Doing the Work at Relayzero
The year crypto M&A got weird & "Exit Market Fit"
The Origins of Relayzero
At Relayzero, we believe exits are created and earned—not found. That belief and the name of Relayzero started with one number: 0x000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f.
Mining bitcoin is a brute-force grind. Millions of machines all over the world are competing to find a random nonce (numbers) until one hits a hash with enough leading zeros. That’s proof of work.
Being a founder is no different. The world has all of the same information and sees the potential reward, but behind every outcome is relentless grind. Relayzero exists to honor and amplify that work—especially at the finish line.
Founder Exit Market Fit
Like mining, building a company is a relentless amount of work, often thankless iteration through failures, pivots, and silent wins. The world sees higher valuations, token launches, or maybe an exit. But founders just see all their work.
Most founders I know are not just chasing liquidity. They’re chasing alignment. They care who’s buying, what happens to their team, their product, their users, and - especially in crypto - the legacy they will help create. They want an exit that fits—both financially and philosophically.
That’s what we call Founder Exit Market Fit.
The Year Crypto M&A Got Weird
We are sitting 18 months into the juiciest crypto merger and acquisition market on record. This surge in M&A activity is driven by crypto’s first native revenue cycle with revenue up and down the stack from apps and protocols to defi and consumer.
I bought my first company in 2016—a Bitcoin wallet. It was a customer of the banking API company where I was General Counsel and they were running out of cash. We didn’t just buy code—we hired the team, gave them long-term upside, and aligned on a shared vision where fintech and crypto would collide. Classic acquihire.
For years, M&A in crypto followed a simple path:
Buy talent
Buy users
Buy revenue & roadmap shortcuts
The market was pretty “expected”.
But in 2024 and 2025, the crypto M&A market got weird.
On February 27, 2025, Phantom (the leading Solana wallet) acquired Simplehash (a token metadata API). Thirty days later, Simplehash’s API—used by many of Phantom’s competitors—was shut down. That’s not a typical acquihire or product and revenue acquisition. This sent wallets and a lot of other consumer apps scrambling to find alternatives and wasting time refactoring code1. That’s what we’ll call an adversarial acquisition - an acquisition that harms competition.
In March 2024, three AI token DAO’s proposed a merger in what looks to be in retrospect a marketing stunt to not combine the three tokens but to create a fourth proxy token.
As one of the first people to write extensively about onchain cashflow, a potential DAO merger piqued my interest.
Did someone say onchain M&A? Turtles all the way down.
In October 2024, we saw a more picturesque version of token acquisition when the Synthetix DAO ($SNX) proposed to acquire Kwenta DAO ($KWENTA), the token behind the Synthetix marquee app.
While technically, we saw our first onchain M&A in 2021, it’s pretty clear crypto has entered its real M&A era.
Traditional companies like Stripe are now billion dollar buyers. DAOs are writing term sheets. Products are acquired and then killed off to hurt competitors. Markets are no longer just competing for users. They're competing to win.
Doing the Work at Relayzero
We help founders navigate this new landscape—and create the outcomes they want.
Relayzero is an M&A advisory firm built by a founder who’s been on both sides of the table. I’ve sold my own company, purchased others, had deals blow up at the finish line, and helped founders land deals amidst the chaos.
I am an advisor to Indexing Co, a distributed ETL for blockchain data. Indexing Co is an excellent solution for companies built on data API’s like Simplehash. Ask your data engineer. They’ll explain.