Kyle Samani on Multicoin's early Solana bet, DPIN reaching escape velocity, and crypto's political realignment

Summary

Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, joins from Las Vegas where the Bitcoin Vegas conference — billed as the largest crypto conference ever, with more than 30,000 attendees at the Venetian Palazzo — is drawing VP JD Vance, David Sacks, Bo Hines, Michael Saylor, and Senators Lummis and Hagerty, among others.

The political realignment

The central question hanging over the conference is how the U.S. Bitcoin strategic reserve gets funded. Senator Lummis has proposed open-market purchases authorized by Congress, but that bill hasn't moved far. Trump's executive order authorizes "revenue neutral mechanisms" — a phrase nobody has defined publicly yet. Bitcoin L2s and Bitcoin treasury companies are the other live debates; DJT (Truth Social) just announced a $2.5 billion offering, and GameStop announced a large Bitcoin purchase the same day.

Samani argues the crypto industry's current political leverage is a direct consequence of the Biden administration's hostility. His read is that on the margin, crypto dollars, reach, and anger moved the 2024 election in both the presidential race and Congress. That pendulum has now swung hard the other way — he describes the current administration as "extremely accommodating," points to daily positive developments out of the DOJ, SEC, and CFTC, and expects the Genius Act (stablecoin legislation) and market structure legislation to pass within months. His base case is that industry gets most of what it wants, and that clears the path for Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft to embed crypto rails into their operating systems, with AI agents transacting on-chain.

On Democratic realignment, Samani says he's surprised it hasn't happened faster. Multicoin donates selectively to pro-crypto Democrats — he names Ritchie Torres and Senator Gillibrand — but describes the party as a whole as not having genuinely embraced the sector, calling it an own goal given the industry's scale.

DPIN reaching escape velocity

The area Samani flags as underappreciated is Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. Multicoin was an early backer of Helium, a decentralized wireless network where anyone can host a hotspot and earn payment for providing coverage. Helium hit one million customers in a single day this week, its first time ever reaching that threshold.

Multicoin recently invested in De/Zero, a project bringing private fiber to paying customers on a per-byte basis, going live this summer. Samani says it will materially change low-latency trading on public blockchains. He also names Hivemapper and Pipe Network as other DPIN bets the firm is involved in. The appeal, in his framing, is that these use cases are easier for non-crypto natives to grasp than pure financial applications.

The Solana origin story

Samani met Anatoli Yakovenko in San Francisco in April 2018, six months after Multicoin was founded. He read Solana's proof-of-history white paper and found it incomprehensible, but what distinguished Yakovenko from every other L1 founder was his explicit anti-academic stance — no papers, no unsolved computer science problems, just applying existing solutions to make software faster. That pragmatism, honed at Qualcomm and Dropbox, was the signal. Multicoin already disliked Ethereum's trajectory and was actively searching for alternatives, so the investment was less contrarian than it might appear in retrospect.

Multicoin's meta-identification record

Samani frames the firm's edge around early pattern recognition across cycles. He counts three large calls: high-performance blockchains (Solana), DPIN (Helium, Hivemapper), and fully homomorphic encryption as a privacy layer — a deliberate departure from the zero-knowledge proof consensus that has dominated crypto privacy conversations for years. Current focus areas include P2P exchanges in emerging markets with capital controls, giving people access to stablecoins despite local government restrictions, and tracking the secondary and tertiary effects as more stablecoins come on-chain.