Hash3

Hash3 is a crypto-native venture capital fund investing at the pre-seed and seed stage in companies and protocols globally. Announced publicly in June 2023 as a $29M seed-stage fund, it writes checks of $250k to $1M and can lead, co-lead, or participate in rounds. The fund states a thesis centered on decentralization and user-owned networks, and says it looks for protocols architected around immutability, trust minimization, censorship resistance, robust economic policy, and utility supporting a sustainable business model.

The firm is structured as a collective that connects founders with a hand-picked group of advisors who are incentivized to help portfolio companies address early-stage operating problems such as product and engineering organization design, recruiting funnels, and growth. Named advisors include Surojit Chatterjee (former Chief Product Officer at Coinbase), Yuga Cohler (engineer at Coinbase), Corey Miller (product at dYdX), Gokul Rajaram (executive at DoorDash; board member at Coinbase and Pinterest), and Ramani Ramachandran (founder of Router Protocol and Dfyn). At launch the fund said 30% of its LP base were executives or co-founders of businesses that had exited for $1B+, and described that group as having generated over $3T in aggregate enterprise value.

Hash3's stated largest focus area is infrastructure and middleware, with interest in scalability, security, privacy, oracle-free decentralization, ease-of-use, and ease-of-development. The firm also publishes research on its blog, including analysis of EigenLayer's restaking operator and AVS marketplace and the risks of looped liquid restaking collateral.

Founding story

Hash3 was founded by Hootan "Hootie" Rashidifard, who spent roughly a year building the fund before announcing it in June 2023. He has written that the idea took shape after meeting Surojit Chatterjee, former Chief Product Officer of Coinbase, and subsequently Ramani Ramachandran, co-founder and CEO of Router Protocol, around the thesis that bridging knowledge from seasoned operators to early-stage founders improves the odds of successful outcomes. Rashidifard has also described a personal motivation for backing decentralized financial alternatives, citing his Iranian immigrant parents having their bank accounts frozen around the time of the Iranian Revolution and his own encounter with Bitcoin in 2012.

Business model

Hash3 operates as a venture capital fund, deploying capital from limited partners into equity and token positions in early-stage crypto companies and protocols, and supplementing capital with an advisor network that is incentivized to support portfolio companies. The firm states it is flexible on structure, funding very early projects to test initial hypotheses or writing larger checks for teams with a validated hypothesis, and is open to exploring new funding structures and mechanisms.

Traction

At its June 2023 announcement, Hash3 had ten portfolio companies, including EigenLayer, Ajna Finance, and Crossmint; Rio was later identified as a portfolio company. Third-party fundraising data lists Hash3 as an investor in 14 projects, including SpaceComputer, Euphoria, Nirvana Labs, Valhalla, CAT Labs, Phylax Systems, Satflow, OpenLedger, and Mayan.

Latest developments

In February 2024 Hash3 published research on the EigenLayer operator and AVS marketplace, noting 2,600,000 ETH restaked (about $7B TVL) and identifying portfolio company Rio among liquid restaking platforms. Third-party fundraising data records Hash3 participating in rounds through November 2025, including the SpaceComputer seed round.