At 23 years old, he raises 5.7 million: Kole Lee’s challenge to revolutionize trading with AI and blockchain

The young former prodigy of the crypto world, Kole Lee, launches his startup Vigil Labs with the goal of rethinking trading from scratch, combining artificial intelligence and decentralized finance.

Key Points of the Article

• Kole Lee, 23 years old, former Stanford student and member of the Stanford Blockchain Club, raises 5.7 million dollars for Vigil Labs.
• Criticizes hedge funds that integrate AI into obsolete systems: “we need to start from scratch”.
• In 2026 Bitcoin could become a geopolitical asset, surpassing $200,000.
• Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi could surpass DraftKings in daily volumes.
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• A major Wall Street bank will launch a DeFi permissioned on-chain platform, marking the union between traditional and decentralized finance.

Who is Kole Lee: from Blyth Fund to Vigil Labs

Kole Lee is just 23 years old but already has a story rich with experiences in the financial and crypto world. After attending Stanford, he dropped out to dedicate himself full-time to innovation. As an analyst at the Blyth Fund – one of the most prestigious student funds – he convinced the board to invest in Bitcoin at 45,000 dollars.

Simultaneously, he was part of the board of directors of the Stanford Blockchain Club, a research and networking center that in recent years has produced talents now active in Ethereum, Solana, and in the world of crypto venture capital.

With Vigil Labs, a startup that has just closed a seed round of 5.7 million dollars, Lee aims to redesign the rules of trading. No longer a patchwork of AI on systems born twenty years ago, but digitally native infrastructures, built with blockchain, machine learning, and decentralized liquidity as foundational elements.

The Criticism of Hedge Funds

According to Lee, traditional hedge funds are chasing AI without understanding its scope. They are trying to “bolt on” artificial intelligence models to legacy systems, that is, platforms born in an era when trading was dominated by Bloomberg Terminal and SQL databases.

An approach that risks repeating the mistakes already seen in the transition to the cloud: costly hybrids are built without ever leveraging the power of the new paradigm. Vigil Labs, on the other hand, starts with a simple question: “what would trading look like if we imagined it today, with blockchain and AI already existing?”.

Bitcoin as a geopolitical reserve

Lee’s vision for 2026 is clear: Bitcoin will cease to be a speculative asset and become a strategic reserve for states and sovereign funds.

Some signals in this direction are already present:

• The Central African Republic and El Salvador have announced Bitcoin purchases for state reserves.
• The central bank of Russia has admitted to considering the use of BTC for foreign trade.
• Some US pension funds have already allocated capital in spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Lee predicts that in 2026 governments and sovereign wealth funds (Norway, UAE, Singapore) will openly declare holding BTC in their official balance sheets. This would trigger a global rush similar to that of gold during the Cold War.

His strongest prediction: Bitcoin over $200,000 per unit by the end of 2026.
An objective that, for many analysts, seems plausible when considering the pace of halving (the last one occurred in April 2024) and the progressive entry of institutional capital.

Prediction markets: a new financial giant

The second point concerns prediction markets. Platforms like Polymarket (on the Polygon blockchain) or Kalshi (regulated by the CFTC) allow betting on the outcome of future events: elections, interest rates, macroeconomic data.

Today, the volumes are still lower compared to sports betting. DraftKings and FanDuel generated over 11 billion dollars in combined revenue in 2023, while Polymarket handled about 500 million dollars in annual volumes.

Yet the growth is rapid: Polymarket has gone from less than 10 million in annual volumes in 2021 to over 2 billion cumulative in 2024. Kalshi has obtained official licenses to list contracts on CPI and Federal Reserve decisions.

Lee predicts that by 2026 these platforms will surpass DraftKings and FanDuel in daily volumes, driven by two factors:

• Diversification: political markets, macroeconomic, climate, tech adoption, not just sports.
• Decentralized liquidity: the ability to exit a position at any time without waiting for the end of the event.

If the prediction were to come true, prediction markets would become the new “probability exchange”, a tool useful not only to speculators but also to risk analysts and policymakers.

TradFi and DeFi: the Inevitable Marriage

Lee’s latest prediction concerns the convergence between TradFi (traditional finance) and DeFi (decentralized finance). According to him, by 2026, one of the major Wall Street giants – BlackRock, Citadel, or JPMorgan – will launch a permissioned exchange platform that will settle transactions directly on-chain.

In practice, a private DeFi exchange where only authorized institutions can operate, but the transactions will be transparent and verifiable on a public blockchain.

Already today we see signs in this direction:

• BlackRock has launched its spot Bitcoin ETF, raising billions in just a few weeks.
• JPMorgan uses its internal blockchain, Onyx, to settle billions of dollars in interbank transactions.
• Citadel has invested in regulated crypto exchanges such as EDX Markets.

If these players openly integrated on-chain settlement, it would be the consecration of DeFi not as an outsider phenomenon, but as the standard architecture of financial markets.

Impact Analysis

Lee’s visions, although ambitious, find fertile ground in current trends:

• The institutional adoption of Bitcoin is already underway, and its classification as a digital safe haven asset appears increasingly realistic.
• Prediction markets represent a still young market but with an annual growth rate exceeding 100%, much faster compared to traditional online betting.
• Traditional finance is moving towards hybrid models: tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), institutional stablecoins, and on-chain clearing are now at the core of global banking strategies.

If even just one of his predictions were to come true, 2026 would be remembered as a watershed year for digital finance.

The story of Kole Lee demonstrates how the new generations of crypto entrepreneurs are no longer just innovating on the fringes, but aim to redesign the architecture of markets. With Vigil Labs and its vision for 2026, artificial intelligence, Bitcoin, and DeFi could transform from niche experiments to pillars of global finance.

The open question is: will the giants of traditional finance truly follow this trajectory, or will they still try to hinder innovation?