On August 14, 2024, Bill Ackman sent a letter to his shareholders. Buried within the familiar cadence of quarterly updates was a structural shift that most traditional finance analysts will miss—but for those of us who track liquidity cycles, it screams in silence. Pershing Square is launching a venture capital fund. Not just any fund: an 'evergreen' perpetual vehicle that can hold private companies through their public listing and beyond. Beneath the baroque facade of a hedge fund expansion, the ledger bleeds into a new domain.
Context: The Perpetual Capital Paradox
Pershing Square Ventures Ltd., as it is called, represents a departure from the standard 10-year lifecycle of venture capital. It is a permanent capital vehicle—designed to eliminate the forced exit, to allow Ackman and his team to let winners run indefinitely. This is the same logic that drives crypto's native perpetual protocols: the removal of temporal friction. But the context is different. Pershing Square is an $18 billion activist hedge fund, known for its concentrated bets on publicly traded companies like Chipotle and Howard Hughes. Now, it is reaching into the private market, leveraging its brand and its balance sheet to compete with the likes of Sequoia and Tiger Global. The initial portfolio is seeded with existing private investments from Ackman’s family office, a move that provides instant AUM but raises immediate questions about valuation and conflict of interest.
This is not a blockchain-native move. But for anyone who has watched the evolution of crypto capital markets, the parallels are unavoidable. The evergreen fund is a trust-based version of what crypto tries to achieve through code: continuous liquidity, permissionless holding, and the elimination of artificial time boundaries. The key difference is that the fund relies on a single legal entity and a single manager’s reputation, whereas crypto disperses trust across a network of nodes. This concentration of trust is both a strength and a vulnerability.
Core: The Structural Mechanics of the Evergreen Model
The evergreen structure is the core insight. In traditional VC, the 10-year fund creates a ticking clock: by year 8, managers must sell or write down holdings, often at suboptimal times. This is a structural inefficiency that crypto has already solved through liquid tokens and continuous trading. But Pershing Square’s approach is different—it is not a tokenized fund, but a legal entity with perpetual life. This allows it to offer what no VC can: a commitment to hold through IPO and beyond. For a crypto startup considering an IPO, this could be a game-changer. However, the model has hidden costs.
The management fee becomes a perpetual annuity, reducing the pressure to generate returns. Unlike a traditional VC where fees are limited to a 10-year horizon, the evergreen fund’s fee stream is infinite—assuming the fund remains alive. This creates a moral hazard: the manager is incentivized to keep the fund alive, not necessarily to maximize returns. The lack of a liquidation event also means that LPs cannot easily exit—they are locked into a relationship that may persist for decades. This is a liquidity trap, masked as innovation.
I have seen this before. During the 2020 DeFi summer, I analyzed the unsustainable yield mechanisms of Compound Finance. The yield was real, but the liquidity was borrowed. When the music stopped, the illusion collapsed. The evergreen fund is similar: it offers the illusion of permanence, but the underlying assets are still subject to market cycles. The difference is that the fund's own shares are not traded—there is no price discovery for the fund itself, only for the underlying portfolio. This opacity is a double-edged sword. Liquidity evaporates when trust calcifies.
From a regulatory perspective, the fund's structure requires careful navigation. The SEC's recent focus on conflict of interest in private funds is acute. Ackman’s family office transferring assets to the fund at cost or fair value? That is a classic related-party transaction that will invite scrutiny. The fund must have independent valuation and a robust compliance framework. Based on my experience auditing 42 early Ethereum projects in 2017, I know that the devil is in the due diligence. Pershing Square’s track record in public markets is strong, but venture capital requires a different kind of technical diligence—especially if the fund targets crypto or blockchain startups. The compliance team must understand on-chain provenance, smart contract risk, and tokenomics. Does Pershing Square have that capability? The article does not mention any venture team hires. This is a blind spot.
Contrarian: The Silent Threat to Crypto Adoption
The contrarian view is that this fund is not a positive signal for crypto. In fact, it may be a harbinger of the opposite. Ackman has been publicly skeptical of cryptocurrencies, calling them 'a store of value for people who want to avoid regulation.' If his fund targets crypto startups, it will be a validation of the asset class. But if it avoids them, it signals that traditional finance still sees crypto as a sideshow. More importantly, the evergreen fund model itself is a competitor to crypto’s native liquidity mechanisms. Why would a startup IPO when it can issue a token and achieve perpetual liquidity without the regulatory burden? The answer is legitimacy. But that legitimacy comes at a cost.
The evergreen fund is a 'trust bridge'—it relies on Ackman’s reputation and the legal framework of traditional finance. Crypto, in contrast, relies on trustless code. We trade in shadows cast by invisible hands. The two worlds are converging, but not without friction. The pattern recognition here is a burden: history repeats, but the code changes the rhythm. The rise of perpetual capital vehicles in traditional finance may actually reduce the demand for tokenized liquidity, as institutional investors get a familiar structure that offers similar benefits. This could slow crypto adoption in the long run.
Pattern recognition is a burden, not a gift. I recall the winter of 2022, when after the Terra-Luna collapse and FTX bankruptcy, I retreated from the industry for three months. During that isolation, I re-evaluated the systemic risks of centralized custodians. The evergreen fund is a centralized custodian of capital—it offers permanence, but at the cost of self-custody. The crypto community may celebrate this as a bridge to institutional capital, but it is also a bridge that leads away from decentralization. The fund’s success could reinforce the narrative that trusted intermediaries are necessary for long-term value storage, undermining the core thesis of blockchain.
Takeaway: Positioning for the Crossroads
Where does this leave the crypto investor? Watch the deal flow. If Pershing Square Ventures makes its first crypto investment, it will be a signal that the institutional bridge is complete. But if it does not, it may be a sign that the old guard is building moats to protect its turf. The macro does not whisper; it screams in silence. The next 12 months will reveal whether the evergreen hedge is a growth catalyst or a containment strategy for the digital asset class. The question is not whether Bill Ackman is coming to crypto. The question is whether crypto needs him to.
In the end, the evergreen fund is a mirror of crypto’s own ambitions: perpetual, liquid, and unbound by time. But it is also a reminder that trust, once concentrated, can calcify into something that blocks the very innovation it claims to support. Volatility is the tax on ignorance. The ignorance here is not about price—it is about structure. Those who understand the true nature of perpetual capital, whether in traditional or crypto form, will be the ones who navigate the next cycle with clarity.