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Asymmetry Is Still Public

The far edge of the risk curve does not belong exclusively to venture capital.

Working draft · September 2026

There is a lazy portfolio convention that treats private markets as the natural home of asymmetric outcomes. Venture gets the power law. Public markets get diversification, liquidity, and incremental compounding.

I do not think that split is especially useful anymore.

The actual question is payoff shape.

If a small position can plausibly return many multiples while the downside is explicit and position-sized, then the fact that the instrument trades publicly does not make the asymmetry less real. It can make it cleaner.

Zcash is one example I keep coming back to. The thesis can be wrong. The asset can go down dramatically. But the combination of finite attention, improving access, a working privacy primitive, and a market structure capable of repricing quickly creates a payoff distribution that looks much more like a venture-style bet than a traditional public-equity allocation.

The point is not that ZEC is “better than VC.” The point is that venture should not be the default answer every time an investor wants exposure far out on the risk curve.

Liquidity is part of the option.

A public asymmetric bet can be resized, hedged, exited, or added to as the thesis changes. That flexibility matters. It also makes bad behavior easier, which is why the sizing rule has to come first.

The useful frame is simple: reserve a small bucket for bets where the upside is allowed to matter, the downside is survivable, and the thesis is specific enough to kill when the facts change.