币界网报道：This is a snippet from the Empire newsletter. To read the full version, please subscribe. Former Chorus One CIO Xavier Meegan is launching a $20 million crypto-native pre-seed fund, we’ve learned exclusively. At Frachtis, Meegan serves as General Partner, with four others on the investment and advisory board, including Chorus One’s Brian Crane and Felix Lutsch. The fund is based in Lisbon, Portugal. “We have five people around the fund right now, and we all have experience running crypto-native businesses, which I think is very rare. There are only a handful of funds in this space that do that. Plus we also have experience running blockchain infrastructure,” Meegan told me. He said they raised the fund in the last 12 months, noting that crypto is currently in the “consumer application era. The next big winners in crypto are going to be applications that leverage our existing infrastructure.” The infrastructure era, he told me, “is over.” He added that now is the time to focus on building for the future of crypto, rather than launching more L1s and L2s. Instead, he sees demand focused on consumer and mobile applications. Though he’s also interested in the intersection between AI and crypto, adding that he’s keeping a close eye on AI agents. “One of the big things, and we have another thesis, is that these agents need faster, more contextualized data, for example. So we need to build that infrastructure. Maybe these agents need certain permissions to access certain things; otherwise, there’s a lot of security risk there,” he said. “As more and more things come online in crypto, AI for personalization, retention, and loyalty for certain types of applications is going to become more and more important. I think that’s going to be a way for some of these teams to win: by using AI to enhance your application, enhance usability, enhance engagement for your users.” Meegan told me that now is a “great time” to invest. It’s been difficult for founders to raise money, but this has had the unexpected benefit of forcing founders to step up their ideas. He expects LPs to come back and become more active over the next 12-18 months. “Everything we invest in… has a long-term thesis, and I’ve talked to a lot of teams… that I believe [will] win in the long term. We actually have a framework for doing that and how we analyze these founders and teams that we’ve developed over the years,” Meegan added. To date, Frachtis has invested in eight projects at the pre-seed and seed stages — including Turtle Club and Hyve. And they’re just getting started. Get news in your inbox. Explore the Blockworks newsletters: The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and markets. Daily. Empire: crypto news and analysis to kickstart your day. Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro, and policy. 0xResearch: Get Alpha straight to your inbox. Lightspeed: All about Solana. The Drop: Apps, games, memes, and more. Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.