YC sent a list of directions for Crypto startups
Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News
The term "Crypto" is experiencing a subtle situation: some investment institutions are removing it from their signs, while others are incorporating it into new startup solicitations.
On October 22, a16z announced that a16z Crypto would be renamed a16z Frontier. A week later, Y Combinator (YC) shared a "Crypto Request for Startups" (CRFS) through guest partner Nemil Dalal.
One is expanding boundaries, while the other is clarifying solicitation directions. At first glance, it seems like two Silicon Valley investment institutions are providing different answers to the crypto industry.
Although YC primarily focuses on early-stage startups for acceleration and investment, a16z covers a broader range of investment stages. The actions of both still form an interesting contrast: they are both re-discussing what kind of businesses can be established with blockchain.
Stablecoins, payments, financing, asset trading, and AI Agents that perform tasks for people have become the main characters in this new script.
### a16z Removes Its Sign, YC Lists Its Needs
First, let's clarify a fact: the renaming of a16z crypto does not mean a withdrawal from crypto investment.
Chris Dixon, managing partner of a16z crypto, clearly stated in the announcement that the new fund will expand its investment scope from cryptocurrency startups to a broader range of frontier technology startups, while continuing to invest in crypto and related enterprises, and advocating for reasonable crypto regulation.
Chris Dixon explained that as blockchain enters the products of fintech companies and traditional institutions, the infrastructure is gradually retreating to the background. Defining a company by what it does is more meaningful than defining it by what technology it uses.
YC's latest Crypto Request for Startups (CRFS) solicitation directly lists the financial problems it hopes entrepreneurs will solve and provides a clear set of crypto startup directions:
* AI Financing: Simplifying the financing process for AI projects using blockchain technology;
* Stablecoins: Emerging dollar stablecoins, other fiat stablecoins, and new digital banks serving specific customer groups;
* Trading: Asset tokenization, and trading venues and interfaces built around new assets, derivatives, or different regions;
* Agent-related: Utilizing Agents to trade crypto and other assets, and building financial service APIs for them.
YC also assesses that over the past year, the motivation for crypto adoption has come more from institutional financial needs rather than consumer speculation. The industry's adoption rate is expected to enter a phase of exponential growth.
Nemil Dalal, who shared the list, has a corresponding business background. His personal website indicates that he is currently a guest partner at YC, has been involved in promoting the development of USDC, and has been responsible for asset strategy, staking, and developer products at Coinbase.
What is noteworthy about this list is that YC has broken down "optimism for Crypto" into specific businesses.
In fact, YC has already laid the groundwork for attention to these directions. As early as September 2025, in a joint startup solicitation with Coinbase, YC had already listed stablecoins, tokenization, and trading as focus areas and described the vision of rebuilding the financial system with code as "Fintech 3.0."
The paths of the two institutions are not the same: YC is looking for specific businesses in the crypto field, while a16z is expanding its investment boundaries to more technology areas. However, from these two texts, a common question can be distilled: after using blockchain, what do customers actually gain?
### The Next Challenge for Stablecoins: Finding Who Will Use Them Continuously
YC's requirements for stablecoin entrepreneurs are quite direct.
For dollar stablecoins, they need to find new user or merchant groups and design effective distribution strategies; for non-dollar stablecoins, they need to choose currencies that indeed have demand; for digital banks, they need to serve customers who have not been adequately served, such as global freelancers and cross-border enterprises, while effectively managing risks.
Among these requirements, the most noteworthy is "distribution": how the product reaches users and how it enters their daily usage scenarios.
Issuing a token only completes part of the product. Who is willing to hold it, why would merchants accept it, how does the money enter, and how does it return to local bank accounts all need to be solved by startups one by one.
In the projects supported by YC, this kind of thinking can already be seen.
The Fire Wallet from the Fall 2026 batch positions itself as a non-custodial stablecoin wallet while providing payment processing, invoicing, web collection, and fiat deposit and withdrawal functions. The team also proposed managing independent sub-wallets for different Agents.
The competition for products here has already delved into billing, collection, and fund management. Whether it can integrate into the customer's business processes becomes a more specific test beyond wallet functionality.
YC itself is also trying to use such payment tools. In February of this year, it announced that funded startups could choose to receive a $500,000 investment in stablecoins. The stablecoin has transformed from an investment theme into a method of delivering investment funds.
From this, an observation can be derived: the value of stablecoin entrepreneurship may increasingly be reflected in continuous usage.
### What Tokenization Really Needs to Solve: What Happens After Assets Are On-Chain?
YC's vision for future financial markets can be roughly divided into two layers.
The first layer is to move existing assets on-chain, including stocks, debts, commodities, and property rights. The second layer is to issue new assets that have been difficult to organize economically in the past, such as equity in startups and small securities under $10,000.
YC believes that the latter may become more interesting over time and anticipates that trading, lending, derivatives, and other supporting services will emerge around these assets.
The focus of this logic is: what can be done after asset issuance? Are there trading channels? Can they be used as collateral? Can they be invoked by other financial products?
In YC's projects, different forms of trading entry have already appeared.
Mochatrade from the Spring 2026 batch allows Indian users to trade perpetual contracts linked to the prices of U.S. stocks, Pre-IPO, commodities, etc., using rupees, and supports rupee deposits via UPI. Its official website clearly states that users are trading price contracts, do not hold underlying stocks, and do not gain shareholder voting rights as a result.
Arbital from the Summer 2026 batch attempts to concentrate perpetual contracts, memes, stocks, and market-making strategies into the same entry and plans to develop mobile social trading products. According to its YC page, approximately 2,700 traders used the platform in the first seven months after launch, with a cumulative trading volume of $1.35 billion. The Arbital team also has a background in crypto trading platforms, with co-founders Karon Pangestu and Steven Mulyawan having served as growth director and head of business development and partnerships for the Asia region at Aevo, respectively, while another co-founder, Vincent Owen Toniwa, built and operated Aevo's backend and infrastructure.
These cases suggest that around asset tokenization, entrepreneurial opportunities will extend to how users discover and trade assets. As the variety of on-chain assets increases, trading entry, liquidity, and user experience become more important.
### AI in This List Needs Money and May Also Use Money
YC places AI financing at the forefront of the list: using blockchain to make capital raising in the AI field easier.
This direction captures the funding needs of AI but does not provide specific product structures or clarify whether to issue equity tokens, computing power securities, or other financing tools, so it cannot be inferred that YC is encouraging a particular token issuance model.
A clearer direction is to build financial interfaces for Agents.
YC believes that Agents will become important financial participants; in addition to directly calling blockchain APIs, they also need to combine different services, such as fiat deposits and withdrawals. This means that entrepreneurs need to organize complex financial processes into operations that machines can reliably call.
In an article titled "Make Something Agents Want" in July of this year, Nemil Dalal discussed this transition: Agents need structured information, clear interface feedback, and execution infrastructure such as wallets and identities. He also emphasized that the movement of funds requires corresponding policies and approval processes.
From a product perspective, this means that beyond interfaces, control capabilities are also needed: How much can Agents spend? Which operations require approval? How to stop after a failure? How to audit transactions?
The Verdict Machine supported by YC utilizes AI to assess and handle the security issues of on-chain operations for financial institutions. Its product introduction states that it will evaluate proposed transactions in conjunction with the institution's on-chain environment and current policies before execution.
This suggests an opportunity worth paying attention to: as more transactions are initiated by programs, authorization, limits, checks, and records may become as important as trading entry. The more convenient automatic execution is, the clearer the boundaries for fund usage need to be.
### Conclusion
The directions listed by YC ultimately need to answer specific questions: Can payments be more convenient? Can financing be more efficient? Can trading be smoother? Can Agents reliably complete financial operations?
For entrepreneurs, opportunities lie within these needs, and so do the challenges. Technology opens up new possibilities, while products need to prove that these possibilities are worth continuous use by customers, and even worth paying for.
Of course, YC's endorsement or support is not a guarantee of success; not all crypto projects it has supported in the past have made it to the end. This list provides directions for finding opportunities, but whether a sustainable business can be established still needs to be tested by the market.