Weekly Newsletter, 21 March 2025

Notes from the Digital Asset Summit

This week, a bit of on-the-ground reporting from the Digital Asset Summit in NYC where speakers ranging from industry veterans (and well… me), to the President of the United States discussed progress of the sector. This was the first time a sitting US president addressed a crypto conference.

Being here, you can definitely feel the ground shifting with regards to institutional US investor engagement. Pre-election it was tough for most institutions to get involved. Firstly, quite a few got burned by events in 2022, mostly related to the fallout from the FTX and Celsius bankruptcies, which unfortunately a lot of early mover institutional investors had exposure to. Additionally, the regulatory uncertainty, particularly the SEC’s aggressive stance toward crypto companies and protocols, kept many investors on the sidelines. What would happen if you invested in these companies or protocols?

Today, the landscape has significantly changed. Both government and regulators are now actively promoting the industry and quite frankly, most institutional investors are playing catch up. There are two main questions that they need an answer to. Firstly, if blockchain technology really is going to start bursting through to a wider audience, how is that going to impact existing investments? Institutions at the very least have to start properly understanding what blockchain technology is. Secondly, now there is no regulatory pushback, can institutions really ignore returns in this new asset class?

It seems we are now entering the phase that institutions are indeed starting to do more work. In a survey of over 350 institutional investors, Coinbase and research partner EY-Parthenon found that over 75% of investors “expect to increase their allocations to digital assets in 2025,” while 59% said they’ll invest “over 5% of their assets under management to digital assets or related products.”

But then comes the difficult part. Once you have decided to invest, where do you allocate? There is so much noise and there are so many low-quality pitfalls, that institutions simply need time to assess all their options in both liquid and private markets.

But our message from NYC is this: US institutional investors are coming. It might take a bit of time, but our sense is that this is probably the last chance to invest ahead of the institutional wall of money that is about to enter the space.

Also this week

Relevant financial updates

TON*, the layer one blockchain designed by Telegram, raised $400 million from Sequoia, Ribbit, Benchmark, Kingsway, and others.
Kraken acquires NinjaTrader, the leading U.S. retail futures trading platform for $1.5 billion.
Privy*, a crypto wallet infrastructure company, raised $15 million from Ribbit Capital, Sequoia, Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and BlueYard Capital.
Crossmint*, the enterprise grade blockchain infrastructure platform, raised $23.6 million from Ribbit Capital, Franklin Templeton, NYCA, Faction, First Round, and others.
Uranium Digital*, a company building a token-powered Uranium exchange, raised $6.1 million from Framework, Mirana Ventures, and others.
Walrus, a blockchain-based data-storage platform, raised $140mln from Standard Crypto, a16z, and others.
Daisy*, a platform for creators, raised $3.9 million from EV3, Volt Capital, and CMT Digital.
Halliday*, a workflow protocol that automates tasks, raised $20 million from a16z, and others.
Slingshot*, a service that allows users to trade directly from their wallets while aggregating liquidity across a range of decentralized exchanges raised a $16 million round from Ribbit, K5 Global.
Level*, the stablecoin protocol, raised $2.6 million from Polychain, DragonFly, and others.
Pluralis*, a decentralized AI protocol, raised a $7 million from CoinFund, Union Square Ventures, Variant, and others.
RedotPay, a crypto payments platform, raised $40 million from Lightspeed, Accel, HongShan, Galaxy Ventures, and others.
Manifest*, a tokenisation platform, raised $2.5 million from VanEck, Lattice, and Compound VC.
Yeet*, a crypto casino and sportsbook, raised $7.75 million from Dragonfly, Primitive Ventures, Mirana Ventures, and others.
Hibachi*, a decentralized perpetuals exchange, raised $5 million from DragonFly and Electric Capital.
Opinion Labs, a platform looking to create a marketplace for opinions, raised $5 million from YZiLabs.
Plume*, a layer-1 blockchain network focused on tokenizing and trading real-world assets, raised an undisclosed amount from YZi Labs.
Utila*, an institutional crypto wallet provider, raised $18 million from Nyca Partners, Wing VC, Arca, and others.

*Underlying TBV portfolio position | Prices as per 21/03

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