Paradigm Closes $850M Third Fund to Invest in Early-Stage Crypto Projects

Quick take:

• The new fund will focus on investing in early-stage crypto projects, the company said in a statement on Thursday.
• In 2021 Paradigm set up $2.5 billion to invest in crypto projects and protocols.
• The venture firm was founded in 2018 to back crypto projects amid high expectations for the industry in the coming decades.

Paradigm has raised $850 million for its third fund. Announcing the news via its website on Thursday, the firm said the new fund will focus on investing in crypto projects at the earliest stages. 

This announcement comes barely two months after the company said it was raising a new fund in the range of $750 million to $850 million for a new crypto fund. 

This new fund follows the company’s $2.5 billion fund launched in 2021 to invest in crypto projects and protocols. 

Founded in 2018, Paradigm said that its decision to focus on backing crypto projects was based on the belief “that crypto would be one of the most important technical and economic shifts of the coming decades.” 

“Six years later, that belief has only gotten stronger,” the company wrote in a statement.

In support of this statement, Paradigm highlighted some of the milestones the industry has achieved over the past six years including Bitcoin hitting a market cap of more than $1 trillion, “Ethereum, Solana and other blockchains scaling” while stablecoins are being adopted globally. 

As frontier research in the industry continues to speed along, developers are building new infrastructure that is enabling consumer applications, bringing hundreds of millions of people to crypto. “Crypto is now a main character on the world’s political stage,” Paradigm added.

The company highlighted its role in the industry’s growth over the years, which has seen it invest in multiple crypto projects and protocols, the latest of those being a leading role in zero-knowledge proofs startup Succinct, which raised $55 million in March.

The company was also the lead investor in a $225M funding round for high-performance EVM-compatible Layer-1 Monad Labs in April.

The company has also previously invested in Uniswap, which it says “pioneered the use of AMMs for decentralized exchanges,” Optimism — which “invented one of the leading models for blockchain scaling”, and Flashbots — which “defined the concept of MEV and reinvented how blocks are built.”

“This is the sort of early-stage work that we love contributing to, and it’s what we’ll be increasingly focused on going forward,” Paradigm wrote.

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