Matt Odell's Bitcoin Vision: From Open Source to Venture Capital Revolution

When Bitcoin entrepreneur, podcaster, and venture capitalist Matt Odell moved his entire social media presence from Twitter—where he had over 250,000 followers—to Nostr, an open-source Bitcoin-powered social protocol, the move signaled more than a personal preference. It reflected a fundamental philosophy about user freedom and decentralized technology that would come to define his approach to building the Bitcoin ecosystem. Through his podcast Citadel Dispatch, which has featured industry leaders weekly since late 2020, and contributions like the iconic Bitcoin meme “Stay humble, stack sats,” Odell has carved out a unique place in Bitcoin culture.

But Odell’s influence extends far beyond social media presence and popular catchphrases. He has emerged as one of the most influential venture capitalists in the Bitcoin space, leading a fundamental rethinking of how startups should be built and funded in a Bitcoin-first world. His investment philosophy directly challenges the assumptions that have dominated Silicon Valley for the past two decades.

How Matt Odell Challenges Traditional Venture Capital in Bitcoin

The traditional venture capital model that dominated Silicon Valley’s early 2000s boom—and resurfaced during the low-interest rate environment from 2008 to 2015—operated on a deceptively simple premise: burn money at scale to acquire users rapidly, worry about profitability later, and extract maximum value from user data through proprietary networks and walled gardens. VCs would invest hundreds of millions in startups, betting that years of losses would eventually yield massive returns once the companies achieved scale or were acquired by competitors.

This approach created a specific incentive structure in the crypto industry, particularly around 2017-2018. Venture firms threw hundreds of millions at speculative token projects, using ICOs and token launches to achieve quick exit liquidity—collapsing the typical decade-long venture investment cycle into mere months. The result? Countless retail investors holding worthless tokens while supposedly “ethical” Bitcoin-focused projects struggled to secure basic funding.

Matt Odell watched this dynamic with deep skepticism. “When I was younger, before we launched Ten31, I held the mindset that all venture capital was bad,” he reflected. His criticism stemmed largely from observing major VC firms use shitcoin dumps as their business model. But rather than retreat into pure libertarian ideology, Odell recognized that the venture capital model itself wasn’t inherently broken—it was simply being deployed toward the wrong outcomes.

What changed his perspective was a fundamental economic shift. The era of perpetually low U.S. interest rates that fueled the traditional VC burn-it-all strategy could no longer be sustained without visible inflation. As the U.S. economic dominance was challenged by rising powers in the East, venture-backed startups faced hard choices: either pivot toward early revenue and profitability, or collapse under unsustainable burn rates. Suddenly, Odell’s investment thesis—betting on founders who could build lean, profitable Bitcoin companies on open protocols—didn’t just feel ideologically correct. It also made mathematical sense.

Matt Odell’s Ten31 Fund: Building Bitcoin Companies on Open Protocols

In 2019, Odell became a managing partner at Ten31, a for-profit venture fund with a dual mandate that fundamentally reimagines venture capital’s role in Bitcoin’s future. “Our first mandate is to make our investors money and make good investments and return capital. And our second mandate is to help Bitcoin flourish as freedom money, help make Bitcoin a better tool to be used by the individual, to empower the individual,” Odell explained.

The fund’s portfolio has grown to include over thirty companies, united by a core philosophy: all investments are built on open protocols without walled gardens, artificial moats, or extractive user data mining. Instead of the Silicon Valley playbook of locking users into proprietary systems, these companies compete on merit—on product quality, user experience, and genuine value creation.

Strike, Ten31’s flagship investment and the most profitable company in the portfolio, exemplifies this approach. Founded by Jack Mallers in 2019, Strike operates as a Bitcoin-focused payment application available globally, navigating complex regulatory environments while delivering Bitcoin’s cutting-edge technology to mainstream users. The numbers speak for themselves: Strike maintains significant product-market fit, operates profitably, and actively accumulates Bitcoin for its corporate treasury, which now exceeds 1,500 BTC. Unlike traditional startups that perpetually chase growth at the expense of profits, Strike compounds its advantage each month through profitable operations that directly increase its Bitcoin holdings.

Start9 provides another instructive example. The company develops Bitcoin-native software that remains completely open source from top to bottom, functioning across most hardware without Silicon Valley’s proprietary restrictions. Most venture firms would pass on Start9’s model—their entire technology stack is open source, and users can access all products without paying a cent. Yet the company monetizes sustainably through optional premium hardware sales and value-added services like premium support and proxy services. As Odell noted, “Start9 is a perfect example that will probably never get a16z funding,” precisely because its openness contradicts traditional VC’s obsession with defensible moats.

Mempool.Space, perhaps Bitcoin’s most widely-used block explorer, demonstrates the same principle at scale. Integrated into nearly every Bitcoin wallet, the software is not only open source but fundamental to Bitcoin’s infrastructure. Mempool monetizes through its transaction accelerator service and B2B enterprise agreements—meaningful revenue streams that don’t require trapping users in proprietary systems.

AnchorWatch tackled an entirely different problem: insuring self-custodied Bitcoin holdings against theft. By building on Bitcoin’s network effects while bridging to the insurance market, the company created a value proposition superior to custodial services. “The insurance element is really interesting, specifically self-custody with insurance… It actually provides a value proposition to users that is better than paper Bitcoin,” Odell observed.

The fundamental difference in Odell’s investment approach becomes clear when examining his screening criteria. Traditional venture capitalists search for founders pursuing growth at all costs. Matt Odell seeks founders building on Bitcoin while willing and able to operate lean, reduce expenses aggressively, and achieve profitability quickly. Why? Because the economic calculus transforms entirely when you believe Bitcoin is the best money ever invented with a multi-decade runway ahead.

“In traditional investor land, you see this growth-at-all-costs mindset. They’ll burn $100 million, they’ll burn $200 million, and then maybe in 10 years, they’ll start becoming profitable,” Odell explained. “But you can’t do that in a Bitcoin world because what is the price of bitcoin going to be in 10 years? And you should be measuring all of your revenue in sats, in bitcoin.”

Profitable Bitcoin startups compound their advantages over time. Each month of profits allows them to build Bitcoin treasury reserves, creating a virtuous cycle where the company’s wealth denominates in an appreciating asset. This transforms the entire venture thesis: instead of betting on perpetual growth in a depreciating fiat currency, investors align themselves with companies accumulating Bitcoin—which they genuinely believe will appreciate over decades.

OpenSats and the Mission to Fund Bitcoin Open Source

Before launching Ten31, Odell and his collaborators founded OpenSats in 2021, a nonprofit organization addressing a critical gap in Bitcoin’s ecosystem: funding open source developers and Bitcoin infrastructure projects that struggle to find venture capital. The organization crystallized around an elegant idea: what if everyday “plebs” pledged $50 monthly to support open source Bitcoin developer grants?

“That turned out to be way more difficult than I expected,” Odell admitted. The challenge wasn’t philosophical—it was practical. Despite Bitcoin’s success as money, a strange paradox persisted within the community. People who understood Bitcoin’s value often hoarded their sats rather than deploying them to support builders. Meanwhile, the broader crypto ecosystem drained capital into countless speculative projects, leaving legitimate Bitcoin infrastructure chronically underfunded.

But OpenSats achieved something remarkable despite these headwinds. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, donated $31 million through his Start Small Foundation, providing the organization with generational capacity to fund Bitcoin development. Yet the most interesting fact about OpenSats’ treasury strategy reveals Odell’s fundamental philosophy: they maintain 100% Bitcoin reserves, automatically converting every dollar donation to Bitcoin.

“We actually have more in our multi-sig treasury than we’ve ever raised in the lifetime of the organization,” Odell noted with evident satisfaction. The implication is profound: by maintaining Bitcoin-denominated reserves rather than dollar reserves, OpenSats’ treasury has appreciated alongside Bitcoin’s price, creating a growing pool of capital to deploy precisely when funding Bitcoin projects matters most. “Our treasury strategy is the most simple, effective treasury strategy, which is: Every dollar that comes in automatically gets converted to bitcoin. We just keep 100% bitcoin reserves.”

Moreover, OpenSats operates as 100% pass-through organization, avoiding the questionable practices many charities employ by taking substantial cuts of donations. This structural commitment to transparency directly reflects Odell’s conviction that Bitcoin should make money for builders easier to access, not harder.

Educating Washington: Matt Odell and the Bitcoin Policy Institute

Matt Odell also serves as a founding member of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, an organization that represents a deliberate shift in Bitcoin’s political strategy. While Bitcoin’s early movement was rooted in pure libertarian ideology, the industry has increasingly recognized that engaging with policymakers—rather than ignoring them—accelerates Bitcoin adoption.

This evolution actually echoes the philosophy of Bitcoin’s intellectual forebears. The Cypherpunks of the 1990s, during the original “crypto wars,” fought government restrictions on encryption through two complementary channels: they built powerful, accessible cryptographic tools while simultaneously fighting for encryption rights in courts, legislatures, and the court of public opinion.

Adam Back, the Cypherpunk movement’s representative and creator of Hashcash, profoundly influenced Odell’s thinking. “I was pretty disenfranchised with politics. And Adam Back personally was a big inspiration for me in terms of his experience with the original Cypherpunk movement and the original crypto wars,” Odell recalled. “When it came to encryption, they fought it on two fronts. They fought it with tools. So they made it really effective and cheap and accessible for people to encrypt things, but they also fought it in the courts and in politics and in mind share.”

Bitcoin itself embodied these twin pillars from inception: Satoshi Nakamoto simultaneously released the Bitcoin Talk forum (education) and the Bitcoin software (tooling). This framework extended through Bitcoin meetups worldwide, proliferating wallet software, hardware security devices, and developer tools. The Bitcoin Policy Institute extends this educational mission to Washington policymakers who often lack basic Bitcoin literacy—a gap that undermines their ability to craft policies serving the public interest they’re theoretically bound to serve.

Bitcoin Park: Building Community Beyond Code

Beyond funds and policy, Odell recognized that Bitcoin’s advancement also required physical community infrastructure. He co-founded Bitcoin Park, a community hub in Nashville, Tennessee, that has catalyzed significant Bitcoin talent concentration in the United States while hosting regular events.

“Bitcoin Park began at a brewery in Nashville,” Odell recalled of the project’s humble origins. “It was a meetup at a brewery, and we quickly hit, like, 200 people a month for meetups. The brewery was basically like, ‘you can’t come here anymore’. And we’re like, okay, let’s find our own space. And that’s how Bitcoin Park Nashville was born.”

The initial Nashville success prompted expansion in 2024, with the acquisition of Bitcoin Commons in Austin, Texas—arguably establishing presence in the two most significant Bitcoin communities within the United States. Yet Odell’s vision for Bitcoin Park extends beyond centralized control. “I would ideally like it to… just be an inspiration for other communities to pop up around the world that are not controlled by Bitcoin Park,” he explained.

This philosophy reflects his core conviction about Bitcoin’s nature: while it’s commonly described as a technology movement, Bitcoin ultimately represents “a movement of individuals, right? And the tech just empowers the individuals.” Physical gathering spaces amplify individual empowerment by fostering peer networks, enabling collaboration, and building the social fabric that underlies adoption.

The Bitcoin-Backed Loan Opportunity and Its Risks

Perhaps Odell’s most cautious insights concern an emerging Bitcoin financial product: bitcoin-backed loans. Through Ten31’s investment in Strike, he possesses deep visibility into demand dynamics and product mechanics. The primary demand driver originates from a simple reality: individuals holding significant unrealized capital gains face a tax liability if they sell Bitcoin to access capital.

“The main demand driver really is people are sitting on significant capital gains, taxable if you use/sell — which is really a tax on savings,” Odell explained. For someone holding Bitcoin purchased at $100-$200 per coin and now worth $120,000, selling for immediate capital access triggers approximately $30,000 in government taxes. Bitcoin-backed loans offer an alternative: borrow against holdings without triggering taxable events.

However, Odell issued strong caveats about this market. Bitcoin’s price volatility creates obvious downside risks; he advises loan users to maintain “very conservative” loan-to-value ratios. But he raised a more subtle concern: the need for market competition protecting self-custody against financial re-hypothecation. Some lending products might separate Bitcoin collateral cleanly from re-lending, while others might obscure these mechanics.

“I think it’s a very important product because they’re going to offer it for the ETFs, and it creates a very perverse incentive where you’re better off not holding real bitcoin,” Odell warned. This risk motivated his emphasis on Strike and peer companies offering transparent, auditable loan structures protecting genuine self-custody. “It’s really important for Strike and the other companies in the space to offer a really solid, good product in terms of loans so that there’s a very strong incentive to stay with real bitcoin.”

This warning encapsulates Odell’s entire investment philosophy: the goal isn’t maximizing venture returns through extractive user practices. Rather, it’s ensuring that Bitcoin’s fundamental promise—individual financial sovereignty through genuine self-custody—remains not just technically possible but economically preferable to custodial alternatives. In that sense, every Ten31 investment and OpenSats grant ultimately serves a single mission: making Bitcoin work better for individuals who genuinely want to control their money.