Paradigm Announces $850 Million Fund For Early-stage Crypto Projects

Paradigm, a crypto-focused venture capital firm, has announced a new $850 million fund.

Matt Huang, co-founder and Managing Partner at Paradigm, said in an announcement that the VC platform’s third fund will focus on crypto projects in their earliest development stage.

Reports that Paradigm was looking to raise a third fund for crypto surfaced in early April.

Paradigm eyes further support for crypto projects

Thursday’s announcement confirms reports that Paradigm was eyeing an $850 million fund.

It’s a confirmation that puts the San Francisco-based technological investment firm at the forefront of the next crop of crypto projects.

Paradigm is an early contributor to some of the crypto industry’s top projects today.  Some of these projects include Unswap, the decentralized exchange that pioneered AMMs; Optimism, a Layer 2 solution for the Ethereum network; and Flashbots, a project that defined the MEV concept.

Recently, the platform backed a $70 million funding round for BTC staking protocol Babylon.

“When we founded Paradigm in 2018, we believed that crypto would be one of the most important technical and economic shifts of the coming decades. Six years later, that belief has only gotten stronger,” Huang said.

The new fund aims at continuing the focus on such early-stage projects.

Paradigm is also behind some huge open-source projects in the crypto space, including the popular Ethereum development tool Foundry and Ethereum execution node Reth.

Crypto now a “main character” on the global stage

According to Huang, the crypto space is evolving at great speed, with Bitcoin monetizing to over $1 trillion as top blockchain networks such as Ethereum and Solana scaling amid new innovations.

The global crypto market is also witnessing a marked shift in the adoption of stablecoins as new infrastructure enables more consumer applications.

Meanwhile, the number of people who own crypto is in the hundreds of millions and in one of the biggest election years, crypto has jumped to the fore as “main character.”