Frictionless Capital

Frictionless Capital is a thesis-driven crypto venture firm that makes a small number of high-conviction investments in high-performance blockchain infrastructure and the applications built on it, with a strong focus on the Solana ecosystem.

Founded in 2022 and based in Miami, Florida, the firm is run by co-founders and managing partners Logan Jastremski and Diego Perez de Ayala. It is not a protocol or an on-chain product: Frictionless is an investor, and its presence in the Solana ecosystem comes through the companies it backs, the research it publishes and the podcast its co-founder hosts.

Investment approach

Frictionless pitches itself against what it sees as the default model in venture. Its about page says: "Venture is full of index investors writing small checks with low conviction. Founders deserve better." The firm's answer is a concentrated portfolio built on first-principles research, not pattern-matching, so each founder gets more attention from the partners. The homepage calls this "frontier investing with conviction". It says the firm gets "in the trenches with founders from day one", on the argument that "capital is a commodity".

Independent coverage describes the same strategy. Reporting on the firm's SEC Form D filing says Frictionless targets projects that can outperform their underlying blockchain networks.

The performance thesis

The firm's published research explains its focus on fast chains. In The Next Frontier of Blockchain Performance (September 2022), Jastremski argues that legacy blockchains run at "dial-up" speeds. His case is that next-generation chains can scale with multicore processors and rising bandwidth, and that scarce block space both drives up fees and stops developers from building consumer-grade applications. The essay treats the physical limits of data propagation, not current designs, as the real ceiling on blockchain throughput.

Frictionless applied that thesis to Solana in Making the Case for Solana: Fighting the FUD, which Perez de Ayala published in January 2023, shortly after the FTX collapse. The piece answered common criticisms of Solana, including its outages, decentralization, validator costs, inflation and ties to FTX. It pointed to Firedancer, the Solana Mobile Stack and state compression as upcoming catalysts. The firm's public backing of Solana through the 2022–23 bear market was the subject of a Proof of Coverage podcast episode.

Funds and backers

In July 2024 Frictionless announced that Frictionless Fund I had raised $20 million to invest in "high-performance blockchain and category-defining applications". According to the announcement, the fund's limited partners included Franklin Templeton and Foundation Capital. Crypto firms including Multicoin, Framework, CoinFund, Big Brain Holdings and AllianceDAO also backed it, as did individuals such as a16z's Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon. The announcement also listed ecosystem founders as backers, among them Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, as well as founders from Axelar, Aptos and Avalanche.

In August 2025 an SEC filing for Frictionless Capital Fund II LP showed the firm targeting $60 million for its next vehicle. The filing reported no capital raised at the time. An offshore Fund II vehicle has also been filed. No final close for Fund II has been publicly reported.

Portfolio

The firm's portfolio page lists eight companies: Backpack, Odyn, Panora, Inference, DoubleZero, Pipe Network, Titan and Dawn. Several are closely tied to Solana:

• Backpack — Frictionless says it invested in 2023. It describes Backpack as a regulated crypto platform that combines a spot and derivatives exchange with a self-custodial wallet. The firm published a long thesis piece, Backpack: A Next Generation Financial Institution, in February 2025. It covers Backpack's integrated exchange, lending and custody product, and its licensing push, which included the acquisition of FTX EU.
• DoubleZero 2Z$0.047-17.6% — a 2025 investment, which Frictionless describes as "a global fiber network for high performance distributed systems and blockchains", bringing high-performance networking and hardware acceleration to crypto.
• Pipe Network PIPE$0.028+1.7% — also a 2025 investment. Frictionless describes it as a decentralized content delivery network on Solana, where independent operators run regional points of presence to serve media.

The Fund I announcement also named DFlow, Andrena and Kuzco among the investments made in the year before July 2024.

Team

• Logan Jastremski, co-founder and managing partner, previously led product for Tesla's Supercharging Digital Experience. He focuses on blockchain scalability research and hosts the Frictionless Podcast, which features technical and investing leaders across crypto and AI. Guests have included Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
• Diego Perez de Ayala, co-founder and managing partner, previously worked at FTX US and in investment banking. According to the firm, he advised on roughly $15 billion of transactions for clients including KKR, Blackstone and CPPIB.

Place in the Solana ecosystem

Frictionless is one of a small group of venture firms whose public investment thesis is built around high-throughput chains. Solana is its clearest example. Its portfolio covers several layers of the stack: a consumer-facing exchange and wallet (Backpack), networking infrastructure for validators and distributed systems (DoubleZero), and DePIN media delivery (Pipe Network). The firm is active as of September 2026. Its X account (@FrictionlessVC) continues to post, and Jastremski is booked to speak at the Global Blockchain Show in Abu Dhabi in December 2026.