Welcoming Five Bells to the Fulgur portfolio. Founded by Anthony Magliacca in the United States, Five Bells is building digital-asset post-trade infrastructure, starting with a Bitcoin-native escrow tool that reduces bilateral settlement risk through on-chain conditional settlement controls. The thesis is straightforward: when two counterparties trade Bitcoin off-exchange, the settlement layer should not depend on either party's good faith, it should depend on the chain.

Post-trade is where most of the cost and risk of institutional finance actually lives. Trades are matched in milliseconds, but settled, reconciled and disputed over days. In digital assets, the problem is sharper: bilateral OTC flows often clear over chat apps and trust, with no neutral venue to enforce delivery-versus-payment. Five Bells' escrow design uses Bitcoin's native scripting capabilities to make conditional settlement programmatic, auditable and atomic.

This is core Fulgur territory. We invest in teams that take Bitcoin's base layer seriously as financial infrastructure, not just as an asset. As OTC desks, market makers, custodians and corporates accumulate larger Bitcoin balance sheets, the demand for credible, non-custodial settlement venues grows quickly. Five Bells is meeting that demand with a tool that fits into existing institutional workflows rather than asking the industry to reinvent them.

Anthony has a clear-eyed view of how trades actually move between large counterparties and where the points of failure sit. Bitcoin-native escrow is the wedge; the broader opportunity is an end-to-end post-trade stack for digital assets that finally matches the integrity of the underlying chain. We are thrilled to back Five Bells as it builds that future.