As usual, there’s some truth to the punchline. The rise of DATs (digital asset treasury companies) has occurred in parallel to a Cambrian explosion in secondary funds. While all DATs have their idiosyncrasies, I think they fill a similar niche in the food web of the ecosystem. For those unfamiliar, a secondary fund is a fund that primarily purchases the LP stakes of previous funds, allowing them to return cash to their investors. An extreme form of this is the continuation vehicle that just outright buys the stake of another fund. It’s not unusual to see the same financial institution to raise a secondary fund to buy out their own older-vintage fund. You can see the appeal: Fund A invested $1b that’s still illiquid bc there’s no way to sell the stake for a profit. Raise Fund B with $1.25b to buy out Fund A. Voila. Fund A books a tidy profit and Fund B is now the bagholder. 2025 has brought about a few extensions of this in what @LeylaKuni calls “tertiaries” and “continuation vehicles squared” where the ritual of handing off the bags goes for a third leg. I’ll leave it to you to guess what the LP profile looks like at each step in the process. At their heart, the DATs generally operate along similar principles. Fund A has a ton of tokens in 💩coin. Far more than they could sell at current marks because liquidity is limited. Wut do? Contribute those coins as in-kind to get shares, meme and market really hard, and hope people pay a premium. Much more sophisticated are the DATs for things like IP, ENA, TON, SUI, AVAX, et al. Here we see tokens sold at a discount, marked up, and the PIPE generally restricted to the original investor base still waiting for an exit. In this case, you have assets moved out of nonprofit foundations, controlled by these original investors, or the original investor’s books, then sold to retail with a narrative and aggressive accounting around NAV. Not unlike a continuation vehicle in many ways. You’re raising a new entity to buy illiquid assets from yourself, and courting retail money along the way. None of this is, to my mind, illegal, immoral, or impossible to pull off as long as there’s no material misrepresentation 😬 But it is akin to leaving a steak knife in the spoon drawer - someone gets a nasty cut because they expected one thing and didn’t look closely