Placeholder
Placeholder is a venture capital firm. Partners Joel Monegro and Chris Burniske manage the firm with Brad Burnham as venture partner. Mario Laul is our Head of Research and Shelly Gogol is our General Manager. Since 2017, we have invested in over 75 early-stage companies and networks, including:
Aleo Avantgarde Arx Backpack Botanix Celestia Eclipse Ethereum Gearbox Gyroscope Jito Kamino Magic Monad Movement Obol Orca Pocket Polymer Saga Solana Solend Squads Tensor Tally WeatherXM Zerion zkSync and more.
Learn about our investment thesis and how we invest, follow us on twitter @placeholdervc.
You can also find open roles across the portfolio at jobs.placeholder.vc.
Latest Blog Posts
September 15, 2025
Gurnoor Narula
Leveling the Stakes on Solana
The process of updating Solana has waterfall effects on Solana’s incentive design, validator economics, and therefore, validator set equity. Certain proposals, such as Alpenglow, are inevitable upgrades given their performance, engineering, and user experience benefits. Under the assumption of these proposals and their economic side effects, we found that a modified version of SIMD-228 and a lower VAT fee of 0.135 SOL/day would be optimal for validator decentralization, pending a more formal discussion of Alpenglow’s reward schemes.
June 30, 2025
Mario Laul
Revisiting L1 Tokens as Money: A Critique of ‘Monetary Premium’
One of the oldest debates in crypto focuses on the relationship between the adoption of L1 blockchain networks and the value accrual of their native tokens. The debate is unresolved but it is generally believed that, as long as the L1 token is the preferred asset for transacting on the network, the most widely adopted networks will also end up hosting the most valuable tokens. While the details of the exact argument are network- and token-specific, there is one additional idea that has been echoing in these discussions for at least 10 years. For many, it is the most important distinguishing factor between a handful of L1 ’blue chips’ and the ever-growing long tail of the crypto asset universe at large. That idea is known as ’monetary premium’ and it is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of money.
April 16, 2025
Mario Laul
Combined Metrics for Tracking Smart Contract Networks
One of the key advantages of blockchain networks over other digital platforms is that data about assets and transactions hosted on a blockchain is publicly available. This allows for close to real-time tracking of how different networks compare across a variety of metrics. The most reliable method for assessing the usage of a particular blockchain is to zoom in on individual measures, ideally at the level of specific applications or user groups. However, that’s not always feasible. As the number of networks and the amount of data grows, various forms of aggregation are required to simplify the tracking process without losing the ability to identify when and where a closer look at the underlying data is warranted. This post provides an overview of one such attempt at metrics aggregation.