We’re excited to welcome David Shang as RockawayX’s new investment partner.

David joins our VC team to oversee liquid asset investments and focus on opportunities in the real-money gaming sector.

Prior to joining RockawayX, David served as a Portfolio Manager at DACM, where he invested primarily across liquid crypto assets. Before that position, he spent time as a long/short tech & consumer equity analyst covering listed small caps and late stage privates at a global hedge fund., worked at J.P. Morgan as an investment banker, and built and exited a consumer beauty business.

We synced with David to learn more about his background, why he chose RockawayX, and where he currently sees the market heading.

What's your background and how did you get into crypto?

I lead liquid investments within the VC team at RockawayX, as well as our coverage of the betting and gaming vertical. I joined from another crypto hedge fund , where I was a portfolio manager investing primarily across liquid crypto assets. Before crypto, I was a long/short tech and consumer analyst at a global multistrat hedge fund, covering listed small-caps and late-stage privates. That's where I learned how to underwrite businesses properly - fundamentals, unit economics, management quality, and a lot of that framework carries directly into how I look at liquid crypto today. Prior to this, I was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan, and earlier on I founded a consumer beauty business that I subsequently exited, so I've sat on the operating side as well.

I made my first crypto investment in 2017, but stayed on the periphery until re-engaging in 2020 during DeFi summer. Since then I've been an active on-chain participant, investing across both liquid and venture, experimenting heavily with DeFi, and launched a project along the way. So I've come at the asset class from most angles - as an investor, builder, and a user, which I think gives me a useful perspective on what's actually going on under the hood, beyond just the screens.

Why RockawayX?

The first is timing and conviction. RockawayX is doubling down at a point in the cycle when most of the industry is retreating. Headcount is up 50% in the past six months, whilst most of our peers are doing the inverse. This tells you something about how the firm sees the next few years, and it's the kind of counter-cyclical posture that historically separates the firms that compound from the ones that don't. It's also just good energy to be around - the industry has plenty of pessimists, so it's nice to be around people who still believe in the asset class.

The second is the breadth of the platform and the ambition behind it. RockawayX isn't trying to be best-in-class at one thing - it's aiming to lead across the board, with operations spread across venture, liquid, market neutral, market making, solvers, infrastructure, and incubation. What this means in practice is more shots on goal, synergies between the arms, and ultimately better odds of finding the things that work. The liquid view sharpens the venture focus, the infra footprint feeds the incubation arm, and so on.

This ties into the entrepreneurial nature of the firm, a term that gets thrown around a lot in this industry - here it actually means something. The studios business incubated an RWA business now sitting at close to $200m in TVL in less than 12 months, offering some of the highest real on-chain yields available today. And this ties right back to the platform point - it's an example of one of those shots on goal paying off, and pulling multiple business lines up with it. The studio incubates it, the credit and infrastructure teams bootstrap the liquidity and the buildout, and the venture book benefits as an early financer of the project.

One win compounds across the firm.

What's your view on the state of the market today?

Most participants are certainly gun shy and licking their wounds - which is understandable when the median alt across the last 18 months is down 80-90% from their highs, and only a handful outperformed Bitcoin. Pessimism is certainly rife, but this is all part of the healing process.

I'm optimistic over the medium to longer term, but don't believe a recovery is broad based, nor will it be V-shaped. There just isn't enough capital on chain today to provide those conditions. The hot ball of money has been systematically extracted away - people have gotten very good at taking your money, between bundles, extortionary trading fees, and straight up rugs, most of the capital collected through these means never recycles back on chain, and I'd estimate high single-digit billions were taken in 2025 alone. The profile of people in that extracted pool was generally price-insensitive, bid-on-a-tweet types, and historically, that's the cohort responsible for driving a lot of the crazier price action we've seen in past cycles. Their absence in 2026 has been notable, and you can feel it in the tape.

Crypto used to hold the dominant mindshare as the home of speculation. But as the onchain environment remains predatory and equities providing a more fruitful hunting ground, offering some of the same dream-style returns that hooked people in the first place, you have both a demand and a supply issue constraining us. And this extends well beyond retail. There's a worrying number of my peers broadening their mandates to invest in equities, but to their credit, it's been the right call. The racier end of public markets is now trading at return multiples that look like old crypto cycles, on real companies.

I still think we have a bit more to wash out, but the asset class is maturing. I expect the median asset to continue underperforming Bitcoin, though dispersion shouldn't be as concentrated as 2025, with more winners emerging, and crucially, the quality of those winners materially better than in prior cycles. There are real fundamentals behind the names that are working, which is a meaningful shift.

So what causes you to be optimistic in the longer term and how do we recover from here?

My constructive long term lens is predicated on the following:

The value of dollars both settling and living on chain over the next few years will go exponential. TradFi players will be the primary driver of more dollars both settling on chain and living on chain over the next few years. Despite this, a lot of that capital will sit inside walled gardens - venues retail can't easily access, value that doesn't trickle into the broader crypto economy. This is a common critique of the tradfi thesis, and I don't disagree. But where I get constructive from is this: you can bet that enough of it leaks out to re-ignite meaningful activity on chain.

The numbers involved are so large that you only need a small fraction to find its way into existing venues to kickstart activity again. The concrete vectors are already showing up. Tokenised stocks just received a formal designation from the SEC under its innovation exemption, and you already have $1.4bn of stocks and $7bn of commodities tokenised on chain today - both up 400–500% since the start of 2025, despite operating in a regulatory gray zone. And the broader RWA category has gone from around $2bn in 2024 to nearly $30bn today. I expect this exponential trajectory to accelerate from here. The world is waking up to the fact that transacting and settling on blockchain rails can be a very effective and efficient way of moving value, with the TAM being all of finance.

What this looks like in practice: stablecoin float keeps growing, more of it sits in venues that touch DeFi, tokenised equities and commodities give traders new instruments to express views on, and lending, perps, and structured products on chain pick up the volume that follows. Layered on top of that, a new innovation will inevitably emerge to tie it all together. It's hard to predict what that is today, but there hasn't really been a year in crypto's history without some novel development capturing the market's attention, and I'm not going to bet against that.

The demand side recovers too, just more slowly. The price-insensitive cohort that drove past cycles doesn't come back overnight, but as the on-chain environment becomes less predatory, some of that capital re-engages. And when we see some reversion in equities, the relative attractiveness of crypto risk re-rates with it.