CRYPTO SUMMER 2.0 (May '26)
Note from the Founders 👋
The Girl Math of Alternatives: Don’t Let the Word “Crypto” Intimidate You 🪙
Deal Spotlight: Mothership Materials ♻️
Investor Resource: How to Invest in Crypto Today 📊
Media & Press: Out & About 🧘♀️📣
What's Coming Up: Your Future Rich Self 💸
Note from the Founders 👋
GM ☕ from Serena, Porter, and Emma, the co-founders of Girl Math Capital! As always, we’ll start with where this email finds us.
You have probably seen Emma continue to crush the unofficial Girl Math Capital PR tour with another speaking event at Luminary’s Whole Health Summit and another amazing podcast feature on the Tech Couture Podcast, but what you may not know is that next newsletter, Emma will be a MARRIED WOMAN! We can’t wait to celebrate her and the future Mr. Girl Math Capital at their wedding in a few short weeks.
Serena has officially wrapped up her first year at Wharton and is back in NYC to work on Girl Math full time this summer! Highlight from the first week on the job was attending a GMC port co launch event in SoHo with Emma and a ton of GMC members… and ending up at an after party with Nina Dobrev (team Damon forever IYKYK).
Shortly after returning from an Italian wedding celebration for a Girl Math member (Sarah, we love you!), Porter led our final crypto education session for Cohort 3, a bittersweet way to wrap up the educational content for an amazing cohort.
The GMC community is also cooking with gas. We are quickly approaching the $1M deployed mark ($900k+ deployed across 64 companies!), and we’re working with our City Leads across the country to plan some events ahead of our next cohort kick off… Cohort 4! So with that, here’s our official announcement:
Applications open June 1st!
If you or anyone you know wants to join what’s bound to be an epic group, fill out our interest form so the app arrives in your inbox once it’s live. We’re SO grateful for all of the interest we’ve seen for this next cohort, and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome a new group of women to GMC.
If you ask us, there’s nothing like a newsletter from the gals to kick off your MDW and the official start to summer (though this rain in NYC is not the summer energy we’re hoping for). So with that, we hope everyone has a fabulous long weekend, and happy reading!
The Girl Math of Alternatives: Don’t Let the Word “Crypto” Intimidate You 🪙
Read time: 8-10 minutes
If you've been watching crypto from the sidelines, half curious and half skeptical, keep reading. This month our co-founder Porter led Cohort 3's final session on the topic, and the biggest takeaway was simple: crypto in 2026 looks almost nothing like the crypto of 2021. The conversation has shifted from "magic internet money" to something much more real.
The TL;DR: Crypto is currently mirroring traditional finance.
The first era of crypto was about the technology. Bitcoin, Ethereum, digital wallets, the philosophical case for decentralization. And this makes sense! The early stages of any new technology are inevitably more niche and complicated than they will be 10-20 years into development (just look at AI!).
Even in those technical early days, institutions were watching, and they noticed something that mattered: financial products and services built on a blockchain (onchain for short) came with real advantages. Today, those same advantages are being applied to nearly every part of our traditional financial system, including banking, payments, lending, and more. The word for this shift is tokenization. And here's the best part: if you can understand traditional finance, you're well on your way to understanding crypto today.
What is tokenization, and what improvements does it offer our financial system?
Tokenization in crypto is the process of converting the ownership rights of physical or digital assets into digital tokens on a blockchain.
When an asset is tokenized, what you end up with is the same asset moving through different plumbing. And that plumbing is better than traditional finance in a few major ways:
It's faster. Wiring money into an investment can take days. Onchain, it settles in seconds.
It's cheaper. A cross-border payment today costs 5 to 7 percent in fees. The same transfer on stablecoin rails costs a few cents.
It earns. Cash sitting in your checking account earns close to nothing. Its tokenized cousin, a stablecoin backed by US Treasuries, can earn around the T-bill rate of roughly 4 percent.
It's composable. Onchain, financial products snap together like building blocks. The same dollar can earn yield and serve as collateral for a loan at the same time, instead of sitting in one account doing one job. This is the part that has no real equivalent in traditional finance, and it's where a lot of the future gets built.
Crypto and tokenization are no longer niche.
This dynamic is important to understand because crypto isn't fringe anymore. In 2025, stablecoins (or a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to another asset, most commonly a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar) settled $33 trillion in payments, more than Visa processed globally. There's now $15 billion and counting in tokenized treasuries sitting onchain, up nearly 5x in three years.
And the firms involved aren't just crypto startups, they’re financial giants like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JP Morgan. These firms are taking the core products they already sell, like money market funds and private credit, and rebuilding them onchain in order to:
Reach additional customers - a tokenized fund can be sold to a verified buyer anywhere in the world, not just US brokerage clients
Cut real costs - tokenization strips out layers of middlemen and the constant reconciliation between them, which research estimates could save asset managers around $135 billion industry-wide
Offer new services - it makes products possible that weren't before, like a fund that trades 24/7 and can double as collateral, which gives them genuinely new things to sell
In Stripe’s case, the payments company sitting behind a huge number (maybe almost all?) of the companies you buy from, stablecoins have become a critical part of their business. Last year Stripe spent $1.1 billion, its largest acquisition ever, to buy a stablecoin company called Bridge. Now when those businesses move money behind the scenes, like paying an overseas contractor or settling a sale across borders, a growing share of it runs on stablecoin rails instead of the slow, expensive banking system. Using stablecoins enables transactions and conversions to happen in minutes instead of days, for cents instead of a percentage, and the customer never sees a thing.
How crypto regulation fits into the story
If crypto has been around for years, why is everyone showing up in 2026? Because for most of the last decade, the US treated crypto as something to police rather than something to regulate, and that uncertainty kept serious institutions away. However, in the last 18 months, that has flipped.
The GENIUS Act (signed July 2025) created the first federal rulebook for stablecoins, which, among other things, enabled banks to hold crypto on behalf of their customers. And the CLARITY Act, which would sort every digital asset into a clear regulatory bucket, passed the House and cleared the Senate Banking Committee this May, with full passage expected by year-end.
The takeaway is that regulation is really good for the crypto industry, because it sets clear guidelines and guardrails that enable American businesses to take advantage of all of the aforementioned benefits. The legal risk of building onchain has been dropping, which is exactly why the floodgates opened.
So what’s next?
While traditional finance’s adoption of crypto is exciting, it is not the end of the road and crypto is likely in its email moment.
If we look at crypto against the evolution of the internet, one could argue, as Spencer Bogart of Blockchain Capital does, that the next era hasn’t been imagined yet.
When the internet was getting started, email was the obvious, exciting use case, and it felt enormous - a roughly $1 trillion idea! In reality, everything that actually defined the internet, like search, social, and the cloud, hadn't even been dreamed up yet, and together those products were worth tens of trillions of dollars.
Everything we just walked through above is likely the email of crypto. Real and useful, but probably just the warm-up. The line from Bogart that rocked our world: "human imagination is backward-looking." We're great at improving what already exists, and not nearly as good at picturing what was impossible yesterday. Which means the best part of this story is almost certainly the part none of us can see yet. Until then, we’ll be following along closely.
For more on this, consider joining our next cohort!
Deal Spotlight: Mothership Materials ♻️
ICYMI: Each month, we'll share a few of the deals our community has backed, not to give investment advice, but to show you the breadth of opportunities Girl Math members are exploring and spotlight some epic founders.
Serena here! As some of you know, I actually started my career in the sustainability space, so it makes my tree-hugging heart soar when our members invest in climate tech companies. Mothership is a perfect example of my favorite sustainable business models - those that solve market inefficiencies with sustainable, circular solutions that also lead to cost savings and revenue generating opportunities.
Mothership Materials, founded by Jo Marini and Dr. Agnes Ostafin, is building the infrastructure layer for the growing bioeconomy. Powered by its patented TRACE™ technology, Mothership transforms agricultural waste like orange peels, brewer's grain, seaweed, bamboo into high-value molecular building blocks used across industries including textiles, bioplastics, alternative proteins, cosmetics, and next-generation materials.
GMC member Kitty Stevenson invested because Mothership's all-female founding team is "an absolute force." With ESG tailwinds creating "a massive opportunity to pivot away from petroleum-based plastics," and a $100M+ pipeline already in place, the investment thesis felt undeniable.
Claire Addison came at it from a different angle. Mothership felt like "exactly the kind of innovation needed to address real-world supply chain challenges." As a longtime science girl, she described the moment she understood the technology as "a missing piece of the puzzle clicking into place."
What makes Mothership especially compelling to us is that the company is already moving into commercial execution. Between a $100M+ pipeline, partnerships with companies like AB InBev and Asahi, and interest from buyers across industries ranging from textiles to precision fermentation, the early traction is significant.
At GMC, we’re always excited by businesses solving massive problems in ways that are economically aligned while also being impact oriented, and Mothership is a strong example of that thesis in action. We’re excited to cheer on Jo as Mothership continues scaling deployments, expanding partnerships, and building what could become a foundational infrastructure layer for the future bioeconomy.
Follow along with Mothership here: LinkedIn | Instagram
Investor Resource ✏️
How to Invest in Crypto Today 📊
From Cohort 3’s crypto unit
This month, we’re breaking down a few ways you can get exposure to crypto today, and the benefits and risk for each depending on your appetite.
Not financial advice. Crypto is a risky asset class and you should always do your research.
Spot ETFs for BTC, ETH, and some others (IBIT, FBTC, ETHA):
Best for: looking for simple exposure to underlying crypto assets through traditional platforms. Buy them in your existing brokerage just like a stock, with no new accounts or custody to manage. Works in retirement accounts too.
The consideration: ETFs have a fee to own them, and you own a fund share rather than the crypto itself, so your exposure isn’t direct.
Public company stocks building in and around crypto (COIN, HOOD, MSTR):
Best for: exposure to the crypto industry from inside your normal brokerage account.
The consideration: you're buying a company, not crypto itself, so you’re betting on an individual player’s success in the ecosystem.
Tokens on a centralized exchange (Coinbase, Kraken):
Best for: actually owning the asset, ability to hold tokens outside of just BTC/ETH and others available via ETF. You can move to self-custody later if you want more control.
The consideration: you'll need to open a new account and go through KYC, you don’t directly own the asset as you're trusting the exchange as the custodian.
Holding tokens in self-custodial wallet (Metamask, Uniswap Wallet, Argent):
Best for: wanting to be fully in control of your crypto by owning it directly. Enables you to use your crypto in other DeFi apps that could enable you to earn yield.
The consideration: you're entirely responsible for security as if you lose access to your wallet, there’s no company to help you recover it.
For more insights like this, consider joining our next cohort!
Media & Press: Out & About 🧘♀️📣
May started off with the release of the Tech Couture podcast with Kabir Shah. In 43 minutes we managed to cover the origin story of Girl Math, what it's like to build with your best friends, how we source and evaluate deals, the creator economy, dream deals, and what's on tap. Give it a listen here! 🎙️
On May 3rd, we brought our members to CorePower's East Village studio thanks to member Sydney Krelitz, and it was the perfect Sunday vibe. We had a packed room of GMC members and founders sweating out the weekend together, followed by sticking around and connecting with some incredible brand goodies: Beia’s skincare, KEY’s energy drinks, and Cotto’s cottage cheese dip with bagels. Watch the recap here.
Mid-month, Emma took the stage at Luminary's Whole Health Summit in NYC. The event brought together speakers across physical, mental, financial, and professional health: our kind of crowd. Emma spoke about when it's the right time to dip into alternatives and how you can align your impact AND your returns.
PS. If you're a brand and ever want to partner, shoot us an email at admin@girlmath.capital!
What's Coming Up: Your Future Rich Self 💸
You heard it here first: we're partnering with Mrs. Dow Jones. 💸
On June 15th, we're sitting down with NYT bestselling author Haley Sacks for an evening all about her new book, Future Rich Person, and how YOU can build wealth no matter where you are in your financial journey.
Join us live in NYC (ticket includes a copy of the book, drinks + apps) or tune in virtually from anywhere.
Lastly, follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok so you don't miss a thing.
Closing Note 💌
Girl Math Capital was born from the frustration that deals were shared in some circles and not in others. This newsletter is one more way to make sure those conversations and opportunities reach more people, and in particular, more women. If you know someone who'd love this newsletter, pass it along. We believe alternative investing isn't just for finance and tech bros - it's for women who want to get smart, build community, and build generational wealth. See you next month 💸💅
The Girl Math Team
If this got you curious, submit your information to join our next cohort, or apply to be a community member here.
