Inside Crypto’s Next Inflection Point, According to Delphi Digital’s Anil Lulla

When Anil Lulla walked away from the comfort of Wall Street, he wasn’t chasing the next speculative fad — he was running from a system he no longer trusted.

After stints at Bloomberg and Deutsche Bank, Lulla says saw too much from the inside to keep believing in traditional finance.

“I was just a little bit worried about … man, this is what the financial system is built on?” he recalled in a new Coinage interview. “I don’t trust it from the inside. I don’t know how people are okay trusting it from the outside.”

That disillusionment set the foundation for Delphi Digital, the crypto research and venture firm he co-founded at the height of the 2017 bull run. What began as an experiment in fundamental research during an era of memes and mania has grown into one of the most influential firms to watch in Web3. Seven years later, Lulla insists that despite the noise, crypto has already crossed a threshold few acknowledge.

“We’ve kind of already won,” he said. “We’ve ended this boring stage of crypto where we just have to watch the score play out.”

For Lulla, that quiet confidence stems from what he calls a transition moment — crypto’s shift from speculation to savings. “The way you should think about crypto right now is… it was mostly primarily speculation driven,” he said. “Speculation is a great use case… broadening the access to being able to speculate to the masses is actually a good thing.” But the market has matured, he argues.

“You’re seeing crypto move from this primarily speculation use case to ... other use cases like savings. Savings is a big one right? And by the way, obviously a huge year for stablecoins,” he said.

It’s a thesis that tracks with the data. Not only have stablecoins surged again in 2025, but it remains one of the hottest investment areas for crypto VCs. On top of that, institutional funds are flowing through onchain rails and stables, with giants like Robinhood and Kraken launching tokenized equity platforms. Lulla sees that as proof that the industry’s long-promised adoption wave is no longer hypothetical.

“For a while, this institutions-are-coming was a meme… it’s no longer a meme,” he said. “They are here. And no one can debate that they are here.”

What comes next, in his view, is an expansion of what “using crypto” actually means. “Don’t just buy and trade these things — become users,” he said. Delphi has backed projects from DeFi blue chips like Aave and Lido to newer players like Pump. As AI agents make a resurgence, Lulla is also optimistic that could throw fuel on the fire for all of this as investing (not just trading) moves more onchain. It's also why Lulla’s team has spent the past two years researching the intersection of crypto and AI — two forces he sees as natural complements.

“AI is all about abundance,” he said. “And I think crypto is all about scarcity. So at the very core, I think these two things will pair very well together.” That also led Delphi to launch Delphi Intelligence, a research platform focused on bridging both worlds and exploring how blockchain infrastructure could anchor AI’s future economy.

But even as new frontiers open up, the core ethos still matters. The Terra collapse, which took down two Delphi-incubated projects, offered painful lessons that continue to shape how Lulla approaches risk. “When you make a mistake, you got to figure out from first principles where the mistake was,” he reflected. “Was the thesis wrong or was execution wrong?” That mindset has guided Delphi’s next generation of investments, from another shot at decentralized synthetic dollars like Ethena to onchain prediction markets and creator-driven economies.

If the last era was about speculation, Lulla believes the next is about proof — proving crypto can build systems that endure, products that people actually use, and communities that outlast hype cycles.

“Most of our net worths are in this parallel financial system that the government does not have read-write access to,” he said. “That alone is like beautiful… and if that’s all we create, that is worth all the dedication and money and time that we have spent on this. Period.”

For Lulla, the inflection point isn’t something to wait for. It’s already here — hiding in plain sight.

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