Santiago Roel Santos is a crypto investor who spent the early 2010s in traditional finance before becoming one of decentralized finance’s earliest institutional backers. He built his reputation as a partner at ParaFi Capital, where he helped lead investments in Aave and The Graph.
He now runs Inversion Capital, a private equity firm he founded in 2024 to acquire traditional businesses and rebuild their operations on blockchain rails. Santos has backed more than 150 crypto startups over the past decade, according to Inversion Capital’s official bio.
Who Is Santiago Santos?
Santos earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Boston University, graduating magna cum laude, according to Inversion Capital’s official bio. He began his career in traditional finance, joining JPMorgan’s investment banking Financial Sponsors Group in 2012 before moving to Sageview Capital, a growth equity firm focused on software and technology companies.
Those years underwriting corporate deals shaped how he would later evaluate crypto projects, treating early-stage tokens less like speculation and more like the due diligence work he had learned on Wall Street. He left traditional finance for decentralized finance full time when he joined ParaFi Capital as a partner in February 2020, according to Decrypt.
For readers newer to the technology he built his career on, our guide on how Bitcoin works is worth reading alongside this profile.
Santiago Santos’s Career and Contributions
At ParaFi Capital, Santos helped lead investments in decentralized finance projects including Aave and The Graph. He was also an early member of PleasrDAO, the collective known for pooling capital to buy high-profile NFTs, according to Decrypt. Santos left ParaFi in 2021 and spent the following years as an active angel investor, backing more than 150 crypto startups, according to Inversion Capital’s official bio, while also co-hosting the weekly news roundup on Blockworks’ Empire podcast alongside Jason Yanowitz, according to the show’s official channel.
In November 2024, Santos announced Inversion Capital, a private equity fund built to acquire traditional businesses and convert their operations to run on blockchain rails. The fund would “acquire traditional businesses that can benefit from business model transformations by adopting crypto mechanisms,” Santos said, according to The Block.
Three months later, he unveiled plans for a dedicated Avalanche-based Layer 1 blockchain to support Inversion’s portfolio companies, telling Decrypt that Avalanche’s flexibility and business development support made it the clear infrastructure choice. You can also find profiles of other figures shaping the crypto industry on our crypto personalities page.
Santiago Santos’s Views and Positions
Santos has long argued that crypto represents a structural shift in finance rather than a passing trend. “Crypto is the next wave of the Internet and we’re just getting started,” he said in a post reported by Decrypt shortly after leaving ParaFi Capital in 2021.
That framing carries into his work at Inversion Capital, where he argues that low-margin, legacy businesses such as telecoms and financial services are better candidates for blockchain adoption than crypto-native startups, since they already have the distribution and user bases new projects spend years trying to build.
Santos treats stablecoins as the most practical entry point for mainstream users, arguing that most people will adopt blockchain infrastructure without ever realizing they are using it, so long as it makes services faster and cheaper.
Santiago Santos’s Net Worth in 2026
No verified personal net worth figure for Santiago Roel Santos is publicly available, according to Traders Union, which describes him as an active angel investor and fund manager rather than a publicly disclosed high earner.
Whatever wealth Santos has accumulated is most likely tied up in illiquid holdings, including carried interest from his years at ParaFi Capital and his equity stake in Inversion Capital, a private company with no disclosed valuation.
Santiago Santos in the News
In February 2026, Santos appeared on The Block’s Layer One podcast, where he argued that token price alone is a misleading way to judge a crypto project and laid out why he thinks stablecoins and first-principles investing, not speculative token trading, will drive the next wave of adoption.
The conversation, hosted by The Block’s Kelvin Sparks and Hypha founder Steven Gates, also covered why Santos chose Avalanche as Inversion’s underlying infrastructure. There is no ongoing legal dispute or controversy tied to Santos as of this writing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Need a refresher on Santiago Santos? Here are the questions readers most often ask about him.
Who is Santiago Santos?
Santiago Roel Santos is a crypto investor who spent 2012 to 2020 in traditional finance, including roles at JPMorgan and Sageview Capital, before becoming a partner at ParaFi Capital and later founding Inversion Capital, a crypto-native private equity firm.
What is Santiago Santos’s net worth in 2026?
No verified net worth figure for Santos is publicly available, according to Traders Union. His wealth is believed to be tied mainly to illiquid equity and carried interest from ParaFi Capital and Inversion Capital, both private companies.
What is Inversion Capital?
Inversion Capital is the private equity firm Santos founded in November 2024 to acquire traditional businesses, such as telecom and financial services companies, and convert their operations to run on blockchain infrastructure, according to The Block.
Why did Santiago Santos leave ParaFi Capital?
Santos left his partner role at ParaFi Capital in 2021 to pursue independent investing and eventually build Inversion Capital, according to Decrypt. He did not publicly detail a single reason for the departure at the time.
What crypto projects has Santiago Santos invested in?
Santos helped lead ParaFi Capital’s investments in Aave and The Graph, and Inversion Capital’s official bio credits him with backing more than 150 crypto startups over the past decade as an angel investor.
Is Santiago Santos still running Inversion Capital in 2026?
Yes. As of a February 2026 appearance on The Block’s Layer One podcast, Santos was still described as Inversion Capital’s founder and remains active in interviews discussing the firm’s acquisition strategy.
