Announcing Our Investment in Inversion Labs: Bringing Real-World GDP Onchain

We’re excited to announce our investment in Inversion Labs’ $26.5 million seed round alongside Dragonfly, VanEck, Faction, ParaFi, and other leading investors across the crypto ecosystem. Founded by Santiago R. Santos, Inversion is building a new blockchain purpose-built for bringing real GDP onchain.

At Metalayer Ventures, we have a deeply held belief that crypto technologies have the power to transform how every person and business interacts with value and money. We are beginning to see this transformation take hold in many places such as the payments industry, where stablecoins are reinventing how money moves across the globe. However, for all the progress the crypto industry has made, much of the ecosystem still has a deep focus on speculative use cases. What has lagged behind is the adoption of the technologies by the mass market, and the migration of real financial assets onto blockchain rails.

Inversion flips this script on its head: rather than waiting for legacy businesses to adopt blockchain technologies, they acquire real operating businesses, and then bring them directly onchain. By moving these businesses onto a crypto-native stack, they can drive operational efficiency, expand margins, and introduce new crypto-enabled fintech products—ultimately scaling to tens of millions of users. This is a design mechanism we haven’t seen attempted elsewhere: blending the economics and control of private equity with the scalability, efficiency, and novelty of crypto infrastructure.

Few people are better positioned to take on this challenge than Inversion’s founder, Santiago R. Santos. As an early partner at ParaFi and personal investor in over 150 projects, he has been one of the most active investors in the space of the past decade. His experience at the intersection of financial services, operational strategy, and crypto infrastructure, makes him uniquely suited to build a protocol designed to power this next wave of adoption.

The opportunity is massive. There are trillions of dollars' of worth of economic activity that can be improved and modernized with blockchain technology. By flipping the script, Inversion is putting itself in prime position to catalyze and capture the next wave of growth in the crypto industry. We’re thrilled to back Santiago, Suz, and the broader Inversion Labs team as they work to bring the world’s GDP onchain.