Ryan Sean Adams
Ryan Sean Adams is a crypto investor and entrepreneur, best known as a co-founder and co-host of Bankless, a cryptocurrency media brand and community focused on Ethereum, decentralized finance, and open finance. He is also a general partner at the early-stage crypto venture fund Bankless Ventures, which is branded with Bankless but operates as a separate investment vehicle.[3][4]
Education
Adams attended Brock University where he studied for a BA, Honors in Business Administration.[1]
Career
Ryan Adams began his career as a Vice President and Principal of Vivus Software from 2003 to 2009. He was also the Vice President of Sales at Meddius, a startup focused on improving patient care by helping organizations make healthcare information universally accessible. In 2016, he joined Premier Inc. as Vice President for Integrated Platform & Analytics.
In November 2017, he founded Mythos Capital, an investment firm focused on cryptoassets. In March 2023, Adams became a General Partner at Bankless Ventures, an early-stage crypto venture fund branded with Bankless and structured as a separate vehicle for investing in seed-stage Web3 companies.[4][5]
Bankless
Adams co-founded Bankless Media with David Hoffman in September 2020 as a cryptocurrency media brand and community focused on helping individuals navigate the decentralized finance and broader open finance landscape.[2] Podcast episode listings show Adams continuing to co-host Bankless through at least August 2026, including year-ahead market discussions in December 2025 and episodes on Ethereum’s market cycle and macro themes released in March and August 2026.[8][9][10][11] In May 2026, crypto media reports stated that Bankless had laid off most of its team, and Adams wrote on X that “the first era of Bankless has ended,” describing a transition after four years of collaboration with co-host David Hoffman.[6] Subsequent reporting described the layoffs as having been carried out quietly without a formal public announcement, prompting online criticism of how the departures were communicated given Bankless’s community-focused image.[12] In his own post on X, Adams confirmed that the team had been reduced, said he was stepping into a more “passive” role while Hoffman would lead the team and content, and indicated that this shift marked a “second era” for Bankless with scope for content to expand beyond its earlier Ethereum-centric focus.[12] In Bankless content, Adams and Hoffman also discussed and occasionally satirized experimental models for community and investor participation in the Bankless brand, including hypothetical onchain equity or IPO-style structures, framing these ideas as conceptual explorations rather than announcements of an actual securities offering.[8][9]
According to his Blockworks speaker profile, Adams describes himself as an "open finance maximalist" focused on financial sovereignty, with a stated mission to help onboard the first billion people to crypto through memes, media, and education.[3]
Bankless Ventures
Ryan Adams is also a crypto investor. In April 2023, he started a venture fund called Bankless Ventures with David Hoffman, structured as a seed-stage Web3 venture fund that is legally separate from the Bankless media business while sharing its brand.[4][5]
"The relationships we’ve (Hoffman & Adams) built through the podcast have helped us meet more and more pioneers with a shared vision for crypto’s ultimate potential. Through our angel investments, Ryan and I have helped finance small teams that eventually grew to become pillars of the crypto industry.
We’ve been fortunate that the growing network of Bankless has given us access to a substantial amount of dealflow, and it’s become much more than two individuals can handle," the team wrote in the Bankless Ventures launch post.[4]
In early 2023, CoinDesk reported that the Bankless hosts were raising a venture capital fund of up to $35 million to invest in seed-stage Web3 companies, structured as a separate legal entity from the Bankless podcast but sharing its brand.[5] By mid-2023, it had been reported that Bankless Ventures was targeting a fund of around $35 million focused on early-stage Web3 projects.[5]
The Bankless Ventures team includes the hosts, Ryan Sean Adams & David Hoffman, Ben Lakoff, Kimberly Adams, and Brent Matterson. Advisors of the venture fund include Justin Drake and Anthony Sassano.[4]
Views and Public Profile
Adams is publicly positioned as an Ethereum
- and open finance-focused commentator, emphasizing financial sovereignty and the role of decentralized finance.[3] He is best known as a co-host of the Bankless podcast and related media channels, where he discusses crypto, DeFi, and Ethereum developments.[3] Adams is also active on X and contributes long-form writing to Bankless, where his author page lists articles on crypto, Ethereum, and broader Web3 topics.[1][7] From 2024 through 2026 his public commentary continued to focus on Ethereum’s market cycle and long-term investment case, including a 2026 interview with analyst Michael Nadeau in which he discussed on-chain indicators and ETH’s position in the broader crypto cycle.[10] He also used Bankless podcasts to explore token distribution mechanisms such as ICO-style launches and macro themes like the “debasement trade,” hosting episodes on the return of public token sales in late 2025 and macro-driven demand for crypto assets in 2026.[9][11]
Adams has remained publicly vocal about Ethereum’s monetary role, including 2026 posts criticizing the “Ethereum not $ETH” narrative and arguing that Ethereum would be a “failed project” if its native token did not function as a large-scale global store of value.[13] Media coverage contrasted his view with Hoffman’s more skeptical position on direct value capture for ETH and reported in mid-2026 that Hoffman had liquidated his remaining ETH holdings, while noting that Adams had not publicly indicated plans to sell his ETH.[13] These debates were presented as differences in perspective between the two co-founders rather than formal policy positions for Bankless.[13]
In late 2025 and 2026 Bankless podcast episodes, Adams and Hoffman described what they saw as the early stages of a new crypto bull market, emphasizing commentary that revenue-generating tokens and alternative store-of-value assets such as Zcash and Near might play a larger role relative to Bitcoin and Ether in this cycle.[14][15] Adams also helped frame macro discussions on rising U.S. Treasury yields, fiscal policy, and what he and his guests referred to as the “debasement trade,” referencing bond-market dynamics and investor letters such as Howard Marks’s memos as part of his long-term thesis for Bitcoin and Ethereum.[11][14] These views were framed within specific Bankless podcast episodes as Adams’s and his guests’ interpretation of market conditions rather than definitive forecasts.[15]
