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Robin Markets tweeted that it has completed a $475,000 angel round of financing, led by Fabric VC, with joint leads from Animoca Brands, ATKA Incubator, John Lilic, and Stefan D. George, and participation from several institutions and angel investors including Hilbert Capital, Layer Zero, and Gnosis.Robin Markets has simultaneously opened its V1 staking product to the public. Robin Markets is a DeFi platform focused on Polymarket position yields, with its core product allowing users to earn yields on their positions in Polymarket.

Liquid Capital founder Jack Yi stated on the X platform: "In the past, the wave of crypto VC and project disappearances had a core reason, which is that the financing funds were mostly consumed on: maintaining teams to develop useless web3 products. The biggest misconception is benchmarking against web2 products. Essentially, web3 is a financial industry and does not need to replicate web2 products. The most successful companies in the past crypto industry have all been financial products, from stablecoins and exchanges to successful companies in payments.Now that the AI era has arrived, first, there is no need for large financing to recruit teams, and second, AI + finance presents new opportunities. We believe that excellent founders with a few elites can achieve top-tier companies, which is currently the biggest opportunity in primary investment."

The field of crypto venture capital is undergoing a structural transformation. Investors generally require startup projects to have real users and revenue before they are willing to invest; the era of easy financing in the early stages has ended. The reliability of token models as an exit strategy has significantly decreased, and token issuances with low liquidity and high valuations continue to underperform the market, leading investors to revert to traditional equity thinking.At the same time, the rise of the AI sector has captured a large amount of LP funds and entrepreneurial talent, making fundraising for crypto VC even more challenging. However, several investors have pointed out that the current competition is decreasing, valuations are becoming more reasonable, and the regulatory environment is improving. It is expected that 2026-2027 will become the strongest investment years since 2018. In the future, funds will focus on areas with clear business models such as stablecoins, payments, tokenization, real-world assets, and financial infrastructure, and the boundaries between crypto VC and traditional VC will accelerate their convergence.

According to Fortune magazine, in the context of a downturn in the crypto market in 2025 and the distribution of profits to investors, the portfolio values of crypto venture capital firms such as Paradigm and a16z crypto have significantly shrunk.According to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the total assets under management (AUM) of four crypto funds under a16z crypto dropped nearly 40% from 2024 to 2025, falling to $9.5 billion. Part of the reason is that the firm began returning capital to investors from earlier funds, and the timing of the returns coincided with the market peak in 2025, with a net DPI (distributions to paid-in capital) of 5.4 for its first crypto fund.Multicoin Capital's AUM has more than halved, dropping to about $2.7 billion. Paradigm's holdings also slightly decreased by about 6%. Meanwhile, the total size of a16z crypto's parent company, Andreessen Horowitz, has exceeded $100 billion.The report points out that the shrinkage in assets under management reflects the decline in portfolio value due to the market downturn, and is also a sign of normal exits by VCs and the return of funds to limited partners (LPs). Some firms, such as Haun Ventures, have seen their AUM grow by over 30%, reaching around $2.5 billion.Currently, Paradigm is seeking to raise a new fund of $1.5 billion, and a16z crypto is also raising up to $2 billion for its fifth fund.

Anthropic recently received investment intentions from multiple venture capital firms, with some offers corresponding to a company valuation as high as $800 billion, significantly above its current valuation level.Previously, Anthropic completed a round of financing in February this year, with a valuation of approximately $380 billion; while the secondary market Caplight shows that its valuation has risen to about $688 billion. Data indicates that the company's annualized revenue has grown to approximately $30 billion, a substantial increase compared to the end of last year.Market participants indicate that with the rapid development of AI models and related products, investor interest in Anthropic continues to rise, and the company is also seen as a potential IPO candidate.

Varys Capital's head of venture capital, Tom Dunleavy, posted on X that the financing environment in the cryptocurrency market has changed dramatically over the past six months. Previously, VCs had to constantly network, write content, appear on podcasts, participate in Spaces, promote their investment logic, and make countless calls every week to invest in good projects... But now, as long as there is money to spend, that's enough. Current projects are being "pushed in front of VCs," without VCs having to actively dig for them; as long as others know you have funds, projects will come knocking.Most VC firms are now in one of the following three states: they are out of money, they are shifting to later stages (Series A and beyond), or they are fundraising (but not smoothly). Fundraising that used to take 2-3 weeks now often drags on for 2-3 months. Projects with questionable business models or those that simply replicate the latest hot narratives can no longer secure new funding or follow-on investments (which is a good thing).Currently, there may be fewer than 20 firms that are still making pre-seed/seed investments. VCs can basically choose the projects they want to invest in at their leisure and have more time to conduct due diligence. The investment cycle in 2025 and 2026 is likely to become a historically significant "golden opportunity," but the premise is that VCs can hold on.

A number of former OpenAI employees have jointly established a venture capital fund called Zero Shot, with a target size of $100 million. The first round has raised approximately $20 million and completed several investments. The fund was initiated by Evan Morikawa, Andrew Mayne, Shawn Jain, among others, with Kelly Kovacs and Brett Rounsaville also participating.Invested projects include the enterprise automation platform Worktrace AI and the robotics company Foundry Robotics, among others. The team stated that they will focus on AI directions with long-term potential, while maintaining a cautious attitude towards certain sectors, including "vibe coding" platforms and robot video data training.

According to Crowdfund Insider, the technology investment platform Fundrise's innovative fund VCX announced a partnership with the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken to tokenize its fund shares.The tokenized asset is named VCXx and will be traded on Kraken's xStocks platform, allowing investors to purchase using USDG or US dollars.

According to The Block, the leveraged prediction trading platform OmenX has announced the completion of a multi-million dollar seed round financing, with participation from institutions such as Paramita VC, Penrose Ventures, M77 Ventures, and several founders of centralized exchanges.It is reported that OmenX focuses on transforming real-world events into tradable markets and introducing a leveraged mechanism similar to perpetual contracts into the prediction market space, aiming to enhance capital efficiency and institutional-level risk hedging capabilities. OmenX founder James stated, "OmenX is not just a prediction market, but an infrastructure that can treat global events as liquid tradable asset classes with institutional-level leverage."Currently, the OmenX Public Testnet has officially opened to the global community, allowing users to participate in the OmenX points system, which is an incentive framework designed to encourage the community to stress test the platform's leverage mechanism and liquidity depth. OmenX is preparing for the subsequent full mainnet launch and plans to deploy on the Base network.

According to Cointelegraph, SBI VC Trade, a digital asset division of SBI Holdings, announced that it will launch USDC lending services in Japan on Thursday, allowing retail users to lend stablecoins to the platform under fixed-term agreements in exchange for returns.SBI stated that the product is intended to replace traditional dollar deposits in Japan, but unlike bank deposits, its isolation protection measures do not cover user assets and may not allow for full recovery in the event of bankruptcy.Additionally, users cannot withdraw or transfer funds during the fixed loan term, which limits their ability to respond to market changes.

According to Binance spot data, the market has experienced significant fluctuations. DEGO has dropped 10.37% in 24 hours, while CVC has risen 5.48% and reached a new high for today.In addition, DIA, DOGE, PIXEL, RENDER, SIGN, SXT, and SAHARA have all shown a "high and then low" state, with declines of 8.69%, 7.49%, 7.99%, 6.04%, 16.34%, 24.62%, and 7.36%, respectively.

Liquid Capital founder Yi Lihua posted on platform X: "The biggest problem in the crypto industry in recent years is the decline of innovation, which stems from two aspects. First, the previous U.S. government's tightening of crypto policies, which should be resolved with the passage of the recent crypto infrastructure bill. Second, Binance's requirement for projects to adhere to a 1+3 year lock-up mechanism for crypto VCs.I believe Binance's original intention is good, fostering a long-term investment mindset. However, the consequence of this mechanism is that project parties, market makers, and exchanges run away with liquidity first, while VCs face a long unlocking period that leads to zero. VCs originally bore the greatest risks in the primary market, yet they also have to bear the risk of exiting last, which is clearly contrary to traditional investment markets. The result of this is the collective demise of crypto VCs, making it difficult for quality entrepreneurs to secure funding and reducing industry innovation.I suggest giving Zhao Changpeng a better exit mechanism for crypto VCs to activate VC capital, which will benefit industry innovation and also be more favorable for exchanges to list quality assets."