Three Keys Lab is a crypto investment fund focused on supporting consumer-facing projects

Three Keys Lab is a crypto investment fund focused on supporting consumer-facing projects that capture cultural momentum, providing early-stage capital

Three Keys Lab, a crypto investment fund focused on supporting consumer-facing projects that capture cultural momentum, is providing early-stage capital and community scaling thesis to help founders navigate market cycles.

The fund’s strategy centers around integrating higher-level layers of user engagement, cultural creation, and market experimentation into the core fabric of onchain ecosystems.

Recent reports from Union Square Ventures and Token Terminal show that applications targeting end users outnumber infrastructure ventures in deal volume but lag significantly in total capital raised.

Despite early signals of mass adoption, platforms built around non-fungible tokens (NFTs), social tokens and memecoins have struggled to secure long-term funding. That gap in financing is likely to be a key factor in the high failure rate of consumer-crypto startups.

This capital imbalance has tangible consequences. Research on crypto startup failures reveals that many promising ventures collapse due to a lack of capital to weather shifting market conditions, even when demand and innovation are present.

The above chart data shows that the public-market capitalization of native onchain assets — principally NFTs and memecoins — expanded more than six-fold in less than a year, rising from a cyclical trough of $22 billion in Q4 2023 to roughly $140 billion at the Q4 2024 peak.

One fund identified this market shift early and structured its entire strategy around what it calls the “tokenized attention economy.” Onchain cultural assets such as memes, social-capital tokens, and digital collectibles whose worth rises with network momentum. Three Keys Lab fund backs community-led, consumer-facing products that compound value as social engagement scales.

In the first quarter of 2025, the fund delivered top-quartile results among 2022-vintage crypto vehicles. The fund returned all paid-in capital to its limited partners, reaching a distributions to paid-in capital (DPI) ratio of 1.0 — a milestone that indicates full capital recovery for investors.

Over the same quarter, the fund’s AUM doubled, with a large portion of this growth driven by its Liquid Strategy, which includes a diversified mix of onchain assets.

Formed at the peak of the 2022 NFT boom, the fund remained unscathed through the collapse of FTX, protected its chip stack during the metaverse pull-back and navigated the NFT retrenchment — events that shuttered many of its peers.

By embracing the onchain frontier and deploying capital with discipline and focus, the fund compounded gains through successive bear cycles, ultimately emerging as one of the few survivors of its vintage and delivering notable returns in Q1 2025.

Consumer Crypto, ReimaginedThe fund’s thesis is reflected in a portfolio that spans several user-facing Web3 segments. Gondi enables NFT-based lending; Kaito develops AI-native information markets; Fountain operates as a crypto-native art finance desk; and Holderscan offers data infrastructure for memecoins.

While these projects vary in function and visibility, they share a common strength: the ability to endure and adapt through extended market downturns.

Three Keys Lab’s culture-driven approach has begun to attract broader institutional support. The fund’s backers include Dragonfly, SIG, Mirana Ventures and a consortium of family offices.

Following its Q1 results, Three Keys Lab plans to expand its internal operations by hiring across research, engineering and portfolio support. Its goal is to deepen deployment in what it sees as the next frontier of onchain market growth: the convergence of culture, finance, and tech.