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Paradigm Banks $850 Million for Third Venture Fund
The industry's most prominent venture firm just scored some more cash.
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Crypto VC Paradigm has raised $850M for its third venture fund, which will focus on early-stage crypto projects.
What's the scoop?
- Looming Large: The crypto-native venture fund has continued to grow in stature alongside other large-scale VC funds like a16z Crypto, and has seemed to take a lead in backing some of this cycle's buzziest companies.
- Cashing In: While venture fund raises were few and far between in 2023, there has been a renewed clip, though many of the funds are still coming in quite a bit smaller than the 2021 era raises.
- Staying Busy: Founded in 2018, Paradigm has been an early contributor and the first outside investor in projects like Uniswap, Optimism, and Flashbots. In addition to investing, Paradigm has also built a series of open source tools, such as Foundry, an Ethereum development tool, and Reth, a high-performance Ethereum execution node.
- New GP: Alongside the announcement of the fund raise, Managing Partner Matt Huang also detailed that Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos will be stepping into the role of General Partner at the firm.
Bankless Take:
While always a standout fund, Paradigm has had quite a year with some highly publicized investments in friend.tech, Blast, and now Symbiotic, the EigenLayer competitor. This new raise, rumored to be focused on consumer plays, paves the way for this portfolio expansion to continue. As the regulatory environment stateside forces projects to drop tokens later, the upside is shifting toward private markets, putting top VCs in an advantageous spot, but also a precarious one for continuing to champion the populist appeal or Web3 as a concept.