Fish Network - Driving the Billion Dollar Small Team Era
The Billion Dollar Small Team Era
Over the past decade, we’ve seen an accelerating trend: billion-dollar companies being built and scaled by small, hyper-efficient teams. What used to require hundreds of employees, multiple offices, and years of infrastructure can now be accomplished by fewer than a dozen founders and operators.
More recently, AI-driven product teams and crypto protocols are positioned to capitalize on this pattern at scale: small squads, plugged into global capital and infrastructure, achieving valuations once reserved for traditional Fortune-500-scale organizations. With a rapidly evolving market economy, founders and fund managers are choosing tools that empower teams for this new frontier versus incumbent systems.
Introducing Fish Network. A platform where you can scale entities with almost no operational drag, and investors can exit or reallocate with confidence. Launch, fund, and scale venture investment communities - transparently and On-chain.
Why Current Infrastructure Falls Short In this Era
Traditional crowdfunding portals are symptomatic of the old model:
High costs: pay-to-list fees and ongoing compliance overhead.
Poor match quality: high-quality issuers avoid the portals, leaving lower-signal deals to dominate.
Investor friction: decision-making is hampered by lack of transparency and uncertain liquidity.
Crowdfunding portals are costly, pay‑to‑list, and have low‑touch interaction rates after matching.
Investors struggle to make informed decisions and face long/uncertain liquidity.
And Issuers with strong fundamentals avoid portals due to fees (typically 10% of AUM for operating and legal expenses) and ongoing compliance burdens, leaving weaker deals to dominate supply.
This explains why the model hasn’t scaled—strong fundamentals avoid it, and investors don’t trust it.
A Flywheel For The New Economy
Imagine being able to find accredited investors, build your team of fund managers, manage multiple startups or deal flow, all in one platform. This infrastructure becomes a flywheel: more startups form, more investors participate, and more liquidity flows through the system, reinforcing a future where economic power is distributed among thousands of small, high-output teams.
Leveraging Coinbase’s L2 BASE, identity verification, custody, and business accounts services, we are able to provide issuers with a comprehensive software and legal framework for raising capital.
We aim to be a significant development in the retail space for on-chain compliant fundraising.
Offering future proof entity management tools:
Fast network formation
A more effective capital raising network
Stablecoins: As of Q4 2024, the USDC share on the Base network was over $10 billion¹.
Capturing just 1% of this market would equal a TVL of $10M locked in the Fish Network smart contract.
Market Growth Vectors:
At scale, the Fish Network provides individual investors more optionality, liquidity, and diversification, creating a competitive advantage for emerging managers, all while providing much needed capital support to the best early stage founders.
The Fish Network is poised to unlock tremendous value for the individual investor by leveling the playing field in venture capital.
1) Reg A+. Once the crowdfunding market is captured, we have the ability to expand into Reg A+ offerings above $5M.
2) New Asset Classes: Initially we are targeting the venture capital market; this model can be extended to any illiquid asset class where investors may want liquidity optionality.
3) Crypto Native Funds: Fish Schools should have the ability to pursue more crypto native investment strategies, such as holding ETH instead of USDC in reserve. However, we have designed the Fish Network to be insulated from most crypto market risks.
4) Institutional Investor Adoption: In phase 2 of the Fish Network, we will unlock a fund of funds model enabling investors to receive diversified exposure to all of the Fish Schools, with minimal crypto-native risk exposure. This could unlock large pools of capital comfortable with the Coinbase & Kraken ecosystems.
What Unlocks This New Market Opportunity
Small teams can reach outsized outcomes when three layers align:
Fast Network Formation
The ability to assemble distributed experts, operators, and backers instantly, without relying on legacy hiring pipelines.
DAOs and on-chain governance create “flash teams” that can form, disband, and reform around high-value opportunities.
More Effective Capital Raising
Traditional fundraising is fragmented and slow. Issuers burn cycles navigating investor discovery, compliance paperwork, and low-signal conversations.
A networked, on-chain capital formation layer would let accredited investors and fund managers plug directly into opportunities, transact transparently, and exit with liquidity.
On-chain formation + compliance tools can make managing multiple startups or funds as simple as switching tabs in a dashboard.
The Fish Network Solution
The Fish Network provides a platform to effectively find and capitalize the best startups building on top of Coinbase’s L2, the BASE Network, as well as other similarly situated technologies and investor communities.
In the Fish Network, investors are organized into community driven Investment Clubs, based on the organizers’ expertise. This structure of collective decision making serves two purposes:
To further assist with diligence in order to select the most qualified startups via a voting process for each funding campaign.
To avoid the General Partner, and Financial Advisor liabilities by relying on collective decision making, which also helps reduce operational costs.
Additionally, The Fish Network offers investors an interactive & social voting experience, using reward reputation points(FISH points), which helps investors build their network, portfolio, and track record on-chain.
Coordination: A Fish School Organizer will be appointed in each newly formed LLC(i.e. Fish School).
To provide accountability over the formation of the LLC, including SEC registration via Form C, and sourcing of accounting, legal, and admin services.
To spearhead the business development & startup screening process; facilitating the funding of the startups competing for a portion of the funds raised.
Direction: The Fish School Organizers are responsible for orchestrating the submission, review, and vetting processes for the best-qualified startups competing for funds. Organizers provide continued support in distributing the funds to the startup and future redemption of shares, USDC, and FISH points to the investors; in exchange for an agreed upon commission from the Fish Network Treasury.
Each Fish School has an Escrow account created by the organizer, to safeguard the capital from the moment it was contributed by Investors, to the moment it is distributed to the winning startup. For Escrow accounts, The Fish Network leverages Coinbase & Kraken custody products to reduce counterparty risk.
Altogether, the personal identity verification, business accounts, and Custody features are utilized to reduce the cost of doing business, and will allow new investors to seamlessly connect to our investor ecosystem through a trusted medium.
Fish Network Liquidity Transfer
Liquidity Flow and Management
Investor (Fish) commits capital → KYC/KYB → custody/escrow initialized.
Organizer curates deals → community diligence → on‑chain vote.
Funds routed per canonical split → startup(s) funded.
On distribution/liquidity events, Organizer coordinates private shares → USDC; smart contracts update balances/points.
Optional redemptions subject to 3‑week window and per‑school lockups (some up to 1 year).
The Fish Network is a compliant, semi‑liquid platform that turns thesis‑driven investment clubs ("Fish Schools") into software‑enabled, tokenized micro‑funds with shared liquidity.
What’s different: Capital is pooled up‑front, Diligence is community‑driven, Liquidity is coordinated across organizations, and admin is a streamlined experience handled via KYC/KYB and qualified custody.
Use shared liquidity to provide synthetic exposure and shorter lockups.
Compliance powered via established crypto infra (KYC/KYB, qualified custody, identity primitives).
Fish Network is built specifically for compliant capital formation and represents a set of tools for emerging managers to offer their investors a different set of tradeoffs between liquidity, optionality, and diversification.
Company Approach:
By leveraging best practices in On-Chain Capital Allocation, we enable investors to form thesis driven communities, and also enable communities to create turn-key investment vehicles. By leveraging a hybrid funding model, we allow the best startups to compete for immediate access to capital.
Investment Clubs & Fish Schools: Structure, Coordination, Direction.
Fish School - a hybrid crowdfunding entity for investors, with expert-level research, investor community development, and compliance. Each Fish School has a dedicated Fish School Organizer with expertise in a given field. Fish School Organizers offer support and guidance to investor participants who help select the best startups to be funded. Fish Schools store their funds directly with qualified custodians.
ROLES
The Fish Network hosts a platform of Fish Schools, organized by vetted, qualified Fish School Organizers, to give investors optionality to join other differentiated investment communities. Currently, Fish School Organizers undergo a rigorous vetting process to ensure we meet our investor’s expectations. In the future, anyone will be able to launch a Fish School seamlessly.
🎣 Fish School Organizer (Emerging Manager / Solo GP)
Who: Vetted lead for a given school / thesis.
Responsibilities: Form & operate Series LLC, coordinate KYC/KYB, source & vet deals, run votes, interface with custody & compliance partners, coordinate distributions.
Incentives: Front‑loaded administrative fee; potential performance‑aligned incentives where permitted (e.g., bounties from treasury / Schoal); reputation accrual.
Requirements: Diligence standards, ongoing reporting to Fish Network, adherence to investment‑club constraints.
🌊 The Fish Network (Platform / Protocol Layer)
What: The shared rails: identity, custody, escrow, reputation, liquidity coordination, and school discovery.
Responsibilities: Provide routing contracts, scorekeeping (Fish Points), dashboards, and compliance tooling; Operate shared liquidity and redemption mechanisms; Identity primitives, KYC/KYB.
Incentives: Network fees, volume growth, and ecosystem health.
🐟 Fish (Investor)
Who: Individuals or entities joining a Fish School.
Responsibilities: Commit capital, participate in on‑chain voting, follow school governance.
Incentives: Fish Points (reputation), potential upside from selected deals, optionality to reallocate across schools, shorter lockups.
Requirements: KYC, agree to club docs; wallet + identity (e.g., cb.id / ENS).
🐠 Shoal Leader (VC or B2B Entity)
Who: Multi‑manager admin (a “Shoal”) coordinating multiple schools toward an outcome (e.g., sector, region, ecosystem).
Responsibilities: Recruit/coach Organizers, ensure compliance quality bar, provide shared services (deal flow, BD, ops), run funnel‑wide programs.
Incentives: Platform fees, brand/community expansion, ability to route capital to top‑performing Organizers, LP relations.
Fish Rewards Points
Fish Points are a social reward mechanism designed to boost engagement within our investor ecosystem. This enables angel investors and emerging managers a new avenue to showcase their wins, build community, and connect with like-minded investors.
There are several ways for awarding and using Fish Points; capital commitments, community decision making processes, voting, and other future use-cases.
This will ultimately help streamline retail crowdfunding, and activate a new network of emerging managers.
Structure: Investors earn reputation points by committing capital into Fish Schools. Fish Schools get capitalized by investors with the following structure.
50% converted to USDC, transferred to the Fish Network smart contract to earn points.
40% allocated to the winning startup(s), voted by the Investors by using earned points.
10% kept in each Fish School treasury to pay for operating expenses.
Liquidity Structure Options
Option A — “80/20 Micro‑Fund” (front‑loaded admin)
Capital use: ≥80% deployed to investments; ≤20% admin/ops (front‑loaded) to cover early costs.
Liquidity: Shared liquidity layer enables early redemptions (subject to fees/lockups per school).
Option B — “50/40/10 Split” (points + escrow)
50% to escrow (USDC) to accrue Fish Points and network rewards during a 21‑day window.
40% allocated to voted‑in startups.
10% to school treasury for ops.
Fees & Liquidity
Organizer fee: Front‑loaded administrative fee (covers BD, diligence, coordination).
Lockups: Default 3‑week post‑deposit window; some schools may set up to 1 year.
Shared liquidity: Synthetic exposure to illiquid assets, collateralized by liquid crypto; cross‑school redemption support.
Distributions: Organizer executes share‑to‑USDC conversions and returns proceeds to school equity holders.
Tech Stack
Base L2 for on‑chain mechanics and identity integrations.
Routing contracts for splits/escrow and reward accrual.
Reputation: Fish Points as non‑transferable reputation; dashboard for contribution & performance history.
Governance & Compliance
Entity: Series LLC per school (Investment Club model) operating under SEC investment‑club guidance.
Identity: KYC (Fish) / KYB (School) via integrated identity (e.g., cb.id / ENS).
Custody & Escrow: Qualified custodians (e.g., Coinbase Prime / Kraken) with routing contracts and 21‑day escrow periods.
Notes: Avoid GP/advisor roles by relying on club voting; maintain records for audits and redemptions.
Risks & Mitigations
Regulatory clarity: pre‑vetted club docs; escalation path via BD/portal partnerships.
Liquidity bootstrapping: seed liquidity facility; FoF to smooth flows.
Manager quality: rigorous Organizer vetting; Shoal Leader QA and shared services.
Use Cases
Emerging manager bootstrapping (Organizer): launch a school for a focused thesis; convert community into deployable, semi‑liquid capital.
VC platform (Shoal Leader): multi‑manager program, LP engagement, <$25k investor activation, follow‑on syndication.
B2B ecosystem: corporate or protocol‑aligned schools to fund partner ecosystems.
Conclusion
The Fish Network flips the syndicate & crowdfunding model on its head. Instead of chasing investors for each deal, when most of them drop out anyway, we introduce a new capital deployment model, where the capital has already been locked in smart contract escrow. Rather than using a traditional SPV, we introduce the concept of a Fish School, where any community can launch an investment club to better serve their constituents.
The investment model for Fish Schools is inherently sector agnostic. Investment Clubs can be leveraged by investors with little to no crypto risk exposure, utilizing USDC to facilitate liquidity. With various Fish Schools investing into different verticals, the end state becomes an open crowdfunding platform like Start Engine, but the backend of the platform is delivered leveraging smart contracts, voting processes, and transparent reward mechanisms.
Investors can easily commit USDC and ETH directly to the startups that are presenting with the click of a button. However, in order to receive reputation points(Fish Points), contributors must invest into the Fish School beforehand. This gives investors the optionality to trust their gut or leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
We are building alongside Coinbase and Kraken for these reasons:
No-Coiner* Onboarding - By being integrated with well established leaders in the US, attracting new market participants becomes an order of magnitude easier
Legal Risk - By being tightly integrated with well understood players in crypto(i.e. exchanges) we can reduce our legal overhead dramatically
Operational Cost - Integrating with Coinbase & Kraken allows us to reduce the investor onboarding cost to a minimum, with ongoing reporting and compliance.
The Fish Network aims to be decentralized with fewer cost bottlenecks (onboarding, compliance, reporting, etc). Coinbase Wallet offers free identity registration using CB.ID with a Base.eth domain, which enables the Fish Network to easily KYC its users. For Fish Schools, a KYB process is implemented to sign transactions on behalf of the Investment Clubs by its Fish School Organizers.
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