John Squire on the $100M Blockchain VC Playbook and Crypto’s 2026 Reset

John Squire on the $100M Blockchain VC Playbook and Crypto’s 2026 Reset

John Squire spent his early career in chemical engineering, then moved into tech, founded and sold several companies, put in time at IBM on global-scale data work, and eventually made the jump to venture capital. Now he’s a general partner at Blockchain Ventures, writing checks into early-stage blockchain and fintech founders.

In this conversation, John walks through how the firm deploys about $100 million a year, why they keep new check sizes in a specific range, and why the best deals almost never come through cold inbound pitches. Most of their sourcing happens at conferences and through networks the partners have built over decades.

He talks about the kind of founder they back: people who start with a real-world problem and build a solution for it. The ones chasing cool tech in search of a use case usually don’t make it. John uses Figure and the Provenance blockchain as a working example, pointing to the volume and efficiency gains from tokenizing HELOCs and other financial products on-chain.

Then he gives his read on where the industry sits in 2026. The tourists have left. The operators running things now are professional executives and seasoned founders focused on actual commercialization. John sees blockchain becoming a core layer of the internet and explains why mainstream adoption is closer than most people think.

Worth a listen if you want to understand where serious VC money is flowing in crypto right now.