Congratulations to @estebancastano and the @trmlabs team!
Today, we are at a crossroads. As I write this, AI is saving lives by helping doctors identify diseases faster, and making education more accessible to people everywhere. It’s also being used to inflict harm on a global scale. TRM’s AI-in-Crime Adoption Index found that, in 2026, criminal adoption of AI rose 40% year over year. Today’s threat actors are using AI to execute scams, cyber attacks, and other forms of digital crime at unprecedented speed and scale. In the last 90 days, we’ve also seen a growing number of incidents where AI agents themselves have gone rogue. Business titans and religious leaders are sounding the same alarm: to realize AI’s promise, we need to protect people from its harms. The first line of defense is prevention. Model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are building stronger guardrails, and governments are exploring rules for how AI can be safely used. We call this the prevention layer. At TRM, we’ve spent nearly a decade fighting crime, from fraud and cybercrime to human and wildlife trafficking. That experience has taught us one thing, if nothing else: the prevention layer is essential, but never enough. Criminals will break through. When they do, it’s critical that crimefighters can identify the harm done, find the people and machines behind it, and take action: support the victim, freeze the funds, take down the infrastructure, arrest the offender, disable the agent, dismantle the network. The world needs a new layer of protection. We call it the disruption layer—and it's what we're building, right now. The operating system for crimefighters In 2018, we founded TRM to help crimefighters map how threat actors were using cryptocurrency. We analyzed petabytes of data, mapping over a 100 types of crime. Government agencies and financial institutions worldwide now use TRM to investigate complex criminal networks and combat financial crime. The more cases we supported, however, the more we realized: if we were going to equip crimefighters to disrupt AI-scale crime, crypto would be 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 of the story, but not the 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 story. To build a successful case, investigators must source intelligence not just from the blockchain, but also corporate records, cyber threat data, the dark web, and dozens of other domains. Today’s crimefighters need to use natural language to search across siloed domains, connect the dots and unearth buried insights, automate the rote work, and coordinate with partners across public and private sectors—all while preserving auditability and human judgment. In short, crimefighters need an operating system for the AI era. So we built it. For years, we’ve been developing this OS alongside the investigators who use it. Now, we’ve just announced a new round of funding, valuing TRM at $2 billion, to propel our work—and this fall, we’ll unveil the OS publicly, for the first time. If your organization needs to fight AI-scale crime, please reach out. We want to work with you.
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Castle Island Ventures retweeted
Kintsu is thrilled to announce our $4M seed round, led by @CastleIslandVC! We're building liquid staking on Monad to help catalyze the entire DeFi ecosystem 💜
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Be aware that members of the Castle Island Ventures team are being impersonated on Telegram. We will never ask you for money or schedule meetings via Calendly on Telegram. Don't click links if you are contacted by an impersonator
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Adding to this, we will NEVER ask you to install custom software for a video call or any other reason. We only do calls on Zoom.
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1/3 We are excited to announce our investment in @deltadotnetwork today delta is taking a fundamentally new approach to designing blockchains that dissolves the trade-off between sovereignty and native interoperability
Introducing delta, a network of networks with shared state delta is an integrated system, built from the ground up to break the trade-off between sovereignty and interoperability for developers We’re thrilled to announce $11M in funding to realize this vision
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2/3 On delta, rollup and appchain builders can customize their local environment while sharing state via the decentralized base layer, allowing them to tap into a global set of users and assets
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3/3 Our excitement about delta is amplified by the involvement of @riabhutoria, Operating Partner at Castle Island Ventures, and delta’s COO We look forward to supporting Ria, Ole, Antonis, Myles, and the entire Delta team as they turn this vision into reality!
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Castle Island Ventures retweeted
🚀 We’re excited to announce a major milestone — we’ve raised $75M to take crypto-backed lending to the next level! We’re setting a new benchmark for security, trust and concierge customer service for both individuals and institutions in crypto backed lending. This significant raise includes a $5M equity seed round, co-led by @MarkYusko's Morgan Creek Digital and @CastleIslandVC, with participation from @galaxyhq, @BitGo, and more, as well as a scalable $70M loan financing facility. This facility, funded by @galaxyhq, will help us meet the growing demand for crypto-backed loans on our platform — backed by #Bitcoin, #Ethereum, and #Solana. We’re just getting started! 🌐
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Layer 2's like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base have long been discussed as scaling solutions for Ethereum. However, we believe that L2s are nevertheless dependent on the scalability of their underlying L1. Monad offers a more optimal base layer for future L2's. (3/8)
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Keone Hon, James Hunsaker, Eunice Giarta, and the rest of the Monad team make up one of the strongest protocol teams we've ever encountered. We grow continually more bullish on their ability to execute. (8/8)
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And @intern may be viewed as a master of memes, but he’s also Boston royalty (9/8)
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Castle Island Ventures is thrilled to back @monad_xyz in its latest $225M funding round. Here's why we're excited about Monad. (1/8)
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Monad is a new layer 1 blockchain that introduces parallel execution to the EVM. This will bring superior cost and speed relative to existing EVM L1's. (2/8)
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Castle Island Ventures retweeted
🚨🚨🚨 SPECIAL LIVE EVENT🚨🚨🚨 Thurs Nov 9, 6pm @MattWalshInBos & @nic_carter team up w @intangiblecoins for a very special LIVE recording of On The Brink x Galaxy Brains ~only~ at PubKey We're expecting a packed house so make sure to RSVP 👇 🧡🍻🙏 meetu.ps/e/MCBss/ZyVHm/i
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Castle Island Ventures: Weekly Round-Up: 1/13/2023 castleislandventures.substac…
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Castle Island Ventures retweeted
1/ Hi 👋 we’re JUKE. Our mission is to deepen the connection between fans and the film & TV shows they love by building experiences powered by digital collectibles.
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