🤝 Trust infrastructure is the shared substrate — registries, identity, credit data — that lets many different parties transact and coordinate without going through the chokepoint of a single owner, operator, agency, institution, or government.
Twin forces
At LAVA we invest in Simple Finance and in trust. The two compound. Simple finance is what end users touch; trust infrastructure is what makes those products credible, composable, and durable at scale.
In the world of cryptocurrency, people often call public blockchains “trustless”. What they really mean is that shared ledgers which no-one owns remove many of the assumptions required to consider a system trustworthy. Trustworthy itself has two roots: the Latin veritas and the Old Norse truwe.
Most of the industry focuses on veritas — verification. In theory, anyone can independently verify that a public chain is operating correctly, and from that derive “trustlessness”. In practice — especially in Africa — the education, tools, and compute power required to actually verify a chain make this a thin reading of the word.
We are more interested in truwe: reliable, strong, stable. We back founders building infrastructure and applications that are trustworthy because they are shared — operated, used, and verified by many parties with divergent economic interests, none of whom can unilaterally corrupt the system. Individual verifiability and communal reliability operate hand in hand. (More on this in What is Trust Worth?)
Where trust infrastructure shows up
This thesis is broad by design. We look for founders using shared ledgers to unlock new economic value by facilitating new forms of trust. In practice that means:
- Identity and reputation — proof of personhood, KYC reuse, portable identity, on-chain reputation that can be priced.
- Credit infrastructure — credit registries, scoring, repayment data, securitization rails, debt clearing.
- Real-world assets and registries — vehicle, property, and equipment registries; tokenization done in intelligent ways that scale beyond single jurisdictions and create truly pan-African and global venues with much deeper liquidity.
- Tracking and tracing — supply-chain provenance, commodities, agricultural inputs, pharma.
- Funding mechanisms — new primitives for collective capital formation, retroactive funding, and aligned-incentive markets.
- Wallet and key security — the unglamorous but essential plumbing that prevents catastrophic tail risk for the rest of the stack (see Shield3).
The constraint we hold founders to: the solution must be simple and direct enough to stand on its own, without depending on a long tail of fragile external integrations.
What we look for in founders
- Aligned incentives over ideological purity. Decentralization is not a question of purity: the systems that are most resilient make intelligent trade-offs about what kinds they optimize for at different stages of growth.
- Founders who have done the work to understand a specific market’s realities — its registries, its incumbents, its laws, its informal practices — before building technology.
- Products that meet a real need, at the right time, and with relational work of standards-setting — because trust infrastructure compounds only when many parties adopt it.
- Skill in zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and selective disclosure where these unlock real compliance wins.
What we are looking for next
We are actively looking at:
- Tokenization, mostly of derivatives that can scale across the continent. We think the world of perpetual swaps and associated infrastructure can actually bypass some of the slow, relational work we often look for when done intelligently.
- Onchain credit and securitization rails for African originators.
- Identity and proof-of-personhood primitives that survive contact with African regulatory regimes.
- Wallet and key-security infrastructure that materially reduces tail risk for the rest of the stack.
Out of scope
- “Trustless” narratives that ignore the human and institutional work required to make a system actually used.
- Great ideas where the market is years away from being ready for.
- Token-first projects without a clear first customer or aligned-incentive story.
- Closed registries dressed up in blockchain language.
- Ideologically pure decentralization that cannot interface with the regulators and incumbents whose participation makes the system trustworthy in practice.
Lasting trust infrastructure is built with skillful implementation, maturity, and timing — applied at the level of code, of incentives, and of relationships. We are looking for the founders who can bring all three at once.