Venture capitalists are the lifeblood of crypto, and luckily for founders, some of the top crypto VCs say their assets rose sharply last year from the year before, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The increases came along with a rise in the broader crypto market.
Multicoin Capital, a venture-capital fund with close ties to Solana, saw its assets’ value jump almost 180%, to $3.81 billion in 2023 from about $1.36 billion in 2022.
Polychain Capital, which was founded by former Coinbase employee Olaf Carlson-Wee, saw its fund’s value almost double, to $5.04 billion in 2023 from $2.61 billion the year before.
And Blockchain Capital, which announced in September 2023 that it had raised another $580 million for more crypto investments, said the value of its assets under management increased to $2.36 billion from almost $1.74 billion.
Others that saw smaller increases include Paradigm, which saw its fund’s value surpass $10 billion; Haun Ventures, which valued its assets at more than $1.5 billion; and Andreessen Horowitz, whose massive fund, which counts crypto among its investments, was worth $56 billion at the end of 2023.
Representatives for five of the venture-capital firms mentioned above didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from DL News, and a spokesperson for Multicoin declined to comment.
Crypto investments creep back
The rebound in the fortunes of the biggest crypto VCs mirrors the revival of the broader crypto market.
In 2022, top crypto investors said their assets under management were substantially lower than they were in 2021, according to Newcomer.
Paradigm marked down its portfolio 34%, and Multicoin said its assets fell 85% in value.
And the total value in crypto raises dropped to a monthly low of a little less than $300 million in July 2023 from more than $7 billion in October 2021, according to data from DefiLlama.
More than a year and a half later, crypto is back in business.
Bitcoin reached an all-time high of more than $71,000 in March, per CoinGecko, and crypto VCs invested about $1 billion in the industry in February.
More recently, however, VC enthusiasm has trailed off, with May only recording about $200 million in raises.
And, despite renewed optimism for the industry, some crypto VCs still haven’t recovered to the heights of the last bull market.
In 2021, Paradigm said its assets under management were $13.2 billion, and in 2022, it said it employed 73 staff members. Now it has only 59 employees.