeah, so we are primarily looking at the Web 2.5 sort of a place, which primarily brings you a lot of new user base into the Web3 ecosystem. Plus, also looking at revenue-generating products in Web3, which are not just going around narratives that might stay for two, five, or six months. The industry can thrive if there are more products coming out with a revenue angle to them.
How does the value accrual happen on their token? And what sort of revenue can they build on their product? That’s another key thing for Web3 to go a long way from here. So we are looking at revenue plays. We are looking at Web 2.5 plays, where we can bring in more users into the Web3 ecosystem.
Narratives are coming and going very fast in Web3. They don’t stay for more than two or three months nowadays. VCs also learn now not to go behind narratives and keep investing in projects for a short cycle. There has to be a longer cycle to get better returns. VCs are also doing more safe rounds, like safe plus token warrants rounds, which give revenue potential and the option to liquidate equity in later stages. That is also one new thing we are seeing, primarily this year.
Shubham
I’ll try to answer this question more from an ecosystem perspective rather than capital deployment, because I believe from an investment lens, capital deployment is not the mode anymore. Real value is in the projects, and that’s what we’re trying to help you do here at SuiHub: helping new projects come into play.
You utilize Move language, because compared to Solidity—which has years of history and a lot of network information—Move is new. We’re trying to make it more scalable, interoperable, secure, with high throughput speed that projects can use. We want to help these projects scale from a very nascent stage, from pre-idea to deployment on our chain, and utilize the technology we have built. We also want to help projects go cross-chain, because that’s going to be the future of Web3 in terms of more users coming, utilizing the space, and driving more value.
From that perspective, we recently launched our own accelerator program, which did pretty well. We have plans to build more in the space with a focus on education, launching workshops for Move, with engineers directly from Mysten Labs in Dubai to help support this plan. Talking about new narratives, we want to see how we can help each project in its own way, apart from getting more users on chain or raising TVL. Of course, there are metrics to check off, but we’re looking at a broad plan for Web3, and that’s how we approach it at SuiHub.
Evan
That makes a lot of sense. Let’s continue on the ecosystem theme because that’s an organizing layer, right? That’s the next chunk that, if you were to throw this into an unsupervised learning model, it would come up with: ecosystems and how they interact with each other, cross-chain. What are you seeing from that perspective, or where do you see the direction going?
Colin
I don’t necessarily look at building ecosystems, but I try to tap into them. If we’re building a project, we need to pick the chain we’re going to partner with. For me, that’s more about depth than breadth. I don’t necessarily look at all the different activities and how big the community is. I want to know: are there real people on the other side that I can build a relationship with? Can we build something together? Can they put me in touch with people that will make us successful?
Engaging with different ecosystem builders and leads, I think that’s where things are going. It’s much less protective now. It’s not, “You’re working with those people, so we won’t work with you.” It’s more: “Let’s see what we can do to integrate, to bridge, maybe not now, but when you’re ready.”
David
Community itself is vital. They’re the lifeblood of any ecosystem, supporting each other, dogfooding projects, providing rapid feedback, and pointing out gaps in your strategy. It’s a great sounding board.
The reality is, no one in Web3 has solved this yet. We talk about getting a billion people into Web3, but we’re far from it. The industry constantly gets wrong the education of the masses, and building products with real utility that are easy to use. Some people are doing a fantastic job in pockets, but we need to nurture that across Web3.
I believe we need to look after our own ecosystem, making sure it’s healthy and tokens are healthy, but the way we win is to unite and find ways for new people to enter the industry. Abstract away the complexity. Most people don’t want to jump through 20 multi-sigs or bridges. The next wave should come from people who don’t even know they’re using Web3 but just love the product. UX, education, distribution—if we can nail those, we win.
Kirubakaran
When more Web2 or new audiences come to the ecosystem, you need chain abstraction or multi-chain features, or wallets with better UX, to make adoption easier. If someone hears there are 100+ chains, they’ll be confused. They can’t even use MetaMask properly right now.
So when building an ecosystem, you need proper tools to enable users to onboard without friction. UX, chain abstraction, cross-chain functionalities are required because as more people come, there will be more chains, and it has to be seamless. Ecosystems also need to give value back to users. Products should give value similar to what they’re used to—for example, Agoda, but in Web3, with loyalty programs or rewards. That kind of ecosystem can bring more Web2 users into Web3.
Shubham
Definitely, I couldn’t agree more. From the perspective of infrastructure, there can’t be more emphasis on that, and also scalability becomes a major factor. But that’s what we’re trying to do—we’re trying to skip the hindrances for, let’s say, any Web2 builder who’s coming into the Web3 space.
Move, again, as a language, we built it in a way that we want to solve the UI problem that basically users face on a daily basis while they tend to move away from Web3 because they think it’s too complex. And the entire point of this is, again, supporting the founders at the very ground level where they can not only focus more on the product but also get help with the entire engineering support, making them more part of the ecosystem as a whole.
We understand what founders and teams face in terms of challenges in the ecosystem. Along with that, we have come a long way in building a great community for ourselves, which plays a huge part in terms of guidance and keeping the movement forward. But that being said, scalability is a huge challenge that we’re trying to solve for a lot of people. That’s why the entire focus area we’ve built is for these projects to come in and get that guidance.
It’s not like we sort of have a great barrier for them or we charge a certain fee—there’s nothing like that. We just want to help the ecosystem grow and expand faster into more areas. We want to focus on more developers, more users, and help them build and utilize this technology that we have built for them as a whole. And that’s what we do.
Evan
See, this is why I love a bear market, because the conversations totally change. You remember crypto conferences a couple of years ago? It was all about what’s hot and what’s buzzing and hypey. Now it’s: what can we build that people are actually gonna use, that’s sticky, that has associated revenue.
It’s like back to real business or something like that. And I think the pendulum swings, right? And this is our time. This is the time for people that have a sober view of what is the frank benefit of this. What’s gonna be sticky and generating revenue five to seven years from now, not five to seven months from now? And this is what happens when they say the tide goes out—you find out who’s swimming naked.
So we at Gamma Prime love a bear market because it’s our type of game. I’ll be doing a keynote in about 45 minutes, so I’ll just give you a teaser on it. The beginning of the keynote is: there’s a huge 400 kilo grizzly bear and I’m scratching his head. I’m like petting him, saying, “Hey buddy,” because we love bear markets—it’s a real bear. And I think that is also part of the theme of this conference.
It’s very much about actual tokenization of real assets and things that are gonna be of value to the ecosystem long haul. Thanks for letting me rant. We had a minute left, so I just ranted. Thank you, guys. Round of applause for our panelists. Thank you.
