5 VC Bets Pointing to Crypto’s Next Big Themes

Some of crypto’s biggest winners aren’t born onchain. They start in private markets, quietly accumulating capital, traction, and regulatory leverage long before tokens or tickers appear.

While most investors can’t access these rounds directly, paying attention to who is raising and what trends they represent offers a powerful edge. Venture funding often surfaces the builders and businesses that will define crypto’s next cycle, and this most recent raise class appears especially promising, with several candidates already resembling prime IPO plays.

Here are five venture-stage crypto companies with narrative momentum at their backs that are worth tracking in 2026. 👇

💸 YO Protocol

Website | Twitter
Last Raise: $10M
Valuation: Unknown
Round: Series A

Deployed on Base, Yield Optimizer (YO) Protocol is an onchain vault offering diversified yield indexes that generate income by deploying capital across multiple protocols and blockchains.

YO aggregates yields and handles portfolio rebalancing, allowing users to earn yield with ease on their ETH, BTC, USD, and EUR deposits, and users receive liquid yoTOKENS after depositing, which enjoy widespread integrations across preeminent Base DeFi applications, including Pendle, Euler, and Contango.

The Protocol announced it had raised $10M in a Series A fundraising round – which was led by Foundation Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Scribble Ventures, and Launchpad Capital – in December of last year.

What’s the Trend?

Onchain yield funds, or vaults, are quickly becoming one of the hottest trends in crypto markets. They can enable anyone to access high-yielding crypto opportunities, without needing to manage position risk or rebalance their portfolio.

While these vault models are not without their risks (Stream Finance imploded in November and dragged numerous other tokenized yield funds into its insolvency wake), YO seeks to mitigate risks for its depositors by adjusting allocations based on risk using Exponential.fi ratings.

The YO governance token is notably launching on February 5 with an initial non-transferable phase.

🏦 Digital Assets (Canton Network)

Website | Twitter
Last Raise: $50M
Valuation: Unknown
Round: Strategic

Canton is a public blockchain created by Digital Assets that claims to be the only network capable of offering configurable privacy and institutional-grade compliance.

The Canton Network purports to support over $6T in onchain real-world assets, process $280B in daily transactions through its network of 500 validators, and exploded onto the crypto industry’s mainstage in December, propelled by headline-grabbing integrations with the DTCC and J.P. Morgan (two TradFi heavyweights).

In December, Digital Assets announced a $50M strategic funding round, with participation from BNY Mellon, Nasdaq Inc, S&P Global, and iCapital. That round followed a $135M strategic raise earlier in 2025 that was led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets.

What’s the Trend?

Canton reflects a potential future where capital markets are onchain, but not permissionless in an Ethereum sense. Instead, large institutions will create custom environments that preserve confidentiality and centralization, while retaining interoperability with an overarching decentralized system.

As TradFi firms explore blockchain-based finance, regulatory constraints will shape the architectures they can adopt. That dynamic creates potential appeal for Canton’s semi-permissioned model, which offers institutions a compliant onramp to blockchain infrastructure without fully embracing open, permissionless networks.

It is going to be critical for the crypto industry to get vocal now in defending equal access to decentralized ledger alternatives, or risk ceding the promise of an onchain future to bifurcated rails for U.S. institutions like current market structure clarity legislation.

💱 ZeroHash

Website | Twitter
Last Raise: $104M
Valuation: $1B
Round: Series D-2

ZeroHash is a crypto and stablecoin infrastructure provider that enables institutional-caliber clients (fintechs, banks, and exchanges) to offer comprehensive digital asset services without directly handling crypto rails themselves.

Founded in 2017, ZeroHash operates as a regulated intermediary that abstracts away the layers of crypto complexity for legacy financial institutions trying to implement blockchain-based trading, custody, and payments solutions.

In September 2025, ZeroHash announced that it raised $104M at a $1B valuation through a Series D-2 raise led by stock brokerage Interactive Brokers with participation from Morgan Stanley, SoFi, Apollo Global, and others.

The crypto infrastructure provider is reportedly in talks to raise up to $250M at a $1.5B valuation, following the apparent falling through in decisions with payments network Mastercard about a potential acquisition late last year.

What’s the Trend?

As regulatory clarity comes into focus and blurs the boundary between crypto and traditional finance, blockchain-ready infrastructure providers stand to play a critical role for firms still operating on legacy rails.

ZeroHash’s recent raise combined with fervent institutional excitement for the company exemplifies the business bull case for blockchain infrastructure and service operators that can straddle the boundaries between crypto and TradFi.

🔮 Kalshi

Website | Twitter
Last Raise: $1B
Valuation: $11B
Round: Series D

Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated prediction market that allows users to trade the outcomes of real-world events. Its contracts span elections, economics, weather, and (most notably) sports.

Founded in 2018, Kalshi became the first fully registered prediction market in the United States in November 2020, when its application to become a designated contract market was approved by the CFTC.

The Kalshi website launched publicly in July 2021, however, it would take until September 2024 (immediately prior to the U.S. general election) for the prediction market to find true success; Kalshi’s landmark court victory against the CFTC secured the ability for regulated prediction markets to offer election-related markets and self-certify compliance of new event contracts.

Kalshi disclosed a massive $1B Series E round in December, valuing the company at $11B.

What’s the Trend?

It's no secret that prediction markets are already a hot trend – these platforms have become one of the fastest growing corners of the crypto industry, but as these platforms fight their way to becoming the go-to venue for sports betting, investors like Paradigm are gambling that we're still just scratching the surface.

While onchain platforms like Polymarket – a Kalshi competitor that was last rumored to be raising fresh funds at valuations up to $15B – prioritize permissionless event trading, Kalshi has utilized U.S. regulatory clarity to its advantage to scale sports gambling-centric prediction market technology across all fifty states.

🌐 Project Eleven

Website | Twitter
Last Raise: $20M
Valuation: $120M
Round: Series A

Project Eleven is a "post-quantum" crypto startup that hopes to secure crypto networks (namely Bitcoin) against the emergent threat of quantum computing. Two weeks ago, it announced a $20M Series A round at a $120M valuation, led by Castle Island Ventures.

In 15 months since its founding, Project Eleven has – among other things – deployed yellowpages (the only post-quantum cryptographic solution deployed in production for Bitcoin) and constructed a post-quantum testnet for the Solana Network.

Project Eleven is currently collaborating with the Solana Foundation and other unnamed "leading protocols and Layer 1 ecosystems" to address post-quantum readiness planning and required technical work.

What’s the Trend?

As quantum computing progresses from theory toward reality, its increasingly imminent arrival poses a growing risk to the cryptographic foundations that underpin many blockchains.

Advances in quantum computing threaten to crack the key standards of some crypto networks, including Bitcoin. Project Eleven is "building the tools to make complex, multi-year migrations practical for networks and institutions, including readiness assessments, migration test environments, and deployment sequencing."