“It is definitely harder to raise than it was last cycle,” Start told DL News.

“Funds are making fewer bets, and they’re being much more selective about where they take exposure,” he said.

Amid the $2 trillion industry drawdown, capital is increasingly being directed towards companies focused on stablecoin infrastructure, payments and financial connectivity, where demand is seen as more closely linked to real economic activity, he said.

“There’s a lot less appetite for broad narratives and a lot more focus on whether a company has real usage, a credible regulatory setup, and a product that fits into actual financial flows.”

Still, crypto startups raised $197 million this week, DefiLlama data shows.

Here are the top three raises this week.

Startale Labs, $50 million

Startale Labs, the Singapore-based developer behind the Astar Network, has raised $63 million in a Series A round.

SBI Holdings led the raise. The backing of the financial services company underscores how Asian financial institutions and the blockchain sector are growing more aligned.

The company is positioning itself as middleware for enterprises entering crypto. It says the fresh capital injection is earmarked to advance its Astar zkEVM and Swanky Suite products.

For SBI, the investment reflects a longer-term wager on multi-chain infrastructure operating within a regulated global framework.

Ledger, $50 million

France-based hardware wallet maker Ledger has secured a $50 million funding extension. The raise reinforces its position as a leading provider of self-custody solutions.

The raise via secondary share sale highlights continued demand for secure asset storage as institutional participation grows.

Proceeds are expected to support expansion of Ledger Enterprise and further rollout of its Stax device.

Despite competition from software-based MPC wallets, Ledger’s funding momentum suggests hardware custody remains the preferred model for high-value and institutional assets.

The raise comes as Ledger co-founder Éric Larchevêque is advocating for crypto workers’ right to wear guns in France. His co-founder, David Balland, was the victim of a brutal kidnapping in 2025.

Tazapay, $36 million

Singapore-based Tazapay has raised $36 million in a Series B round.

Stablecoin issuer Circle’s venture capital arm led the raise. Circle’s backing points to a strategic push to expand the use of USDC as a settlement asset in emerging markets.

Tazapay’s platform offers fiat-to-crypto rails across more than 70 markets, enabling local collection and payouts supported by integrated stablecoin liquidity.

By bypassing legacy systems such as SWIFT, Tazapay is targeting inefficiencies in global B2B payments.

You’re reading the latest instalment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

The deal marks the first time a UK-regulated bank will tokenise deposits on a public blockchain while keeping them FSCS-protected and interest-bearing.

Yet it also throws into question the role of Cardano, Input Output Global’s first blockchain, launched in 2017.

Despite Midnight being the focus of attention, Cardano won’t get left behind, Charles Hoskinson, the firm’s founder, said on X.

“When we do deals like this almost always there’s a Cardano component to the infrastructure. It’s not exclusive to Midnight,” Hoskinson said.

Monument is a so-called digital challenger bank. It targets financial services professionals and entrepreneurs, and requires a minimum deposit of £25,000 to open an account.

The deal comes as crypto projects look for commercial tie-ups with traditional financial firms as the two industries converge.

In recent years, Wall Street firms have become fascinated by tokenisation — the idea of representing ownership rights of traditional assets like stocks, bonds or real estate as tokens on a blockchain.

Among tokenisation’s biggest proponents is Larry Fink, the CEO of $14 trillion asset manager BlackRock. In his annual 2026 shareholders’ letter, Fink praised tokenisation for its ability to reduce fees and open up investing to more people.

‘Tip of the spear’

Midnight is a privacy-focused partner chain to Cardano. It enables Cardano DeFi protocols to use zero-knowledge technology to keep transactions private, and also relies on Cardano for its security.

Hoskinson said both blockchains will benefit financially from each others’ successes.

“Midnight is leading the way, it’s the vanguard, the tip of the spear,” he said. “It’s showing how to do commercialisation. It’s showing how to get real-world assets into the cryptocurrency space.”

Cardano was conceived as a so-called third-generation blockchain, and attempted to solve the scalability, interoperability, and sustainability issues facing Bitcoin and Ethereum. Its developers placed a strong emphasis on scientific rigour, requiring it to be academically peer-reviewed.

Yet technological setbacks over the years have seen it lose ground to rivals.

DeFi protocols on Cardano hold just $146 million in deposits, an amount that pales in comparison to Ethereum’s $76 billion and Solana’s $8.7 billion.

Cardano’s ADA token is down over 91% from its September 2021 all-time high.

If Midnight continues to find commercial success, it could give Cardano a much-needed boost.

‘Flagship deal’

Midnight’s deal with Monument goes further than just letting customers tokenise their deposits.

The second phase of the deal will focus on providing tokenised products on the Midnight blockchain, such as real-world asset investments, to Monument’s customers.

Further in the future, Midnight and Monument plan to introduce blockchain-based lending, allowing customers to borrow against their investments

This, the Midnight Foundation said, is designed to provide Monument customers with more cost-effective access to credit than traditional borrowing, allowing them to access liquidity without selling their investments.

“This is a flagship deal, and we take it very seriously,” Hoskinson said. “It’s something we’re real proud of.”

Midnight’s NIGHT token, the native utility and governance token for the network, is up 3.1% over the past 24 hours.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

The escalating war in the Middle East will force investors to rethink “asset security, liquidity, and stability in an increasingly multipolar world,” Tim Sun, senior researcher at Hong-Kong asset manager Hashkey Group, told DL News.

But some sectors — primarily stablecoins — will win from the chaos, he stressed.

“Instability actually strengthens the core thesis for stablecoins,” Sun said. “When traditional banking channels face sanction risks or capital controls, stablecoins become the default settlement layer.”

“Demand only grows in a risk-off environment. Infrastructure that enables faster, cheaper stablecoin settlement—whether on/off-ramps, compliance tools, or cross-chain bridges—will continue to attract capital,” he said.

Still, crypto startups raised an impressive $192 million this week, DefiLlama data shows. That brings this year’s total fundraising up to $2.75 billion so far.

Here are the top three funding rounds this week.

Kast, $80 million

London-based stablecoin-focused fintech Kast raised $80 million in a Series A round at a $600 million valuation.

The round was led by QED Investors and Left Lane Capital, backing the company’s push to link digital dollars more closely with everyday retail payments.

Kast’s platform integrates major stablecoins such as USDT and USDC with widely used mobile wallets including Apple Pay, allowing users to spend crypto balances through familiar consumer channels.

Cryptio, $45 million

Crypto accounting platform Cryptio secured $45 million in a Series B funding round this week.Sentinel Global and Blackfin Capital Partners led the raise.

The company provides software designed to deliver audit-ready accounting data for enterprises handling crypto transactions, an increasingly important requirement as regulators tighten oversight of the sector.

The new capital is expected to support expansion among large financial institutions grappling with reporting, tax and compliance obligations tied to digital asset activity. The deal reflects a broader shift in investor priorities, with funding increasingly directed towards back-office infrastructure that enables transparency and regulatory compliance rather than the experimental protocols that dominated earlier crypto cycles.

Zcash Open Development Lab, $25 million

The Zcash Open Development Lab has raised $25 million to strengthen the core infrastructure of the privacy-focused cryptocurrency network and expand the usability of its ecosystem.

The funding will support development of the Zodl wallet and related interoperability tools designed to make Zcash easier to use across different blockchain networks.

Despite increasing regulatory pressure on privacy-focused technologies, the investment suggests that some backers still regard privacy-preserving tools as a fundamental component of digital financial infrastructure.

The focus of the funding also points to a shift in priorities within the ecosystem, from purely technical protocol work towards broader usability and cross-chain integration.

You’re reading the latest instalment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

Ripple just achieved a $50 billion valuation as part of a massive share buyback programme, which pushed its valuation up by 25% since it raised $500 million in November, according to Bloomberg.

At the same time, the price of XRP, the cryptocurrency developed by the firm, has lost over 60% of its value since reaching an all-time high in July, but that hasn’t dissuaded the token’s supporters from investing billions into exchange-traded funds tied to the asset.

First, the valuation. Ripple has kicked off a share buyback programme for some $750 million worth of shares from investors and employees. The buyback drive will continue through April, Bloomberg reported.

Ripple most recently bought back $285 million worth of shares from early investors and employees at an $11 billion valuation in January 2024, according to Reuters.

The new buyback drive comes hot on the heels of Ripple securing a $500 million strategic investment from affiliates of Fortress Investment Group, Citadel Securities, Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, Brevan Howard, and Marshall Wace.

XRP down 60%

The latest buyback drive comes as uncertainty weighs on the crypto market.

The market has lost almost half its value since October, and a perfect storm of geopolitical turmoil, tariffs, and the escalating conflict in the Middle East threatens to drag down cryptocurrency prices further.

XRP has not been left unscorched. The Ripple-linked asset has lost 54% of its value since October.

Yet, that doesn’t seem to deter the XRP Army, the collective noun for the asset’s diehard fans. No

In fact, they’ve injected over $1.5 billion into XRP ETFs despite the market drawdown.

“My guess is this [degree of inflows] is largely XRP superfans versus casual retail,” Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst Eric Balchunas wrote on X on March 10.

Ripple didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email him at eric@dlnews.com.

Charles Chong, vice-president of strategy at crypto advisory firm BlockSpaceForce, told DL News that investors have “real alternatives with faster revenue visibility.”

“Crypto teams need to work harder,” he said. “That’s pushing founders to be more precise about defensibility, monetisation, and how their models hold up in a slower market.”

Chong’s words of caution come as crypto startups raised $128 million in the first week of March, DefiLlama data shows. That brings the total amount raised in 2026 to nearly $2.5 billion so far.

Still, this week’s investors include the likes of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Ripple, Y Combinator, Wintermute, and Sequoia Capital, all piling into infrastructure for payments, trading, decentralised finance.

“Investors are still writing cheques, but only for teams that can clearly explain value capture and opportunity cost, especially in a world where AI offers a very different risk-reward profile,” Chong said.

Here are the top three raises this week.

ARQ, $70 million

ARQ, the Latin American fintech previously known as DolarApp, secured $70 million in Series B round, the largest venture round in the sector this week.

The raise was led by Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund. It seemingly signals institutional confidence as the company shifts from a cross-border dollar transfer service into a broader digital banking platform.

Handling more than $10 billion in annualised transaction volume across roughly two million users, ARQ plans to deploy the capital toward a full brand overhaul and the rollout of new products including wealth management services and high-yield local currency accounts.

The move highlights rising demand across Latin America for stablecoin-linked financial infrastructure, as consumers and businesses seek protection from persistent currency volatility and limited access to traditional banking services.

Crossover Markets, $31 million

Crossover Markets raised $31 million in Series B funding roundTradeweb Markets led the raise that valued the firm at roughly $200 million. Additional investors included Ripple and crypto market-maker Wintermute.

The company operates CROSSx, an execution-only electronic communication network built for institutional digital asset trading

Unlike many crypto exchanges, the startup says it separates trade execution from custody and market-making functions, a structure designed to minimise conflicts of interest and appeal to traditional financial firms.

QFEX, $9.5 million

QFEX, a hybrid derivatives exchange focused on tokenised real-world assets, raised $9.5 million in seed funding led by Yuri Sagalov of General Catalyst, with backing from Y Combinator and investor Paul Graham.

Founded by Cambridge mathematics graduates and former high-frequency traders from Citadel and Tower Research Capital, the platform allows investors to trade equities, commodities and foreign currencies via perpetual derivatives that operate around the clock.

You’re reading the latest instalment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.

The only question now is where exactly will the next big businesses crop up?

From artificial intelligence to geopolitics — that question is hard to answer.

DL News asked five investors about what they’re keeping an eye out for in 2026.

Hoolie Tejwani, Head of Coinbase Ventures

Perpetuals are already the most used financial product in crypto. They’ve been around for years, handle vast amounts of trading, and work even when markets get chaotic.

What’s new is how they’re being used. Instead of just speculating on crypto prices, people are using perps to create synthetic markets tied to real-world assets. That could be inflation data, oil prices, private companies, or other signals people care about but can’t easily trade today.

The key point is you don’t need to actually own the thing you’re trading. You don’t have to move oil barrels or custody shares. That makes it much faster to launch new markets and lets them scale globally from day one.

‘Taken together, 2026 feels less like hype and more like maturity.'

Hoolie Tejwani, Head, Coinbase Ventures

A few other shifts are happening alongside this. Crypto’s superpower is enabling 24/7 global markets for anything. Anything that can be tokenised and traded will be, and the lines between trading platforms will blur.

Decentralised finance products are also starting to work together better, with a more intuitive user experience, so we expect new cohorts of users and capital to onboard to DeFi. And as AI systems become more capable, crypto is quietly becoming the way those systems move money and coordinate actions.

Regulation also plays a role. This year was when legislation like the Genius Act helped move crypto out of a legal grey zone. Market clarity is the next big unlock, which we expect to see in 2026.

When clear rules are set, capital gets more patient, and builders can play beyond the next quarter.

Taken together, 2026 feels less like hype and more like maturity.

Founders are thinking long-term, building real infrastructure, and focusing on what actually gets used. That’s usually when things start to stick, and we’re investing in the teams that show up to build with five- to 10-year visions.

Mike Giampapa, General Partner, Galaxy Ventures

Despite lacklustre price performance in 2025, with total crypto market capitalisation down roughly 13% year-to-date, we’ve seen unprecedented improvements in underlying fundamentals.

We expect adoption of stablecoins and other tokenised assets to continue accelerating in 2026 and to represent a secular growth trend over the next one to two decades.

The US government is likely to continue supporting the global export of dollar-backed stablecoins, underpinning a new wave of fintechs and neobanks that deliver better, faster, cheaper financial services.

In parallel, incumbents are beginning to fight back by launching blockchain-enabled products across digital asset custody, cross-border payments, stablecoin issuance, cards, and treasury management, making 2026 a true inflexion point for institutional adoption.

Large banks, asset managers, and broker-dealers increasingly view these efforts as opportunities for growth and margin expansion, replacing legacy rails with modern blockchain infrastructure without requiring end users to materially change existing behaviour.

As more assets move onchain, institutional capital formation should accelerate, creating a supportive backdrop for DeFi, with crypto primitives such as prediction markets, perpetuals, and vaults continuing to gain relevance.

Following a landmark year for crypto mergers and acquisitions in 2025, we expect continued consolidation as incumbents execute on strategic roadmaps.

Venture funding activity is ultimately downstream of new fund formation, which is likely to remain challenging as many institutional allocators remain over-allocated to venture and private equity more broadly.

Finally, after what was the most important year in history for crypto regulation, with the signing of the Genius Act into law in July, attention now turns to advancing a market structure bill in 2026, which will further reinforce institutional adoption."

Francesca Conti, Head of Acceleration and Incubation, CV Labs

Next year is poised to be the year of further institutional adoption in the blockchain arena.

With players like Binance awarded three Abu Dhabi Global Market licenses in the United Arab Emirates, we are confident that the new regulatory clarity emerging across other jurisdictions is a positive indication of what is to come in the new year.

In our experience, good regulation enables innovation and, in turn, allows institutions to participate in the global rise of digital asset markets and correlated industries.

Similarly, crypto exchange Bullish raising $1 billion for its public offering signalled a green light for digital asset companies on Wall Street, which can only stimulate stronger institutional interest that meets their clients’ demand.

We anticipate that growth will continue in other jurisdictions at an even more rapid pace, particularly in regions where the impact of blockchain and frontier technology extends beyond financial market expansions to deeply enable critical industries such as agriculture and health to operate with significant efficiencies.

On the heels of our recently closed African Blockchain fund, backed by well-known leaders such as Circle Ventures, the investment arm of the US-based issuer of the USDC stablecoin, the appetite in emerging markets is more evident than ever.

Our internal research shows that investment in Africa’s blockchain ecosystem is on the rise — with blockchain accounting for over 7% of total venture capital funding and 12.7% of all deals on the continent.

Whilst payments, infrastructure and fintech rails continue to dominate verticals for us at CV VC, we remain deeply committed to the emergence of blockchain technology as the bedrock rail on which better, transparent and verifiable actions can be managed across web3.

Jeff Ren, Founder, OKX Ventures

In 2026, the smarter money in crypto will follow the places where the technology is interoperable with the rest of finance. There’ll still be plenty of chatter about a possible Bitcoin Act or new waves of spot exchange-traded funds, but the more durable story lies in the plumbing underneath.

In 2026, we’ll see more projects explore product-market fit around risks people already care about. That means more niche assets coming onchain: stocks, gold, intellectual property, even trading cards and GPUs, with global, 24/7 access and the ability to plug straight into DeFi.

The goal isn’t to invent new things to speculate on, but to package familiar risks — rates, oil prices, elections, credit spreads — in intuitive formats that the everyday user can actually navigate to get exposure or hedge.

Stablecoins already move more value than big card networks, and with rulebooks like the Genius Act in the US and sweeping crypto regulations in Europe, called Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, banks and brokerages are finally comfortable launching their own stablecoins and tokenised products.

That’s how stablecoins move from trading chips into the default rail for salaries, business-to-business payments and cross‑border trade in a more technology‑driven, compliance‑first environment.

Perpetuals still dominate crypto, but they come with funding fees and a learning curve that favours professional traders. Options can offer cleaner upside or protection without that ongoing drag, especially in simpler, more user‑friendly formats.

Expect to see more click‑once structures, including binary yes-no contracts on events that look and feel closer to prediction markets than traditional options.

Underpinning it all, more of the flow will be machines talking to machines: bots and agents holding balances, paying for services and rebalancing on autopilot. From a VC angle, that means fewer spray‑and‑pray bets on narratives, and more focus on whether a product can work with regulators, institutions, and this emerging machine economy at the same time.

Petr Martynov, Head of Growth, Morningstar Ventures

For most of crypto’s history, investors chased infrastructure. That meant faster blockchains, more decentralisation, and cheaper fees.

That phase is largely done.

By 2026, the most interesting investment opportunities will come from what gets built on top of that foundation.

First, I expect a real wave of consumer crypto apps — especially in DeFi — that don’t feel like crypto at all. The tech is finally invisible. Users won’t think about wallets, seed phrases, or gas fees.

They’ll just use products that feel as smooth as Revolut or Robinhood, but happen to run on blockchains underneath. That’s when adoption stops being theoretical.

Second, the line between traditional finance and DeFi will blur fast.

As regulation becomes clearer, particularly in the US, we’ll see more familiar financial products move on-chain: equities, payments, settlement rails.

This isn’t crypto replacing traditional finance. It’s TradFi quietly using blockchain because it’s cheaper, faster, and global by default.

Finally, I’m watching how blockchains become verification layers for AI and robotics.

As machines generate more data and make more decisions, we’ll need neutral systems to prove what happened, when, and by whom.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

Hash price — the metric measuring how much revenue miners earn per unit of computing power — hit an all-time low in recent weeks and the depressed price of the leading cryptocurrency is hurting profit margins for companies in the cutthroat industry.

But pivoting towards selling their processing powers to fuel the artificial intelligence revolution offers an increasingly alluring alternative.

Nick Hansen, CEO and co-founder of the Luxor mining pool, told DL News that “resisting the urge to transition to AI” will be Bitcoin miners’ biggest challenge in 2026.

Despite the move to AI being attractive, he said that it’s still “very difficult to balance [both mining and high-performance computing].”

The prediction comes as Bitcoin miners are struggling to make ends meet due to free-falling crypto prices, plunging daily transaction fees, and plummeting rewards for maintaining the blockchain — and that’s when they’re not being banned from operating all together.

Falling rewards

Bitcoin’s price trading at around $87,000, 30% below its October all-time high, is one reason for miners’ struggles. Most top miners in Q3 were breaking even at about $90,000 per Bitcoin, MinerMag data shows.

The lower the price, the smaller the rewards — in dollar terms — for maintaining the blockchain will be.

Those rewards have already shrunk after last year’s halving event slashed miner rewards for minting blocks in half to 3.125 digital coins.

Lower transaction fees aren’t helping miners make money, either. While institutional adoption by the likes of BlackRock has helped bring crypto into the mainstream, it means that a lot of Bitcoin has been locked up and won’t be used to make transactions.

With fewer transactions, miners face fewer fees.

AI pivot

Hence the AI pivot.

A number of top publicly listed miners have started directing resources to providing the infrastructure for high-powered computing.

Some miners are already going all-in on the industry as minting the biggest digital coin by market cap becomes unprofitable. Nasdaq-listed Bitfarms in November announced that it would wind down mining operations to focus instead on high-performance computing.

“Bitcoin miners are now an integral part of the AI value chain, providing warm powered shells for AI data centres — considered the biggest bottleneck to execution,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a November 3 report.

While many public miners are not dropping mining operations completely, they’re marketing themselves as “compute” or “digital infrastructure” companies while switching between minting digital coins and providing compute for AI — depending on which is more profitable.

“We’ve seen way more miners trying to say they’re in the ‘compute business’ as opposed to digital asset mining,” Hansen added. “Which I think is fair, given any idea of harnessing compute to produce value is easier to understand for the average investor.”

Top miners Terawulf, IREN, and Cipher Mining have signed multi-year HPC contracts with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft.

Bitcoin miners have been eyeing up the AI space for some time now. While both industries require huge amounts of energy and data centers, the move isn’t always easy — AI data centres require more expertise than Bitcoin mining operations.

Gwyn Lauber, VP of corporate affairs at Bitcoin mining tech firm Canaan, said: “Margins are clearly under pressure right now, but Bitcoin mining has experienced many similar moments in the past.”

Lauber added that miners would be paying attention to the macroeconomic picture next year — including the next steps from the Federal Reserve.

“An easing cycle in 2026 would likely result in better Bitcoin prices and mining margins,” she said.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

Tether, which issues USDT, the third biggest digital asset by market capitalization, on Friday said it had submitted a binding all-cash proposal to Juventus owner Exor to buy its entire stake in the club. Tether also offered one billion euros (over $1.1 billion) to invest in the club as part of the proposal.

But on Saturday, Exor CEO John Elkann said in a video statement that the club was not for sale.

“Juventus, our history, our values, are not for sale,” he said.

Exor, which has major investments in companies like Ferrari and Stellantis, then said in a statement that its board of directors has unanimously rejected the unsolicited proposal. Exor is owned by Italy’s influential Agnelli family.

Tether Submits Proposal to Acquire Juventus Football Club 🦓

Read more: https://t.co/CDv8OosqFU

— Tether (@Tether_to) December 12, 2025

“Juventus is a storied and successful club, of which Exor and the Agnelli family are the stable and proud shareholders for over a century, and they remain fully committed to the Club, supporting its new management team in the execution of a clear strategy to deliver strong results both on and off the field,” the statement read.

DL News reached out to Exor for comment.

Tether already holds a more than 10% stake in the club since upping its shareholder position in April as part of the crypto giant’s diverse portfolio.

But Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on Friday that the proposal to become majority shareholder was personal.

“This proposal reflects a belief in Juventus as more than a football club,” Tether said in a statement.

“As a boy, I learned what commitment, resilience, and responsibility meant by watching Juventus face success and adversity with dignity,” Ardoino added. “Those lessons stayed with me long after the final whistle.”

“Our goal is to contribute positively to the club’s future, to support sporting performance at the highest level, and to help Juventus continue to grow sustainably in a rapidly evolving global sports and media landscape.”

Tether did not immediately respond to questions from DL News.

The stablecoin giant has branched out from issuing the most-traded digital token.

Just this week, the company debuted a wellness app and announced that it had invested in humanoid robotics firm Generative Bionics as part of a €70 million ($82 million) funding round.

And in March, the El Salvador-based company bought a majority stake in South American agricultural firm Adecoagro.

Mathew Di Salvo is a news correspondent with DL News. Got a tip? Email at mdisalvo@dlnews.com.

The deal will give professional and institutional investors — such as asset managers, private equity and credit firms, custodians and market makers — access to “scalable infrastructure for tokenised assets,” Philipp Pieper, co-founder of Swarm Markets, told DL News.

“This acquisition brings together the two layers institutions have been missing: trusted, machine-readable data for private assets and a regulatory-compliant execution and trading stack,” Pieper said.

Inveniam is an American data analytics firm that specialises in providing clear data about the private-market assets, including real estate and private credit. In October, the company acquired decentralised cloud storage provider Stor for an undisclosed amount.

The Swarm Markets deal highlights the growing competition among crypto companies and fintech firms looking to tokenise private markets.

Crypto exchange Kraken and stock-trading platform Robinhood are just two businesses that have ventured into this space over the past year.

The interest in private markets is understandable. Investment giant BlackRock estimates that the market will grow by over 53% to be worth $20 trillion by 2030.

“The tokenisation of public and private markets is one of the largest infrastructure opportunities in global finance,” Pieper said.

‘Only just beginning’

Despite the growing competition, Pieper is confident that Swarm Markets and Inveniam will make an impact.

“We don’t believe the space is crowded,” he said. “In fact, it is only just beginning. Many companies have announced intentions to enter tokenisation or private markets, but very few have a working product that investors can actually use today.”

Essentially, he argues that, once you parse through the flood of announcements, few companies are doing what the two companies can do.

Pieper noted that Swarm Markets has been live for years, bringing public securities on-chain in a compliant, DeFi-compatible way.

Combine that with Inveniam having brought more than $200 billion of private-market assets to the blockchain, and you’ve got a winning combo, Pieper argues.

Moreover, he argues that private markets are primed for an update.

“Private markets dwarf public markets in terms of market value, but remain largely opaque, slow, and inaccessible,” Pieper said.

“Investors increasingly expect the same transparency, liquidity, and real-time data they experience in public markets. Tokenisation is the path towards that.”

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

The New York Broker and financial services group has established itself as a prominent underwriter of crypto-related stock offerings and has advised several digital asset treasury firms, companies that have bet their future on the idea that crypto prices will continue to soar.

Clear Street has also acted as an underwriter for Trump Media & Technology Group, US President Donald Trump’s family’s media company, the Financial Times reported.

Clear Street didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Under strain

The news comes as the digital asset treasury fad has come under strain in recent months as crypto prices have crashed.

The business model was pioneered by Michael Saylor’s Strategy — which Clear Street has served as an underwriter for — in 2020 when the software company pivoted to essentially become a Bitcoin proxy by buying the digital asset.

By July this year, the gamble had driven Strategy’s share price to surge some 3,500%, incentivising other firms to plough their capital into digital assets.

The problem? Crypto prices have crashed in recent months. Bitcoin, for instance, is down just under 30% from its $126,000 October high.

Digital asset treasuries’ stocks have fallen in tandem with the price. Strategy is down some 60% since its July high. Nakamoto, another crypto treasury firm, has seen its share price fall some 95%.

Metaplanet, the hotel operator turned Bitcoin treasury, has an average cost that sits at around $108,000 per Bitcoin. With Bitcoin at $89,000, the company is underwater by nearly $17,000 per coin across its 30,823 Bitcoin balance sheet.

Kraken IPO

Clear Street is not the only crypto-linked company that’s potentially going public in 2026.

Kraken, one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges, has confidentially filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of its common stock, the company said in November

Kraken didn’t set a time for when the IPO will happen, but only said it expected it “to occur after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.”

Previous reports have predicted that Kraken would go public in the first quarter of 2026.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

Top guns involved in dealmaking this year include tech-focused firms Paradigm and Sequoia Capital, as well as Wall Street juggernauts BlackRock, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs.

The most popular sectors? Centralised exchanges with $4.4 billion, prediction markets with $3.2 billion, and DeFi platforms with $2.9 billion, according to data from DefiLlama.

“The projects attracting capital today are those aligned with regulatory clarity, operational resilience, and the ability to integrate with TradFi institutions and their standards,” Jordan Knecht, head of institutional strategies at GlobalStake, the blockchain services firm, told DL News.

“In the middle of a choppy market, investors are signalling that they prefer durable, compliance-first businesses that aim to establish a long-term foundation for this asset class,” Knecht said.

Knecht isn’t alone to note that the crypto market has evolved this year.

Charles Chong, VP of strategy at crypto-native advisory firm BlockSpaceForce, told DL News that “the environment for crypto startups is shifting.”

Chong said that capital is rotating toward mature players whose revenue and unit economics justify valuation.

“None of this signals weakness; it simply reflects a market that is normalising and maturing,” he said, adding that raises are “becoming more rational, more aligned with fundamentals, and less driven by reflexive speculation.”

Georgii Verbitskii, angel investor and founder of the crypto investment firm TYMIO, told DL News that crypto is closely following the same pattern as other market cycles.

“In every major technology cycle, capital first flows into the base layer — the rails, liquidity, and settlement systems — before it moves into consumer-facing applications,” he said.

Here are some of the most notable raises this year.

Binance, $2 billion

Binance, said to be the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume, secured a massive raise of $2 billion in March. This significant capital injection was led by Abu Dhabi-based artificial intelligence and advanced technology investor MGX.

Binance CEO Richard Teng said that “this investment by MGX is a significant milestone for the crypto industry and for Binance.

Polymarket, $2 billion

Betting platform Polymarket closed a major funding round worth $2 billion in October, led by Intercontinental Exchange, valuing it around $8 billion. Once a fringe crypto‑betting site, the capital infusion reflects high institutional confidence.

Circle, $1.1 billion

Circle Internet Group, the issuer of the $76 billion stablecoin USDC, raised $1.1 billion in its June initial public offering. The blockbuster IPO was led by JP Morgan, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs serving as joint lead bookrunners, joined by Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Société Générale as bookrunners.

Founded in 2013, Circle has been one of the primary beneficiaries of the United States’ warming to the crypto industry.

You’re reading the latest instalment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email at lance@dlnews.com.

One of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges has confidentially filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of its common stock, according to the company.

Kraken didn’t set a time for when the IPO will happen, but only said it expected it “to occur after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.”

Previous reports have predicted that Kraken would go public in the first quarter of 2026.

Co-CEO Arjun Sethi has publicly dodged the questions about Kraken’s plans to go public, telling DL News in September that the crypto exchange was in no rush to follow rival exchanges Gemini and Bullish to file for an IPO.

“If we were a part of what I call the pack of companies that have FOMO to go public, then we would have already filed,” he told DL News.

Kraken said it had not determined how many shares it planned to offer and at what price.

$20 billion valuation

The announcement comes hot on the heels of Kraken revealing that it had secured $200 million in a strategic investment from Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation.

Fortune was first to break the news.

The round comes shortly after Kraken closed an earlier round of financing in September in which it raised $600 million at a $15 billion valuation.

The investments reflect “years of work, discipline, and conviction,” Sethi said on LinkedIn. “I am proud of our team and grateful for the partners who chose to join us.”

“This journey has never been about being right in a single moment,” he continued. “It has always been about staying right over the long run.”

The new valuation puts it ahead of rivals Bullish and Gemini, who trade at $5.2 billion and $1.3 billion market caps, respectively.

Long time coming

The news that Kraken has filed a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC is seemingly the culmination of years of hints that the exchange is planning a float.

Kraken even hinted as far back as 2021 that it planned to go public, but those plans were delayed due to market downturns and conflicts with the SEC during the Biden administration.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

On Wednesday, the firm announced the raise of an additional $35 million in a Series A funding round led by venture firms Speedinvest, CommerzVentures and Latitude. Existing investors Shapers, Headline, Chalfen Ventures, and Kraken Ventures also participated in the round.

Deblock plans to use the funds to fuel its expansion across Europe, starting with Germany as its second market after France.

“Germany’s strong adoption of digital financial services and established regulatory framework make the German market a natural next step on Deblock’s European expansion path,” the firm said in a release shared with DL News.

Deblock previously raised approximately $29 million through an initial $12 million seed round in 2023 and a further $17.5 million seed round in November 2024.

The latest raise values Deblock at around $208 million.

The round adds to the $22 billion pile of funding that investors have ploughed into crypto startups in 2025, doubling 2024’s total, according to data from DefiLlama.

Neobanking frenzy

Deblock is a so-called crypto neobank that aims to leverage blockchain technology to offer users higher yields on deposits in a bid to outcompete traditional banks.

The firm links bank accounts with self-custodial crypto wallets, giving customers access to both the traditional banking system and decentralised financial services.

“We target both crypto natives and opportunity seekers: crypto users looking for a crypto-friendly bank, and more traditional neobank customers attracted by a better yield on their euros,” Jean Meyer, CEO and co-founder of Deblock, told DL News.

But it’s not the only firm with a similar idea.

More than half a dozen new crypto neobanks have launched over the past year, banking on clearer regulations and the technological savvy of younger generations to fuel their success.

Bigger crypto firms are also muscling into the space.

Earlier this week, Aave Labs, the firm behind the $55 billion Aave lending protocol, unveiled a new savings app offering up to 9% returns on deposits.

These newer entrants will have to compete with existing neobanking giants like Chime, Revolut and Monzo, who are meeting crypto neobanks halfway by rolling out their own blockchain features.

Ambitious plans

The challenges in competing with established banking titans are something Deblock’s founders know well.

The firm’s four co-founders, Aaron Beck, Adriana Restrepo, Jean Meyer, and Mario Eguiluz, were all previously executives at Revolut.

Revolut is now one of the most valuable fintech firms in Europe, having achieved a $75 billion valuation at a secondary share sale to employees and investors in September.

Deblock’s founders are hoping to replicate that success.

Since launching in France in April last year, Deblock says it has onboarded more than 300,000 customers.

The firm has also secured several key regulatory licenses needed for its expansion plans in Germany. It is authorised as an Electronic Money Institution by the Banque de France, and was the first fintech to receive a Markets in Crypto-Assets licence from the Autorité des Marchés Financiers.

“Our goal is to create a clear and secure way to use both euros and digital assets in everyday life,” Meyer said. “These markets are critical to defining the future of onchain banking in Europe.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

And not even the record 43-day US government shutdown, $1 trillion of market value evaporating, and growing uncertainty about the global economy are discouraging them from ploughing even more into blockchain-based businesses.

That’s according to Eva Oberholzer, chief investment officer of venture capital firm Ajna Capital, who told DL News that sentiment is now shifting “from hype to proof” as core infrastructure “continues to attract institutional checks.”

“We are seeing a split,” Oberholzer said. “Traditional Series A rounds take longer, while community rounds fill quickly because the buyers actually use the product.”

And Oberholzer is not the only one seeing upside.

Despite turbulence, “we’re still seeing major startups like MegaETH, Polymarket or Kalshi go to market,” Shane Molidor, founder of crypto investment bank and advisory firm Forgd, told DL News.

Indeed, five crypto companies raised over $87 million in the second week of November, according to DefiLlama data.

That brings the total funding for crypto companies to over $22 billion so far in 2025, doubling 2024’s total. Codebase expects $25 billion to be doled out to crypto companies this year.

Big-name investors cutting cheques this week include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, known for early backing of Palantir and SpaceX, Robinhood’s venture capital arm, which rarely makes frontier investments, and Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto division.

“Investor sentiment remains cautiously optimistic,” Ron Tarter, co-founder of stablecoin issuer MNEE told DL News. “We see VCs and family offices with capital to allocate.”

Here are the crypto companies that raised the most money this week.

Lighter, $68 million

This week, trading platform Lighter raised $68 million in a new round backed by Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, Robinhood, and Haun Ventures, Fortune reported. The deal values Lighter at $1.5 billion, making it a so-called unicorn.

Lighter is a decentralised exchange and blockchain designed for perpetual futures trading, with plans to add spot markets. It runs on a custom Ethereum layer 2 and has rapidly climbed rankings for total value locked.

Already profitable, Lighter joins a new generation of DeFi exchanges like Hyperliquid aiming to unseat centralised giants such as Binance.

Founder Vladimir Novakovski said the firm’s goal “is to build the infrastructure that guarantees transparency, fairness and correctness in all financial transactions.”

Seismic, $10 million

Crypto infrastructure startup Seismic raised $10 million in a funding round led by a16z crypto, with support from Polychain, Amber Group, LayerZero, dao5, and TrueBridge, Fortune reported. The latest round brings Seismic’s total funding to $17 million.

Seismic says it helps fintechs shield user data when transacting on public blockchains.“The entire world can see what happens onchain,” founder Lyron Co Ting Keh said. “We’re here to make sure customer data doesn’t leak in the process.”

Seismic routes transactions through private rails that prevent exposure of sensitive details, including salaries, rent, and credit history, typically revealed on public ledgers. The company’s partners include Brookwell, a stablecoin account provider, and Cred, a private credit platform. An unnamed cross-border payments client also uses Seismic to reduce transfer costs.

While Stripe-backed rival Tempo, a top competitor, raised $500 million, Co Ting Keh welcomed the competition. “If the pie is big enough, all of us eat.”

You’re reading the latest installment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email at lance@dlnews.com.

On Wednesday, the firm announced a $500 million strategic investment from affiliates of Fortress Investment Group, affiliates of Citadel Securities, Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, Brevan Howard, and Marshall Wace.

The decision to sell another $500 million in new common equity “reflects the strategic value of deepening relationships with financial partners,” Ripple said in a post announcing the raise.

The raise values Ripple at $40 billion — a more than 263% increase from the firm’s previous valuation event. In January 2024, Ripple bought back $285 million worth of shares from early investors and employees at an $11.3 billion valuation, according to Reuters.

It follows Ripple’s recent $1 billion tender offer at the same valuation.

It’s the biggest funding round since Ripple’s Series C, which closed in December 2019 and raised $200 million at a $10 billion valuation. That round was led by Tetragon and included investments from SBI Holdings and Route 66 Ventures.

Upping the ante

The raise comes amid a Wall Street crypto land grab following the passing of landmark stablecoin regulation in the US.

In September, Reuters reported that a Wall Street consortium including Apollo Global Management, Oppenheimer, Jane Street and HSG invested $500 million in crypto exchange Kraken at a $15 billion valuation.

In June, USDC stablecoin issuer Circle conducted an initial public offering that valued the firm at $6.9 billion. Investors piling into Circle’s stock have pushed that valuation up to more than $28 billion.

Ripple’s soaring valuation ups the ante for other crypto firms courting Wall Street for investment.

Ripple diversifies

Launched in 2012, Ripple styles itself as a fintech firm that leverages the XRP Ledger blockchain to provide cross-border payments, among other services.

In recent months, the firm has started diversifying its business by entering new markets in prime brokerage and treasury management.

Last month, Ripple bought GTreasury, a firm that offers corporate treasury management services, for $1 billion.

In April, Ripple spent $1.25 billion on Hidden Road, a non-bank prime broker that offers institutions clearing, prime brokerage, and financing across foreign exchange, digital assets, derivatives, swaps, and fixed income.

The acquisitions come as more and more firms look to muscle in on crypto-based cross border transfers.

Heavy hitters including Tether sister company Bitfinex, payments giant Stripe, and Circle are building new blockchains specifically for payments using US dollar stablecoins.

At the same time, existing cross border payment providers are cosying up to crypto.

Last month, Western Union, one of the largest and most well-known money transmitters, announced plans to deploy a stablecoin on the Solana blockchain.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Hi! Eric here.

Coinbase buying early–stage crypto investing platform Echo for $375 million this week highlights two things: first, the competition is heating up. Second, the number of mergers and acquisitions in the space is about to skyrocket.

That’s according to Wyatt Lonergan, general partner at VanEck Ventures, who told DL News that crypto startups no longer just compete within the “pretty small space” of digital assets firms, but now also against financial multi-billion-dollar behemoths.

Competing in a small space is “a lot different than if you’re competing with the 100 billion pound gorilla,” Lonergan said.

What’s changed? Well, everything.

US President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto policies have softened regulators’ policing of the industry and paved the way for industry-friendly laws.

At the same time, companies like stablecoin issuer Circle and crypto exchange Gemini have raised billions of dollars in their initial public offerings.

The combination of these factors has incentivised Wall Street giants and fintechs to muscle into crypto like never before. They’ve launched new services and recruited new talent to better compete.

Both traditional finance firms and crypto ventures alike are scooping up smaller startups that provide everything from payments to custody and infrastructure.

This growing competition means that industry native firms and outside ventures alike are actively acquiring smaller firms, essentially outbuying the competition. Thus, the surge in M&As.

Stripe, Kraken, Robinhood, and Ripple are just some of the big players that have announced acquisitions in 2025.

Over 200 such deals worth about $20 billion have already been announced this year, Karl-Martin Ahrend told DL News in September. He expected those figures to grow to $30 billion across 400 deals in 2025.

Things are looking bullish.

CZ Biden’s ‘war on crypto is over’ as Trump pardons ex-Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao

On Thursday, US President Donald Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of the industry’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, according to White House officials. Liam Kelly and Aleks Gilbert report.

Nigel Farage became the star of the crypto conference. Not everyone’s happy

The Reform Party leader has pledged to turn the UK into a crypto hotbed if elected prime minister, but not everyone in the industry is happy about his support.

Solana quietly ends support for Saga mobile phone just two years after launch

Developers behind Solana’s Saga mobile phone announced on Monday that they will stop providing vital software and security updates for the phone just two years after launch, Tim Craig reports.

Post of the Week

Concerns over the threat of quantum computing got a fresh look this week as a breakthrough from Google brings the technology much closer to being used in real-world applications.

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could crack Bitcoin’s cryptographic algorithm putting the $2.2 trillion asset in jeopardy.

Quantum computing is basically the climate change of Bitcoin. Plenty of idiots who deny it because they can’t possibly grasp the amorphous or the astronomical, and plenty of scientists that understand it yet have no socially compelling solutions to offer.

We need Bitcoin Greta.

— Jeff Park (@dgt10011) October 23, 2025

On Tuesday, the US-based exchange announced it had acquired the early stage investing platform for $375 million in a cash and equity deal.

Coinbase has acquired @echodotxyz.

Onchain capital formation is a vital and unique part of the crypto ecosystem. Excited to be adding Echo and Sonar to Coinbase to give our customers new token access opportunities. pic.twitter.com/3XIjxMu8cW

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) October 21, 2025

The tie-up will likely unlock more and higher-quality opportunities, Amir Hajian, a researcher at crypto market maker Keyrock, told DL News.

It’s “a major win for users,” Hajian said. “Coinbase’s 100 million plus user base creates a powerful incentive for projects to launch there.”

Echo is one of several platforms that lets individuals invest in early-stage crypto ventures that are usually reserved for institutional investors.

“You can let specific communities invest a ranged amount at cheap prices,” Kasper Vandeloock, an angel investor and adviser to several crypto trading platforms, told DL News. “Normally it’s kind of the ethos to make Echo rounds cheaper as it’s for the community.”

“It democratises early-stage investing by flipping the traditional model by empowering communities rather than gatekeeping allocation among insiders,” Hajian said.

It comes as investors’ appetite to back crypto ventures has surged to its highest point since 2022. They have poured over $21.8 billion into projects so far this year, according to DefiLlama data.

Industry experts expect that appetite will only grow thanks to the US government’s pro-crypto policies.

The return of ICOs

Investments like the ones Echo facilitates can be extremely lucrative. Those who invested in Bitfinex’s Plasma blockchain on Echo last year were able to realise a 324-fold return when its XPL token launched in September.

But early-stage investing is also extremely high risk, even for the crypto industry.

“Seed stage stuff is really difficult to invest in,” Jordan Fish, Echo’s founder, said on X in July. “Lots of projects on Echo will go to zero. In fact, I would imagine that most things on Echo will go to zero.”

Platforms like Echo aren’t the first time retail investors have been offered access to early-stage investments.

In 2017, a type of crypto investment called an initial coin offering, or ICO, exploded in popularity. These offerings skipped the need for regulatory oversight by selling blockchain-based tokens instead of equity.

But the lack of regulation meant ICOs were mired with hundreds of dubious projects, if not outright scams. They were swiftly cracked down on by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Industry insiders say that there’s still a need for alternative funding methods.

“The industry needed alternatives to VC-dominated launches that treat retail as exit liquidity,” Matt O’Connor, co-founder of token offering platform Legion, told DL News. “Regulatory clarity in Europe through MiCA, and shifting sentiment in the US has created space for compliant public token sales again.”

In addition to Echo’s early stage investing infrastructure, the platform also has a token launch platform called Sonar, which is more similar to previous ICOs.

Coinbase said it plans to integrate Sonar first, and plans to expand support to tokenised securities and real-world assets through Echo’s infrastructure in the future.

Echo will remain a standalone platform under its current brand for now, Fish said in an X post.

Allocation competition

Coinbase’s acquisition could have some downsides, however.

Interest in popular early stage investments on Echo is already high. Coinbase’s acquisition and the increased exposure it brings could make things even more crowded.

“Competition for allocations will intensify,” Hajian said. “As Echo opens the door to a much larger audience, each fundraising round may attract far more participants, making access to the best deals more limited.”

Hajian said he still sees the acquisition as a net positive for Echo users.

Others, such as Vandeloock, anticipate more early-stage investments on Echo from projects building on Coinbase’s Base blockchain.

“I don’t think much will change for Echo users, however I do hope they will receive a Base airdrop,” he said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz led the prediction market’s raise, with participation from other investors, including CapitalG, Coinbase Ventures, General Catalyst, and Spark Capital.

In a statement shared with DL News, Alex Immerman, partner on a16z’s Growth Fund, applauded the founders for taking “the difficult but more responsible route” of becoming regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The cash injection comes as prediction markets are increasingly becoming a key feature of the crypto industry.

It also highlights the growing interest among investors to back crypto-linked startups.

Venture capital firms have backed projects to the tune of $17 billion in the first nine months of 2025, outpacing 2024’s total by over $7 billion.

Competition is heating up

The raise also highlights the intensifying competition between Kalshi and its arch-rival Polymarket.

For now, it seems as if Kalshi is in the lead.

The prediction market overtook Polymarket in September by registering higher trading volumes than its competitor.

As of the week of September 29, Kalshi had over $956 million in trading volume on its platform, almost double that of Polymarket, according to Dune data.

The booming sports betting market is driving the success, according to Dustin Gouker, a sports betting consultant and predictions market analyst.

Sports betting has flourished in the US since the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban against the practice in 2018.

It’s now become a $13.7 billion market, one that prediction markets are eagerly wanting to get in on.

In March, stock-trading platform Robinhood also launched a prediction markets hub powered by Kalshi, offering contracts on sports and policy outcomes.

Users betting on Kalshi through Robinhood now account for a large chunk of Kalshi’s trading volume, Gouker told DL News in September.

Kalshi has leveraged its regulation by the CFTC, a distinction that sets it apart from its rivals.

Yet, that advantage may soon disappear.

In July, Polymarket acquired QCX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange, for $112 million. In early September, the regulator granted a no-action letter to the exchange, paving the way for Polymarket to start offering its services in the US.

Crypto key for Kalshi

Kalshi already allows users to make deposits with cryptocurrencies through a collaboration with ZeroHash, but it plans to expand its remit.

That’s according to Kalshi’s newly hired crypto lead, John Wang.

“The next 10x unlock for us will be building new financial primitives for trading on Kalshi,” he said during Solana APEX, a Solana conference at the Marina Bay Sands convention centre.

“And crypto, as this global financial layer, is honestly essential to fulfilling that vision.”

He called on developers to pitch ideas ranging from pushing data onchain to tokenising Kalshi positions.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

Local news reports on Thursday say Naver will incorporate Dunamu into its business group as a fully owned subsidiary through a comprehensive stock swap.

Naver Financial, the company’s fintech arm, will execute the stock swap by issuing shares to acquire Dunamu in full.

The stock-only structure means Naver won’t have to front the cash upfront to do the deal.

Naver’s stock price is up 11% following the news.

South Korea’s crypto market

The move carries big stakes for Naver and South Korea’s crypto market.

Upbit is the country’s largest crypto exchange and the fourth biggest globally by daily trading volume. The platform is central to the liquidity for trading major altcoins, such as XRP and Cardano.

Alongside Bithumb, Korbit, and Coinone, Upbit forms what’s called South Korea’s “big four,” the country’s four most prominent cryptocurrency exchange platforms.

Naver is also a major player in Korea’s financial market through its fintech arm, which handles $58 billion in annual payment volume.

Both Naver and Dunumu are already developing a stablecoin pegged to the Korean won, and the deal has been cast as a means to push Naver into the international market, according to news reports.

Regulatory hurdles

However, crypto trading in South Korea is heavily restricted to South Korean citizens.

The deal also underscores a global trend of internet and fintech giants steadily colonising crypto rails to expand their businesses.

From PayPal and Stripe to the likes of Kakao, Naver, and Rakuten, several internet and fintech giants have recently embedded crypto products directly into their sprawling payment and financial markets.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.

On Monday, newly public Strive announced it will acquire fellow Bitcoin-holding firm Semler Scientific in an all-stock deal worth over $1.3 billion.

The combined firm’s nearly 11,000 Bitcoin would lift it from 16th to just outside the top ten among public holders, according to Bitcoin Treasuries.

“This merger cements Strive’s position as a top Bitcoin treasury company, and we believe our alpha-seeking strategies and capital structure position us to outperform Bitcoin over the long run,” said Matt Cole, Strive’s chairman and CEO.

With direct Bitcoin purchases no longer driving the same upside, the path to outperforming the asset itself may run through similar mergers and acquiring smaller treasuries for their coins.

Early imitator

Michael Saylor kicked off the Bitcoin treasury trend in 2020 when his software company MicroStrategy started to hoard the cryptocurrency.

Five years and one name-change later, Strategy’s stock value is up some 2,300%.

Other firms have, understandably, tried to copy the trade. Semler was among the first companies to mimic Saylor’s playbook, launching its Bitcoin treasury strategy in May 2024, roughly a year before the field became crowded with imitators.

But the move hasn’t exactly paid off for shareholders. Semler’s stock trades a little above $30, only a few percent higher than when it first announced its Bitcoin pivot.

Shares briefly crested $80 in late 2024, after Donald Trump’s presidential victory lifted hopes of favourable crypto regulation, but the rally has long since fizzled.

The Strive–Semler tie-up isn’t the only sign of consolidation in the sector. Just last month, KindlyMD completed its merger with Nakamoto Holdings, raising $540 million through a PIPE financing to fund Bitcoin purchases.

That deal was smaller in scope, but served the same purpose: showing how corporate treasuries are pursuing growth by bolting together businesses and financing structures instead of just making direct Bitcoin buys.

And with recent reports suggesting that one in three Bitcoin treasuries have slipped below their Bitcoin value, it looks like the stock-for-Bitcoin flywheel is breaking down.

Similar mergers and acquisitions to thin the herd may be the only way forward for the top firms to justify their premiums.

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at kbaird@dlnews.com.

Fourteen companies building products around fiat-pegged cryptocurrencies have raised $537 million so far this year, according to DefiLlama data.

That’s a five-fold increase from the $84 million raised in 2024.

In July, stablecoin infrastructure venture OSL Group bagged the biggest round so far this year when the Hong Kong-based firm raised $300 million in equity funding to expand its global reach, per DefiLlama’s data.

“There’s just a buzz around stablecoins,” Anna Strebl, CEO of stablecoin payment platform Confirmo, told DL News.

She added that while getting funded has become relatively easy, “I don’t think it’s unfair hype.”

Stablecoin frenzy

The amount raised highlights the crypto frenzy that has swept across markets this year, spurred by the industry’s key regulatory wins.

Not only has US President Donald Trump supported the industry through executive orders and key government appointments, but he has also signed landmark stablecoin legislation, known as the Genius Act, into law in July.

“It was basically a green light for corporate America,” Ron Tarter, CEO of stablecoin company MNEE, told DL News, saying the law legitimised the industry.

The amount raised isn’t the only signal that things have changed for stablecoins.

This week, the total value of stablecoins in circulation passed a record $290 billion. Coinbase analysts forecast that stablecoin supply will surpass $1 trillion by 2028.

Another sign of the buzz around stablecoins can be seen in the stock market. Stablecoin issuer Circle’s $1 billion blockbuster initial public offering was executed in June.

It’s trading at four times the value at the time of its IPO.

While crypto lender Figure Technology also issued a stablecoin, DefiLlama categorises the firm as an RWA firm. Similarly, DefiLama defines Circle as a CeFi, or centralised finance, firm.

Including Circle and Figure in the mix, the stablecoin sector has raised over $2.4 billion this year.

Growing competition

Naturally, competition in the stablecoin market is intensifying.

While companies like Circle and Tether may still maintain their hard-earned market dominance, they face competition on all sides.

Not only has fintech giant Stripe announced plans to launch its own stablecoin network, but Wall Street players are also plotting similar stablecoin strategies.

Institutions now view stablecoins as “building blocks of digital finance, turning dollars from passive storage into assets that both earn and settle value,” Evgeny Yurtaev, co-founder and CEO at wallet provider Zerion, told DL News.

In June, Société Générale announced its intention to launch a US dollar-pegged stablecoin, and JPMorgan announced its own stablecoin offering called JPMD.

Elsewhere, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup are actively exploring launching their own stablecoins, too, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Banks push back

To be sure, stablecoins startups’ success hasn’t remained unchallenged.

In August, several banking lobby groups issued a stern warning. They stated that the Genius Act granted crypto companies an unfair advantage, potentially draining over $6 trillion in deposits from lenders.

Their argument?

Though lenders will be able to issue stablecoins, they’ll be barred from paying any interest to holders. Crypto companies have no such rule holding them back, they say.

The industry, spearheaded by Coinbase’s Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad, has hit back against the banking backlash.

“Deposit erosion is a myth,” Shirzad wrote in a blog, suggesting that those financial institutions are simply trying to protect their “$187 billion annual swipe-fee windfall.”

You’re reading the latest instalment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email at lance@dlnews.com.

The Maelstrom Fund founder has led a raise worth almost $7 million into Bio Protocol, a decentralised science, or DeSci, platform building artificial intelligence-native tools for biotech funding and drug discovery.

“Bio is about to be the category-defining launchpad which will fund scientific research the community finds appealing, not just academics,” Hayes said in comments shared with DL News. “If it works, it’s not just a launchpad — it’s the birth of an AI-native research market.”

Maelstrom anchored the raise. Mechanism Capital, Animoca Brands, and Atria Ventures also joined the raise alongside several biotech and crypto investors, Bio Protocol said.

The funding round marks Hayes’ latest support of the $896 million DeSci sector. In January, he wrote a blog encouraging “risk-takers” to support DeSci projects.

“We love undervalued dogshit,” the Maelstrom chief investment officer wrote in January, saying that the fund had already bought into tokens like VITA and that of Bio Protocol.

The new raise includes new funding from Hayes’ firm, Bio Protocol told DL News.

Bio Protocol said it will use the cash injection to strengthen its engineering, AI and regulatory muscles “to bring AI-driven decentralised science onchain.”

Its stated goal, much like the rest of the DeSci movement, is to leverage blockchain technology to create a more open, cheaper and transparent way of doing research.

“Science today is locked in institutional black boxes,” CEO Paul Kohlhaas said in comments shared with DL News. “By unifying AI, biotech, and crypto in a decentralised platform, we can compress drug development from decades to months.”

The platform lets researchers and patients deploy BioAgents — autonomous AI “co-scientists” that generate hypotheses, manage wallets, and commercialise discoveries.

The first agent, Aubrai, launched with VitaDAO and biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey in August. So far, it has raised $900,000, minted 1,000 onchain hypotheses, and triggered live lab tests, according to Bio Protocol.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email at lance@dlnews.com.

The digital asset company called Trump Media Group CRO Strategy will be initially seeded with $1 billion worth of CRO, the native token of Cronos, a Crypto.com blockchain subsidiary. The remainder will mostly be held as an equity line of credit for additional CRO purchases.

The CRO treasury company plans to run a validator node on the Cronos blockchain, according to the terms of the deal. Validators are participants on blockchains like Cronos who stake their tokens and secure the blockchain while earning fees for processing transactions.

The company will delegate all of its CRO tokens to the validator to earn native staking rewards.

CRO tokens surged 30% on Tuesday on the news, even as the broader cryptocurrency market slipped this week.

Devin Nunes, CEO of Trump Media, said the company was “bullish on cryptocurrency” even as the digital asset treasury trend spreads across companies of all sizes.

The deal first sparked backlash from some Cronos token holders who said it would dilute the value of their investments when it was first proposed in March.

That’s because it involved the reissuing of 70 billion CRO tokens, currently worth almost $14 billion, that were previously burned, a term for when cryptocurrencies are removed from circulation. Token burns are typically permanent.

Reissuance increased the token’s supply to 100 billion CRO tokens, from 30 billion, a 233% increase.

Crypto treasury companies

The deal puts CRO, the 30th-largest cryptocurrency by market value as the latest crypto to be adopted in the digital asset treasury trend that has become popular in corporate America. Companies are diversifying their balance sheets by adding cryptocurrencies to their corporate reserves.

It’s a broader trend pioneered by Michael Saylor, founder of Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, who started acquiring Bitcoin in August 2020. Strategy holds the largest Bitcoin treasury among all publicly-traded companies with about $70 billion worth of the asset on its balance sheet.

Strategy’s stock price has soared more than 2,000% since it began stockpiling Bitcoin, while the cryptocurrency itself has surged about 10-fold since then.

That success continues to spawn numerous imitators with companies like BitMine and SharpLink that are stockpiling Ethereum, while others like Sharps Technology are holding Solana. On Tuesday, Pantera Capital announced plans to raise about $1.25 billion to seed a US-listed Solana treasury company.

Many of these companies issue debt or shares to raise capital to buy their preferred cryptocurrency.

Earlier in August, ALT5 Sigma Corporation announced plans to raise $1.5 billion from a stock sale to buy WLFI, the native token of World Liberty Finance, a Trump-backed DeFi project.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip?. Please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.

AI-focused crypto projects raised $516 million in the first eight months of the year, a 6% uptick from the total amount raised in 2024, according to DefiLlama data. It’s the highest amount raised in this market segment, according to the database.

Major institutional investment firms including Bitwise, Pantera, Sequoia, and Binance Labs have poured money into AI crypto projects this year.

Bitwise senior investment strategist Juan Leon predicted the “megatrend” could add $20 trillion to global GDP by 2030.

Crypto giants like Coinbase — with its launch of its x402 stablecoin payment protocol that allows AI agents to transact online — are also heavily investing in the space.

The ballooning funding into these efforts come as the buzz around the technology — especially generative AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, X’s Grok, or Midjourney — has reached fever pitch.

AI is undeniably booming. NVIDIA, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are all heavily invested into the technology.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley has estimated that AI has the potential to add almost 30% to the long-term valuation of the S&P 500 index, which would translate to up to $16 billion in additional value.

To be sure, 95% of AI pilot programmes have failed to achieve rapid revenue acceleration, according to a recent report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Moreover, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently signalled that an AI bubble might be forming, saying that “some investors are likely to lose a lot of money.”

Crypto and AI

Yet, those invested in the intersection of AI and crypto remain bullish.

AI is creating “entirely new asset classes” such as datasets, fine-tuned models, and autonomous agents, Sean Ren, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California and CEO of crypto startup Sahara AI, told DL News.

The convergence of AI and crypto is “extremely varied,” Maxim Legg, CEO of dataset firm Pangea, told DL News.

“We see projects innovating in the fields of compute, privacy, robo-advisory, training, optimisation — just to name a few.”

One of the key markets being tackled is access to computing power. Graphic processing units, the chips that power AI and computers in general, are scarce and concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants.

That makes it harder for smaller AI firms to innovate, which is a problem blockchain projects can help to solve, some argue.

“AI is moving faster than just about anything we’ve seen, but it’s running into a brick wall: there just aren’t enough GPUs,” Trevor Harries-Jones, director of the Render Network Foundation, told DL News.

The pitch Render and others make is to tap into GPUs all over the world and make “them available to anyone who needs them,” Harries-Jones said.

“The winners will be those that build useful applications, not just hype,” Legg said.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email at lance@dlnews.com.

On Wednesday, Peter Thiel-backed crypto exchange Bullish made its market debut by securing $1.1 billion after the stock surged 228% to $118, giving it a $10 billion market cap on the first day of trading.

It joined other crypto companies, including Galaxy Digital and Circle, that have gone public this year.

The IPO made up the bulk of the $1.2 billion raised by crypto companies since August 8, according to DefiLlama. That brings the total raised by industry players in 2025 to $14.4 billion, 51% more than they did in 2024.

And more could come, partially thanks to successful IPOs like Bullish’s.

“Having seen these public IPOs or acquisitions at higher valuations, people now have the proof points to invest with a level of confidence in early-stage, real-world blockchain companies that they may not otherwise have had in the past,” Michael Martin, director at Ava Labs’ incubator Codebase, told DL News earlier in August.

Martin and other investors have said that they expect the industry to raise $25 billion in 2025.

The wave of public listings comes amid growing optimism in the crypto industry.

They have reason to be hopeful.

This year has seen Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies hit new records, the Trump administration push through new crypto-friendly regulations, and Wall Street embrace blockchain-based projects like never before.

In short, the market conditions couldn’t be better for crypto companies to go public.

Investors have an incentive for them to go public, as it would enable the backers to cash in on their investments.

“Many VCs and private equity firms have held these positions for years,” Kat Liu, vice president at IPO research firm IPOX, told Reuters.

And it’s not just crypto companies that are going public. There have been over 200 IPOs on US exchanges so far this year, according to StockAnalysis data.

Here’s a small sample of crypto companies that have either announced or are reported to go public in the near future.

Gemini

In June, the Winklevii finally filed to go public.

Gemini, the crypto exchange run by Bitcoin billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, announced on June 6 that it had confidentially filed to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s one of the initial steps many companies take before they go public.

So far, the details of the IPO — the when and for how much — remain non-public.

Still, the announcement capped years of hints that Gemini would go public, stretching as far back as 2021.

BitGo

In July, BitGo, one of the industry’s largest crypto custodians, said it planned to go public in the US in a filing with regulators.

The California company follows a slew of summer filings ranging from Grayscale, the crypto fund manager, to the exchanges Bullish and Gemini.

Grayscale

In July, Grayscale said it had submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC. In layman’s terms, that means the crypto-focused asset manager is gearing up to go public.

You’re reading the latest installment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ interim managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

On Monday, ALT5 announced plans to pivot to become a so-called crypto treasury company, selling 200,000 new shares and using the proceeds to buy up the $1.5 billion worth of WLFI.

The firm will swap half of the newly-issued shares directly for WLFI held by World Liberty Financial in a deal that values the token at $0.20, Matt Morgan, ALT5’s chief investment officer, told DL News.

It’s not clear if World Liberty Financial is the only participant swapping WLFI tokens for shares. The firm said that several other unnamed institutional investors and venture capital firms participated in the share sale.

It’s the first time that WLFI has received a valuation since World Liberty Financial sold $550 million worth tokens to investors between October and March. At the time, investors paid varying prices for WLFI depending on how early in the sale they bought it.

Large WLFI holders include Tron founder Justin Sun, who bought $75 million worth during the token sale.

On its launch, WLFI was programmed so that buyers couldn’t trade it, meaning that there was no way for the market to value the token.

Conflict of interest

The deal also highlights the growing crypto treasury company trend.

Michael Saylor’s Strategy was a trailblazer in this regard. The firm has issued debt or shares to buy Bitcoin since 2020, a ploy which has seen its shares skyrocket by over 3,500% since.

Over the past year, a new wave of crypto treasury companies have copied Saylor’s playbook on the back of a favourable crypto regulatory environment under the Trump administration.

Many of these companies issue debt or shares to buy up their cryptocurrency of choice, and often emerge through reverse mergers with struggling publicly traded companies.

Sometimes there’s a conflict of interest between the treasury companies and the issuers of the crypto asset they buy.

Tron Inc, a crypto treasury company that says it will buy up TRX, the native token of the Tron blockchain, has Weike Sun on its board, the father of Justin Sun. The firm listed the father-son relationship among its potential conflicts of interest in its S-3 filing last month.

As a part of ALT5’s crypto treasury swerve, the firm added several World Liberty Financial executives and backers to its board of directors. They include World Liberty Financial CEO Zach Witkoff, the project’s COO Zak Folkman, and Eric Trump, President Donald Trump’s son.

All three new appointees hold WLFI and therefore have a financial interest in the token’s value.

Morgan said he’s not at liberty to comment on matters that may involve commercially sensitive information relating to his role or ALT5 when asked about the potential conflict of interest of the board appointments.

Trading the token

The WLFI token is designed to govern World Liberty Financial. Those who hold the token can vote on changes to the protocol, its creators said.

The project makes clear that it isn’t a decentralised autonomous organisation, a type of crypto collective popular among DeFi projects.

In July, WLFI holders voted to make the token tradable after the question was put to them by the project’s creators.

World Liberty Financial said in an X post that the token could begin trading as soon as the end of August.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

That’s according to Michael Martin, director at Ava Labs’ incubator Codebase, who said a perfect storm of bullish signals will incentivise investors to back crypto companies.

He told DL News that factors like Circle’s successful public float, booming crypto market, Stripe’s acquisition of Privy, Wall Street pouring into blockchain projects, and new rules of the road for digital assets will drive even more investment in the last half of the year.

“People have the proof points to invest with a level of confidence in earlier stage, real-world blockchain companies that they may not have had in the past,” Martin told DL News.

The prediction comes during a week that saw 12 crypto projects raise $121 million, pushing the total amount bagged by industry players this year to $13.2 billion, according to DefiLlama.

That investment is already 40% higher in August this year than all investment into crypto last year. That also puts it on the path to break the $18 billion expected by PitchBook analysts earlier this year.

Martin’s prognosis echoes that of Galaxy Venture’s Mike Giampapa, who told DL News earlier this summer that he expected crypto startups to secure $25 billion in 2025.

Critical juncture

Investor’ optimism comes at a critical juncture for the industry.

The Trump administration’s pro-industry tilt has emboldened not just sector players, but also larger financial institutions and banks to increasingly tap into digital assets.

With Trump having rubberstamped the Genius Act in July and more crypto bills coming up for votes on Capitol Hill, the industry is getting the clarity it’s clamoured for for years.

That clarity is expected to further fuel the adoption of blockchain technology by traditional financial institutions. Wall Street companies and fintech firms may also see this as an opportunity to follow in Stripe’s footsteps and acquire crypto companies to embed their solutions in their services

“You’re going to see more of that,” Martin said.

Macroeconomy risks

To be sure, there are clouds on the horizon that risk derailing the investment boom.

Even so, macroeconomic uncertainties — particularly those surrounding US President Donald Trump’s tariffs — jeopardise the rally, Martin said.

Other concerns include whether or not public crypto companies like Circle and Coinbase will perform as well as expected.

Martin said that if public crypto companies and leading cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin were to underperform analysts’ expectations, that could rattle investors and scare them into tightening their grips around their cheque books.

Apart from the risk of public crypto companies underperforming, there is also a chance that macroeconomic conditions will give investors reason to halt their investment strategies.

For instance, Trump’s tariffs against some of the US’ closest trading partners combined with jobs growth having stalled this summer have rattled investors. No one knows what will happen next.

“VCs have capital they need to deploy,” Martin said. “But how are you going to deploy it if you don’t know if X, Y and Z is going to happen?”

You’re reading the latest installment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ interim managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

In July, 65 crypto projects raised over $2.6 billion in new investments to grow their businesses, according to DefiLlama.

That brings the total amount raised by industry players to $13 billion so far this year, up from the $9.5 billion raised in total in 2024.

Pitchbook expects crypto startups to double that figure to $18 billion in 2025.

Here are the three crypto projects that raised the most money in July.

Pump.fun, $590 million

Pump.fun raised $590 million in an initial coin offering at the beginning of July to, as it boldly proclaimed, “kill Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch” by transforming itself into a new type of social media platform.

At a glance, the controversial memecoin generator token sale seems a grand success. Pump.fun’s ICO sold out in just 12 minutes, capping off one of the fastest and largest raises in recent crypto memory.

However, the project sold 2 billion fewer tokens than it had originally planned.

The project had previously said 150 billion PUMP tokens, out of a 330 billion total ICO allocation, would be offered to the public at $0.004 each.

That implied a $600 million raise. But the live dashboard confirms just 148 billion tokens were sold, pulling in $590 million — about 98% of the originally stated public allocation.

The sale came in the same month as the platform is struggling with plummeting revenue amid a memecoin slump and an increasingly crowded market.

And those traditional social media platforms? Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, saw its stock price surge 11% this week, giving it a market cap of just under $2 trillion, about half of the entire cryptocurrency market.

OSL Group, $300 million

Hong Kong-based OSL Group said it has secured $300 million in equity financing.

“The funding will accelerate our global buildout — particularly in regulated payment infrastructure and access points,” Ivan Wong, CFO at OSL Group, said in a statement.

Upexi, $200 million

Upexi, a Solana treasury company, announced a $200 million deal led by Big Brain Holdings at the beginning of July.

The deal took the form of a convertible note offering, and the proceeds will be used to buy more Solana, the company said.

Upexi is part of a wave of crypto treasury companies that have cropped up over the past year. While the bulk of them copy Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin-buying strategy, many are also allocating resources to buying altcoins.

You’re reading the latest installment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ interim managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

The haul brings total crypto startup funding for the year to nearly $11 billion — already surpassing 2024’s total by more than $1 billion. Industry players have already raised $583 million in July alone.

If the pace continues, the industry is on track to blow past PitchBook’s $18 billion prediction for 2025.

This week’s standouts? Firms expanding their Bitcoin treasuries.

Of the seven projects that raised money this week, two are adding more Bitcoin to their balance sheets. Both are part of a broader wave of companies copying the scheme of Michael Saylor’s Strategy.

Below are the three largest funding rounds from last week:

H100 Group, $54 million

Stockholm-based ​​H100 Group bagged $54 million to continue building out its Bitcoin treasury.

The publicly traded company — listed on the Nasdaq First North — is building a longevity-focused ecosystem that merges digital health with decentralised infrastructure.

While H100’s primary focus is health and wellness, the firm touts itself as Sweden’s first Bitcoin treasury company.

The firm now holds 294 Bitcoin worth about $32 million.

H100’s raise this week is a dramatic uptick from when it took in just over $2 million in May.

Agora Finance, $50 million

Agora has become the latest startup to ride the stablecoin wave. The company raised $50 million this week in a round led by Paradigm, Fortune reported.

The AUSD stablecoin issuer says it plans to use the latest cash injection to better compete against rivals like Circle andTether.

The timing of the announcement is notable. It comes just days ahead of Washington’s “Crypto Week” that kicks off on Monday, during which the Trump-backed Genius Act is expected to be voted in.

If passed, the new law is expected to unleash a tsunami of fresh capital into the stablecoin sector.

DigitalX, $13 million

Australian crypto asset manager DigitalX raised $13.7 million in a round backed by Animoca Brands, ParaFi Capital, and UTXO Management.

While the company disclosed total commitments of about $20 million, only $13 million was finalised this week.

The funds will go toward expanding DigitalX’s Bitcoin treasury, which currently holds 262 Bitcoin or about $29 million in direct and exchange-traded fund exposure, according to Bitcointreasuries.net. When the round is fully closed, that figure is expected to climb above 500 Bitcoin.

“This strategic investment marks a significant milestone for DigitalX as we continue to focus on Bitcoin as the core of our treasury strategy,” said interim CEO Demetrios Christou in a statement.

You’re reading the latest installment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered byDefiLlama.

Pedro Solimano is the publication’s Buenos Aires-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email at psolimano@dlnews.com.

“We’ll end somewhere in the [$20 billion to $25 billion] range,” Mike Giampapa, general partner at Galaxy Ventures, told DL News.

PitchBook, the investment research firm, shared that optimism and estimated the industry will raise $18 billion in 2025. That would double the $9.6 billion raised in 2024 — an amount the industry has already surpassed this year, according to DefiLlama.

The bullishness comes at a critical juncture for the industry.

After the Biden administration’s crypto crackdown, the sector has found itself in a state of metamorphosis. Having long been relegated to the outskirts of finance, it’s increasingly accepted by Wall Street as a legitimate industry.

Bullish signals

Buoyed by US President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration and industry-friendly legislation, bullish signals are on the rise.

Both Bitcoin and altcoins’ prices have reached record highs, stablecoin issuer Circle’s IPO soared to levels not seen since the dotcom boom of the 1990s, fintechs have bought crypto firms, and banks are exploring the launch of their own stablecoins.

But with the lines between crypto and traditional finance beginning to blur, the approach of VCs has changed, investors told DL News. They’ve updated how they judge prospective startups, and shared what it’ll take for the days of 2021, when investors injected $36 billion into the industry, to return.

‘Fundamentals matter — there has to be a proper, real business.’ Jonas Kristensen

The crypto funding boom coincides with a new wave of founders.

In a break from previous cycles, founding teams aren’t dominated by native-crypto members, but also entrepreneurs from other sectors, Wyatt Lonergan, general partner at VanEck Ventures, told DL News.

VanEck Ventures, for instance, has backed teams that include ex-bankers or tech workers at companies like OpenAI who bring blockchain technology into traditional finance and other industries, he said.

They are “starting to tie the tech world and the crypto world together — it’s not its own island anymore,” Lonergan said.

Founders who can demonstrate how to merge those worlds will have an advantage in the funding race, investors said.

Other areas of interest include the cross-pollination of crypto and AI, better user experiences, and innovative crypto-trading platforms.

Key for those firms to get funding, however, is that they can demonstrate the viability of their business. That means investors will look at metrics like revenue, distribution, and active users.

“The general sentiment in 2025 is that fundamentals matter when investing — there has to be a proper, real business,” Jonas Kristensen, head of Wintermute Ventures, told DL News.

The FTX effect

FTX was a gift in disguise, Kristensen said.

To him, the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire and other scandals purged bad actors from the industry and forced crypto companies to level up their compliance credentials.

But it came at a cost. Big investors burnt by the scandals withdrew from crypto to focus on areas like AI that promised greater yield and smaller risk. They’re unlikely to return to crypto any time soon, Giampapa said.

The absence of those big deployers of capital is one of the reasons why investors say they don’t expect funding levels to return to the heights of the last cycle, at least not yet.

Another reason is that limited partners, the investors that invest in VC funds, are also more hesitant to back crypto investments this time around. VCs are betting that those backers will eventually return.

“LPs are smart and where good opportunities are popping up, capital will form,” Giampapa said. “We’re still in a bit of a digestion period before that capital does actually form.”

The scandals also incentivised investors to look for founders willing to disclose holdings and deals akin to how startups in other sectors do.

“We know from history that if you set up a system where it can be gamed and you can hurt people, then people will take advantage of it,” Lonergan said. “There are smart, cutting people out there.”

Finally, the scandals armed anti-crypto firebrands like Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler with fresh ammunition.

According to the investors we spoke with, founders became more hesitant to launch and market crypto businesses out of fear of drawing the SEC’s ire.

They had reason to be worried. During the Gensler year, the agency fired off a barrage of law enforcement actions against crypto companies such as Ripple, Coinbase, and Kraken.

The regulator ended most of those lawsuits after Trump was elected, which encouraged entrepreneurs to explore crypto opportunities more openly, Lonergan said.

“Those shackles are off,” he said.

You’re reading the latest installment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ interim managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

It won’t stop there, according to Ripple Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz.

“Our M&A people are very busy,” the executive told DL News in New York.

“We have multiple potential acquisitions in various different stages, from early stages to late stages.”

Ripple is the creator of the XRP Ledger, a blockchain that runs on XRP. The cryptocurrency had a market value of $124 billion Thursday, making it the fourth-largest, behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether’s USDT stablecoin.

The company has been aggressively courting traditional finance, pitching XRP and its new stablecoin, RLUSD, as assets designed to facilitate cross-border payments.

In April, Ripple acquired Hidden Road for $1.25 billion. The crypto firm said it would use RLUSD as a collateral across Hidden Road’s suite of brokerage services.

Previously, Ripple acquired the crypto custody firms Metaco for $250 million and Standard Custody for an undisclosed amount.

In January, a spokesperson told DL News the firm was “actively seeking companies to purchase.”

Crypto M&A

Schwartz said Thursday those efforts are ongoing — and buoyed by a relative lack of interest from titans of traditional finance.

“There’s a unique opportunity right now for cryptocurrency companies to acquire companies that create strategic value, like the Hidden Road acquisition,” he said.

“And we’re definitely aggressively looking for those opportunities, because it seems like Wall Street hasn’t quite caught on yet. … They’re not competing to acquire the companies that could give them a leg up in these spaces.”

Crypto mergers and acquisitions have soared this year. But they have been largely limited to crypto-first companies and fintechs eager to expand crypto offerings to their base of retail traders.

Last month, Coinbase acquired crypto options exchange Deribit in a $2.9 billion cash and stock deal, and Robinhood bought Canadian exchange WonderFi for $250 million Canadian dollars in an all-cash deal.

In March, US-based crypto exchange Kraken acquired NinjaTrader, a retail futures trading platform, for $1.5 billion.

And in January, Circle, the company that issues the USDC stablecoin, bought Hashnote, the world’s largest tokenised treasury fund.

XRP Ledger

Unlike other, more flexible blockchains on which developers are free to deploy virtually any kind of application, the XRP Ledger is tightly controlled and features only a small number of applications — a design choice meant to ensure user funds aren’t siloed across a variety of exchanges and lending platforms, Schwartz said.

Nevertheless, his team is currently working to make it more flexible, or “programmable,” in developer parlance.

“I don’t think you’re going to see, even in the medium term, the full programmability,” he said.

“We like the fact that we have a niche where we have things like concentrated liquidity. But what we’re looking at is, can we get some of the benefits of programmability without the downsides?”

The XRP Ledger could, for example, soon feature smart contracts that manage payments, converting the crypto a payee receives into their preferred digital asset, Schwartz said.

Ripple is also building a lending protocol for the XRP Ledger, set to debut in the the third quarter of the year, pending approval of “validators” who confirm transactions on the blockchain.

“There’ll be somebody offchain, who curates the set of borrowers, who sues them if they don’t repay, or who handles repayment arrangements if they declare bankruptcy or whatever,” Schwartz said.

“And then the ledger can tokenize your interest in the repayments and handle the distribution of the repayment. Which is sort of a nice split between TradFi on the frontend and DeFi on the backend.”

Ripple has made a flurry of announcements in June, including the debut of tokenised treasuries, an institution-friendly decentralised exchange, and a partnership with Wormhole, a so-called crypto bridge that allows for the movement of crypto assets across otherwise incompatible blockchains.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

Hi! Eric here.

Venture capitalists are bullish.

That’s pretty much the takeaway from DL News’ reporting and conversations I’ve had with investors this week.

VCs are on course to invest $18 billion in crypto startups this year, which is almost double the level in 2024.

The reasons are plentiful. Jonas Kristensen, head of Wintermute Ventures, the popular liquidity provider’s investment arm, said President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto policies are clearly a boost. So, too, is the entry of traditional financial institutions to the sector.

While investors in past cycles may have thrown money at anything and hoped something would stick, market maturity is now spurring VCs to analyse key metrics such as revenue, distribution, and user bases.

“The general kind of sentiment in 2025 is that fundamentals matter when investing,” Kristensen told me. “There has to be a proper, real business.”

So what are investors betting on?

Kristensen is looking at the blending of fintech and crypto. As financial institutions are using crypto-native solutions like stablecoins, that also means they’ll have to look at things like custody and compliance.

Liam Kelly spoke to VCs on the sidelines of Berlin Blockchain Week this week who said they’re exploring how blockchain can be combined with AI agents. They are also hunting for startups that are building sites with user experiences that are easy to navigate, as well as innovative trading platforms.

Let the good times roll.

Komainu CEO eyes deals to push beyond custody amid crypto M&A boom

Crypto custodians are part of a bigger mergers and acquisitions boom. I spoke with Komainu’s CEO to hear more.

Project Eleven: VCs throw $6m at project securing Bitcoin against quantum threats

Quantum computers are threatening the security of all industries, including crypto. Tim Craig wrote about how one startup just raised $6 million to protect Bitcoin wallets.

Genius Act clears Senate in historic vote for stablecoins as focus turns to House

The landmark Genius Act passed the Senate this week, Aleks Gilbert reported. It now has to pass the House before it can be turned into law and set the stage for a stablecoin bonanza.

The CEO of Komainu, a crypto custodian, said he’s looking to scoop up crypto companies across the world to either get a foothold in new regions or to open up additional business lines.

And there’s plenty of opportunities to go around as crypto downshifts into its richest bull market since 2021.

“The industry is in a state now where nearly everything is for sale. I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Frost-Smith told DL News in a wide-ranging interview.

Komainu’s goal? To “become the dominant digital asset service provider outside of the US,” Frost Smith said.

That’s a tall order.

$75 million raise

While Komainu says it has “well over $10 billion” assets in custody and bagged $75 million in a Series B raise in January, it isn’t the only bank-backed custodian offering its services to international institutional clients like banks and governments.

Rivals such as Zodia Custody are similar in size, and also have offices in many of the same regions that Komainu is targeting.

Komainu declined to provide a valuation.

Acquisitions appear to be a key piece of both companies’ growth strategy.

In October, Komainu agreed to acquire Propine Holdings, a Singapore based crypto custodian. In May, Zodia Custody announced plans to buy Tungsten Custody, a Dubai-based firm.

‘There’s an awful lot of concentration risk in Coinbase at the moment.’

Paul Frost-Smith

Frost-Smith declined to offer details about how much Komainu is willing to spend on acquisitions or how it plans to fund them. He said that, apart from tapping into the funds provided in the January raise, it has access to “other funding if needed.”

It’s not just crypto custodians that are looking to make deals — the entire crypto industry is in a state of consolidation.

In May, Messari estimated that there had been almost 120 mergers and acquisitions worth about $8 billion in 2025, which means crypto M&As are set to hit levels not seen since 2021.

Firms like Stripe, Coinbase, Ripple, Robinhood, and Kraken are among the bigger players to have bought smaller startups this year.

What’s Komainu’s deal?

Komainu first launched in 2018 as a joint venture by Nomura, the Japanese financial services group; CoinShares, the digital asset firm; and Ledger, the crypto hardware developer.

Komainu is named after the mythical lion-dog statues that guard Shinto temples.

Komainu’s team of roughly 70 employees are spread across its headquarters in Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, and offices in the UK, Singapore, and Dubai. It is also opening an office in Italy.

In Asia, Komainu is looking to be fully operational in Singapore and Japan over the next six to nine months, the company’s CEO said.

Frost-Smith said he expects his staff to increase to about 120 people by the end of the year — which would bring it in line with Zodia Custody’s staff numbers.

US opportunity

Frost-Smith is bullish about the US.

Since Donald Trump was elected president, the country has grown more welcoming for crypto firms. That’s created an opportunity for Custodians like Komainu.

“There’s an awful lot of concentration risk in Coinbase at the moment,” he said, noting that eight of nine US Bitcoin exchange-traded fund issuers custody with the crypto exchange.

“There are very good arguments to say that that custody base should be split among several custodians [to spread the risk,]’ Frost-Smith said.

A company spokesperson added: “Komainu sees its main competition coming from the US and is taking steps to ensure it is the go-to provider outside the US.”

Even so, the main priority for Komainu is to expand its business in Asia.

Komainu is also toiling to get licensed under the European Union’s new Markets in Crypto-Assets, or MiCA, regime.

“It’s less of an important market for us than Asia,” Frost-Smith said, adding that the firm doesn’t want to lose the few European clients that it has, which is why Komainu is pursuing the licence.

Withdrawing from the UK

Across the English Channel, the UK government has signalled a move to introduce new crypto-specific laws and regulations.

CryptoUK, the industry body, has welcomed this push, even though those rules will require crypto companies to ramp up background checks on users to avoid being used for money laundering or other financial crimes.

More oversight may run counter to the prized tenets of financial privacy at the heart of crypto.

Even so, Komainu registered with the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK’s key financial markets regulator in 2023. Frost-Smith warned that the firm may leave the UK if the FCA’s new proposed rules prove too costly.

“We would consider withdrawing from the UK,” Frost-Smith said, noting that no decision one way or another has been made.

“The regulators here need to be a little bit careful that they don’t make things so different and so onerous that they force sensible, conservative operators like ourselves out of the market,” he added.

Update June 20: A previous version of this story incorrectly suggested that Komainu has an office in the US. It doesn’t, but operates in the States through its Jersey licence.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ managing editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

In a post on X, Ravindra Kumar denied accusations on social media that he had sold vested allocations of various crypto tokens to investors that never existed.

“I’ve been accused of serious wrongdoing, which is completely false,” Kumar said Friday. “My legal team and I are working on a statement to address this matter.”

Fraudulent deals

On Thursday, Mohammed Waseem, the CEO of Aza Ventures, an Indian over-the-counter deals broker, revealed that his firm unwittingly helped mediate dozens of fraudulent deals over the course of several months.

“We have been scammed,” Waseem said on Telegram. “There is no easy way to say it, but it is what it is.”

He said a figure he referred to as “Source 1” sold vested crypto tokens for multi-billion dollar projects such as Sui, Near, Axelar, and Sei at steep discounts and under favourable conditions.

Although early deals were legitimate, Waseem said, later ones “shifted entirely to Ponzi schemes.”

When the time came for Source 1 to transfer tokens to buyers, they kept delaying, leading to several buyers to raise the alarm.

Waseem said he chose to keep Source 1’s identity private because he believed it gave himself and investors the best chance of recouping their investments.

But suspicions mounted online that Kumar was Source 1. With his denial, Kumar appeared to confirm this.

‘Stop falling for scammers selling you OTC deals. There is NO deal.’

Adeniyi Abiodun

The scam has hit the crypto industry’s wealthiest cohort of investors who often look to invest over-the-counter in the vested tokens of early-stage projects because of the potential for outsized returns.

Over-the-counter, or OTC, refers to trading of assets done directly between two parties, and without the supervision of an exchange.

It’s usually the only way to sell illiquid assets such as large tranches of vested crypto tokens.

Multiple warnings

Before Waseem informed investors about the fraud, several crypto project founders warned about phoney deals involving their tokens.

“Stop falling for [Telegram] scammers selling you OTC deals. There is NO deal.” Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder of Mysten Labs, the firm behind the Sui blockchain, said in an X post in May.

Later that month, Lucian Mincu, Co-founder of MultiversX, another project impacted by the phoney OTC deals, posted a similar warning.

Smokey The Bera, the pseudonymous founder of the Berachain blockchain, said he had previously told Waseem that OTC deals involving Berachain’s BERA token weren’t legitimate.

“He insisted that his sources were good, and wouldn’t cooperate with any investigation,” Smokey said.

Refund plans

Waseem has assured victims that he plans to issue refunds to everyone who got ripped off.

How he will do so isn’t clear.

The Aza Ventures CEO said he has already exhausted all of his personal funds trying to maintain distributions under the assumption that Source 1 would eventually pay him.

He also told investors that Source 1 said they will begin to return funds by the end of June.

Waseem also said that he had been in contact with the authorities in India, who confirmed that Source 1 was running a Ponzi scheme and committed to assisting him in the refund process.

“I did not do this knowingly,” he said. “I have been taken for a ride myself.”

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

The venture capital giant’s crypto arm, known as a16z crypto, backed both EigenLayer and PrismaX’s rounds.

The deals topped up $928 million a16z crypto has deployed in the crypto sector this year. That’s about a tenth of the total VCs have invested in crypto startups in 2025, according to DefiLlama data.

The venture capital firm’s investment came as the overall industry received $155 million across 15 deals between June 14 and 20.

That brings the total money injected into the industry to almost $9.4 billion, just $200 shy of the total raised in 2024 and on course to meet analyst expectations of it hitting $18 billion this year.

Here are the three biggest funding rounds of the last week:

EigenLayer, $70 million

On Wednesday, Eigen Labs, the engineering and research organisation behind the popular Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer, raised $70 million.

The raise took the form of a token purchase from a16z crypto. The deal follows its previous backing of Eigen Labs’ $100 million Series B round in February 2024.

PrismaX, $11 million

On Wednesday, PrismaX announced that it had raised $11 million in a seed round led by a16z, Crunchbase reported.

Other investors included Volt Capital, Virtuals Protocol, Symbolic Capital, Stanford Blockchain Accelerator, and Blockchain Builders Fund.

The startup is building a decentralised data incentive mechanism to promote the standardisation of robotics vision data and the development of remote control infrastructure.

Gradient Network, $10 million

Also on Wednesday, Gradient Network announced the completion of a $10 million seed round.

Pantera Capital and Multicoin Capital led the raise and HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China) and “other distinguished partners,” also participated in the raise according to a press release.

Gradient is building a decentralised AI infrastructure for open-source intelligence.

You’re reading the latest installment of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals across the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by DefiLlama.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ News Editor. Got a tip? Email at eric@dlnews.com.

On Thursday, the group of cryptography experts announced the seed round, which was co-led by Variant Fund and Quantonation. Nic Carter’s Castle Island Ventures, Nebular, and Formation also participated.

It’s not entirely clear how Project Eleven plans to monetise its goal, but Alex Pruden, Project Eleven’s CEO and co-founder, said he was confident there was money to be made.

“If you don’t believe there’s a business opportunity somewhere in that $2 trillion — say, to build wallet infrastructure to help wallets manage the migration for users — then I think you have to be pretty bearish on Bitcoin and crypto generally,” Pruden told DL News.

The raise comes as quantum computing experts warn that Bitcoin could be at risk from cryptography-cracking quantum computers in as little as five years time. Yet so far, there’s no concrete plan to upgrade the blockchain to make it resistant to quantum computers.

“The entire Bitcoin protocol needs to be re-architected, tested, and every single wallet needs to migrate to a secure protocol,” Pruden said. “If that doesn’t happen then I guess the $2 trillion of value in Bitcoin goes to zero.”

Bitcoin development is conducted by a loose group of core developers who contribute to the project, often alongside other jobs. Private companies, NGOs, and wealthy Bitcoiners support them via grants and donations.

Some Bitcoin developers are already independently exploring ways to secure the blockchain against quantum computers.

Securing Bitcoin

The first facet of the Bitcoin protocol at risk from quantum computers are old Bitcoin wallets that use outdated cryptography, which includes Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s $115 billion stash.

However, eventually quantum computers will be able to crack the cryptography used in newer wallets, too.

Project Eleven’s aim is to eventually secure all Bitcoin wallets with so-called exposed public keys.

When a user sends Bitcoin, they must expose their wallet’s public keys. Normally this isn’t an issue as public keys are encrypted. However, with the advent of sufficiently powerful quantum computers, these exposed public keys become a target because they can theoretically be cracked.

Project Eleven estimates approximately $600 billion worth of Bitcoin in such wallets will be at risk in the future.

Ahead of a more permanent solution, the company aims to protect wallets with exposed public keys by enabling users to claim provenance over their funds using post-quantum cryptography.

To do this, Project Eleven is launching Yellowpages, a cryptographic registry designed to help Bitcoin holders prove ownership of their funds.

“With Yellowpages, we’re giving users free, audited, and open-source tools to proactively establish quantum-resilient ownership today,” Conor Deegan, co-founder and vice president of engineering at Project Eleven, said in a statement.

Yellowpages won’t solve the Bitcoin protocol’s vulnerability to quantum computers, but it will provide a fallback solution, allowing users to secure their Bitcoin holdings without immediate on-chain transactions or reliance on protocol upgrades.

Quantum advancements

Quantum computers exploit quantum mechanical phenomena to produce so-called qubits, the basic unit of information in quantum computing.

The quantum properties of qubits mean they can theoretically be used to create computers that are orders of magnitude more powerful than those that use conventional methods, meaning they could break advanced cryptography that secures encrypted data.

But quantum computers are difficult to build. The more qubits a quantum computer utilises, the more difficult it is to run computations with producing errors.

For many years, the development of quantum computers has been slow. But in recent months, several advancements have been made.

In December, Google unveiled a new quantum computing chip called Willow, which boasts a 56% improvement over the tech giant’s previous chip.

Then in February, Microsoft announced its own chip that it says solves the scaling issues that have persistently plagued the field.

Unconvinced

Yet some Bitcoin advocates, like Strategy Chair Michael Saylor, are unconvinced of the threat of quantum computers.

“I don’t worry about it,” Saylor told Bloomberg News on June 10. “Microsoft and Google market their quantum projects, but they would never sell a quantum computer that cracked cryptography as it would destroy their own companies.”

Pruden, on the other hand, believes Bitcoin will be future quantum computers’ number one target.

“An economically motivated actor will 100% go for Bitcoin versus something else like a bank,” Pruden said.

With Bitcoin, cryptography is the entire mechanism of ownership. Banks on the other hand, have a lot of legal and operational controls that could thwart a potential quantum computer attacker, he said.

Like other experts, Pruden estimates that quantum computers will pose a threat to Bitcoin within five to 10 years time.

“That’s probably how long it will take to fix and migrate everything,” he said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips attim@dlnews.com.

On Wednesday, the $91.5 billion fintech giant announced its purchase of the crypto wallet provider, but didn’t disclose the financial details of the deal.

It’s another step towards Stripe’s goal of building out a crypto payments ecosystem to tap into the $251 billion stablecoin market, according to Matthew Mena, a crypto researcher at 21Shares.

“Privy gives Stripe the missing puzzle piece: user-facing wallet infrastructure,” Mena told DL News. It “rounds out what’s becoming a full-stack crypto infrastructure play.”

Stablecoin blueprint

The move follows the payment giant’s previous acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure firm, in February.

Stripe is in the vanguard of traditional financial firms tapping stablecoins and blockchains for payments.

If Stripe’s crypto strategy pays off, it could drive a new wave of adoption and provide a blueprint for other firms to follow.

The stablecoin market is growing at its fastest pace since 2021, adding over $50 billion since the start of the year. It recently reached an all-time high of $251 billion in circulation.

“As infrastructure matures and user demand grows, we expect the stablecoin market to expand rapidly, potentially reaching $1 trillion by as early as next year,” Mena said.

And it’s just the start. Ripple and Boston Consulting Group estimate that tokenised assets will grow to a $19 trillion business over the next eight years.

Stripe isn’t the only non-crypto native firm excited about the potential of stablecoin payments.

Just last week, Uber, X, Airbnb, and Apple all reportedly began exploring stablecoin integrations.

PayPal and SpaceX are already using them in production, and banks such as Santander and Société Générale have launched their own, Mena said.

‘Reality is most people won’t interact with traditional crypto wallets.'

Adam Morgan McCarthy, Kaiko

“There is a lot of excitement around the stablecoin use case among traditional financial institutions,” Katalin Tischhauser, head of research at Sygnum Bank, the digital asset bank, told DL News.

The eye-popping performance of the Circle IPO and Stripe’s strong build up in the space are recent demonstrations of this, she said.

If stablecoins continue to see increased adoption, it could also benefit the underlying blockchains that facilitate stablecoin issuance and transfers.

Ethereum, which currently hosts nearly half the stablecoin market, could see a surge in activity and fee revenue as new users interact with stablecoins through consumer apps without even realising they’re using blockchains, Mena said.

It’s still unclear which blockchain stands to benefit the most. Stripe currently lets users accept stablecoin payments on Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon.

Why Privy?

Firms like Stripe are adopting crypto rails for payments to harness speed and efficiency benefits and become less dependent on centralised banking infrastructure.

But getting such a system working is difficult. Companies need to decide on which blockchain to use, which stablecoins to support, and provide their users with infrastructure to navigate the new system.

Unlike other non-custodial wallets like MetaMask, Privy abstracts much of the complexity of using a crypto wallet away. Privy’s clients include NFT platform OpenSea and restaurant loyalty startup Blackbird.

“Reality is most people won’t interact with traditional crypto wallets,” Adam Morgan McCarthy, a research analyst at Kaiko, told DL News.

“Integrating this tech seamlessly with existing user interfaces is the game changer.”

The acquisition aligns closely with Stripe’s core business which is to simplify and expand digital payments for businesses and consumers, Satish Patel, an analyst at CoinShares, told DL News.

M&A boom

Stripe’s purchase also adds to the growing number of high-profile crypto acquisitions in recent months.

In June, Robinhood completed its $200 million acquisition of Bitstamp, the crypto exchange.

In May, Coinbase paid $2.9 billion for crypto options exchange Deribit. And in January, USDC issuer Circle bought Hashnote, the world’s largest tokenised treasury fund.

Stripe hasn’t disclosed the details of the Privy acquisition. However, Privy was valued at $230 million in March 2025, according to PitchBook data.

“It is likely [Stripe] paid a healthy premium above this valuation, reflecting Privy’s growth and the buoyant state of the crypto market,” Patel said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.

Dubbed Stable, the project is backed by crypto exchange Bitfinex and by USDT0, a business affiliated with Tether that lets users bring the stablecoin to otherwise incompatible blockchains.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino is advising the project.

Stable is being marketed to financial institutions, rather than retail users.

A key selling point will be so-called “enterprise lanes” that promise faster execution of transactions.

“USDT alone settles over $100B daily,” Stable developers wrote on X. “However, the current infrastructure is volatile, costly, and fragmented.”

Real-world apps

It wasn’t immediately clear who’s behind the project. A thread on X detailing the forthcoming blockchain said only that the team comprised “protocol engineers, fintech operators, and crypto founders.”

Stable did not immediately return DL News’ request for comment.

Stablecoins are crypto tokens pegged to the value of another asset, most often the US dollar.

They are among the most utilised real-world applications of crypto technology. They’ve gained a foothold in some developing economies as a store of value. Some of the world’s largest financial institutions — and, controversially, the family of US President Donald Trump — are experimenting with stablecoins.

Tether is the world’s largest, with a market value of $154 billion. Circle’s USDC is a distant second, with a market value of $61 billion.

Shares in Circle soared after the company went public this week on the New York Stock Exchange.

Tether is enormously profitable: Last year, it recorded $13 billion in profits stemming from its holdings of Bitcoin, gold, US Treasury bonds, and other financial instruments.

But it has also been controversial.

The stablecoin is popular with Mexico-based criminal organisations, the US Treasury Department said in a report last year.

And it has emerged as a bogeyman among crypto-sceptic lawmakers amid debates over stablecoin legislation this year.

Earlier this year, Tether said it would move its headquarters to El Salvador, the Central American country led by a controversial Bitcoin-boosting president, after acquiring the country’s Digital Asset Service Provider licence.

Aleks Gilbert is a DeFi correspondent based in New York. He can be reached at aleks@dlnews.com.

The performance tops up a run that’s already raised more than $7.7 billion in 2025.

In line with prior weeks, investors focused on infrastructure projects aimed at scaling Ethereum, quantitative trading, and enhancing Bitcoin’s capabilities.

Here are two top funding rounds this week:

Neutral Trade, $2 Million

Neutral Trade, an onchain hedge fund platform operating on Solana, raised $2 million from investors, including Skyland Ventures, Enzyme, BlackPine, and several DeFi focused angels.

The platform offers delta neutral and multi strategy vaults designed for accessibility, with a minimum deposit of just $100 and on-chain transparency across all positions.

It features vaults ranging from fixed income stablecoin strategies to thematic indices.

According to Neutral Trade, the raise will be used to support expansion across Ethereum, layer 2s, and centralised exchange ventures.

LayerEdge, $1 Million

LayerEdge completed a public token sale for its EDGEN token, raising $1 million.

The token launched with a circulating supply of 20%, giving it a fully diluted valuation of $1 billion at launch.

The project builds infrastructure for a decentralised internet secured by Bitcoin, leveraging optimistic rollups and a Hybrid Modular Data Availability layer.

Its proprietary operating system, edgenOS, aims to make node participation accessible on everyday devices.

The sale included a wallet cap of 0.1 ETH per participant and allocated all funds directly to onchain liquidity, according to the project.

The tie up, which makes PayPal the latest stablecoin issuer to ink a deal with the US-based exchange, comes with a coveted boon.

Coinbase users can convert their holdings between PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin and dollars one-to-one with zero-fees.

Until now, Circle’s USDC was the only stablecoin to benefit from such a deal.

“This does not change our existing relationship with Circle – instead it pushes the entire stablecoin ecosystem forward,” a Coinbase spokesperson told DL News.

“We’re committed to accelerating global adoption of stablecoin payments, and our partnerships with both Circle and PayPal are key to making that happen.”

Coinbase suggests there’s room for everyone. Indeed, the stablecoin market is booming, hitting an all-time high of $237 billion this month.

But competition is fierce.

Giving users the ability to swap from dollars into a stablecoin without having to pay fees removes a big hurdle. Other stablecoins on Coinbase, like Tether’s USDT, don’t benefit from fee-less dollar conversions.

Coinbase says it also aims to leverage its infrastructure to expand support for stablecoins to PayPal’s merchant partners, and will explore new use cases onchain utilising PYUSD.

Excited to work more together @acce 🤝! https://t.co/Kkzfqm4d8D

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) April 25, 2025

Coinbase has held a minority stake in Circle since August 2023.

Stablecoin land grab

PayPal launched its PYUSD stablecoin in 2023.

Since then, it’s tried many ways to boost adoption. It experimented with so-called DeFi bribes on decentralised exchanges like Curve, and gave out lucrative incentives to PYUSD users on Solana lending protocol Kamino.

On Wednesday, PayPal announced that customers who hold PYUSD on its app or Venmo can earn 3.7% annually.

These initiatives have found moderate success. PYUSD is now the ninth-biggest stablecoin with $888 million in circulation.

But that’s still far below industry titans Tether and Circle, which have $146 billion and $62 billion in circulation respectively.

The Coinbase deal is significant because it’s PayPal’s first major partnership with a centralised crypto exchange, where the majority of crypto trading happens.

Circle’s new network

On April 21, Circle announced plans to build Circle Payments Network, an in-house service using its USDC stablecoin designed for invoice payments, remittances, treasury services, and payroll and contractor payouts.

It’s bad news for Circle’s partners and those who build similar apps using USDC, Zaheer Ebtikar, founder of crypto hedge fund Split Capital, said on X.

“Building in the stablecoin space will get materially more competitive if the issuer is entering the capture zone and not evangelising darling projects,” he said.

Such a strategy could sideline exchanges and DeFi apps that have already built similar payments products around USDC.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.