Venture capital is the lifeblood of the startup world in Web3 and crypto. Entrepreneurs need to raise money for projects in order to hire talented people, pay operating costs, and perform marketing for scaling a business. 

VCs, of course, are more than happy to do this, as they get a chunk of the long-term payoff – if there ever is one, of course. Most startups fail, and the business is highly predicated on unicorns to drive venture funds. 

The crypto market is unique, to be sure, with cryptocurrencies also playing a role as many startups launch tokens. However, the digital asset market hasn’t been performing as well. 

Since October, when the price per 1 BTC hit an eye-watering $126,000 record level, the orange asset is in the red by 25%. 

Crypto prices impact the VC market, and dynamics have certainly changed for startups to raise money. What’s the outlook looking like overall right now? 

“Market cycles may influence investment sentiment and can slow or accelerate the pace of closing deals,” noted Stefan Deiss, CEO of Hashgraph Group, focused on VC in the Hedera ecosystem.

Lowered Expectations From Venture Capital

One of the first things that happens when crypto trends to a downward cycle is that startup valuations go lower. 

It may not seem directly related, but the concept of the “hot rounds” for fashionable startups cool off, and VCs don’t really go for sky-high valuations so much, noted Artem Gordadze, an angel investor in NEAR Foundation and advisor at startup accelerator Techstars.

“When Bitcoin is trading at high levels, like the perceived $100k level, startup valuations are commensurately high,” Gordadze said. “This creates a challenging dynamic: VCs must justify the entry valuation based on a potential future price that must materialize within the investment horizon to generate acceptable returns.”

It seems the theory that Bitcoin always goes up is not one venture capitalists are attuned to. Because of long time horizons for VC investments, they have seen many cycles, especially with Bitcoin. 

In addition, many VCs often call November and December “write-off” months. This means they don’t expect to do too much work during the fourth quarter and the holiday season, preferring to start investing anew after the calendar turns to another year. 

The Pragmatic View

The view of venture from 10,000 feet up, as it pertains to the crypto sector specifically, is one of spending, but less volume. 

Case in point: Prediction market Polymarket closed $1 billion, while Kraken took in $800m in funding this quarter. 

In the third quarter, the total amount of funding was $4.59 billion, but half of that was concentrated on just seven deals, according to Alex Thorne, head of research for Galaxy. 

“Market downturns sharpen the focus because you stop seeing price action as a signal but rather resilience in execution and product as the main indicators that count,” said Hashgraph Group’s Deiss. “Downturns push investors to focus more on fundamentals rather than short-term momentum.”

That short-term momentum may often be more hype than anything else. And many big venture-backed projects doing a TGE have not performed very well this year. This includes PUMP (down over 50% in 2025) and Berachain (a 91% drop since its February launch). 

“High volatility and uncertain early-stage valuations are driving a significant shift in capital deployment, favoring strategies with shorter liquidity cycles and better pricing control,” added Gordadze. 

The Lock-Up and the Liquidity

One of the most distinctive aspects of the cryptocurrency industry is the token generation event, or TGE.

The successor to ICOs of days past, Coinbase is now facilitating TGEs after its $375 million purchase of investor platform Echo.

Monad was the first project to launch there, raising $296m, and there’s surely more to come. 

However, once a token launches, there are a few metrics that are unique to crypto that venture investors must closely monitor. 

One is the lock-up, whereby, at TGE, not all tokens are circulating in the market yet; there is a period of holding these assets back. This is designed to better incentivize a network’s participants, from team members to community airdrops and foundation efforts. 

Then there’s fully diluted value, or FDV – this is the total number of tokens times the price – basically a market cap for all tokens, even if they haven’t been unlocked yet. 

And when markets gyrate, it’s really hard to forecast any potential exits of tokens for VCs, which can be a conundrum.

Recently, Arthur Hayes of Maelstrom Capital went on a rant about lock-ups, specifically related to Monad. As a trader, Hayes clearly doesn’t like the illiquidity of these types of tokens. 

“Given the average token or equity vesting/lock-up period of 12 to 48 months, VCs must model the market’s likely condition when these lock-ups end,” said Gordadze, the Techstars mentor. “The entry price must be strategically set to ensure a profitable exit, making long-term market forecasts crucial for deal finalization.

The Future of Crypto VC Investment in 2026 and Beyond

On the subject of market forecasts, VCs surely love to talk about the future. And for crypto, it seems, given favorable US regulatory actions in 2025, that next year could be much better. Is that just investor hopium? 

Maybe. But rose colored (or green) glasses are always the default mode for VCs. Optimism, of course, always wins. 

“2026 is shaping up as a year defined by real utility – DeFi will make a strong comeback with enhanced momentum and maturity and the stablecoin moment becomes background,” noted  Deiss. Stablecoins certainly had a moment this year, although they are the boring infrastructure that’s going to power, say, the next Polymarket, which uses USDC on Polygon as its main coin and chain. 

“Now that stablecoins are finally going mainstream and banks are rushing to get in, the next level will be services for users that are powered by these assets behind the scenes,” noted Gordadze.

The most significant growth areas will likely reside in the intersection of AI/Blockchain and RWA/Blockchain, as these represent the greatest opportunities for real-world impact and institutional revenue generation.”

The post How is Crypto VC Investment Trending in a Bearish Market? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

Bitcoin is now, almost paradoxically to its original ethos, being adopted by Wall Street. Bittensor is a new finger to “the man” of centralization. It’s a sizzling hot narrative. With the rise of AI, concerns have arisen about the tech’s concentration and centralization. 

Bittensor, and its cryptocurrency, TAO, aims to decentralize AI services.  Despite losing nearly 53% in 2025, some believe Bittensor is a next-generation Bitcoin for the AI age. But how realistic is this optimism?

The Premise and Promise of Bittensor

The network just completed a reward halving on December 15, reducing its supply of minted coins. The problem is, many have heard this narrative before. 

With the first Bittensor halving complete, I can’t help but recall Bitcoin’s first halving, which I was fortunate enough to witness.  History doesn’t repeat, but the rhymes are unmistakable; both the parallels and differences between the two are striking:

Same: A Decentralized…

— Greg Schvey (@GSchvey) December 15, 2025

Plenty of cryptocurrencies have claimed to be “the next Bitcoin” – because there’s money to be made with that story. 

However, there could be some real value for Bittensor over the long run – though it has hurdles to overcome, as any sort of ambitious crypto project like this would.

The tale of Bittensor is not unlike Bitcoin: There are powerful incumbents, and a new network can take on and even upend this world order.

For years, influencers rehashed an often similar, anthemic phrase of “long Bitcoin, short the banks”. Notwithstanding that now Bitcoin is embedded in Wall Street banks and publicly traded DAT stocks, this narrative worked well. 

A premise is that AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Deepseek have become too big and frightening, and people need to be concerned about their rise.

Decentralizing artificial intelligence workloads and replacing proof-of-work puzzles with actual real-use AI is Bittensor’s basic gist. 

“Bitcoin proved that cryptographic incentives could coordinate a global network of hardware to secure a ledger,” Evan Malanga, an executive at Yuma, one of the largest backers of the Bittensor platform, told BeInCrypto. “Bittensor takes that same mechanism and redirects the compute power toward something that has direct benefits in today’s world: Training and running AI models, applications, and infrastructure.”

Another Bitcoin? Really?

It’s important to note that Yuma is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG), whose firm was one of the earliest backers of various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Zcash, and Decentraland. 

It was also an early investor in Coinbase, Circle, and Chainalysis. DCG’s CEO, Barry Silbert, is clearly on board with Bittensor – which for some could be considered a positive signal. 

Bittensor does have some Bitcoin-like characteristics. There are only 21 million units of TAO, clearly a nod to BTC. Bittensor also has halvings, which in December reduced its rewards from 7,200 TAO to 3,600 per day. 

Instead of the energy-intensive proof-of-work riddles Bitcoin uses, Bittensor uses something called proof-of-intelligence, where nodes must perform tasks to prove their capability in handling AI workloads. The better a node’s task output quality, the higher the chance it can receive rewards in TAO. 

Nodes that are allowed on the Bittensor network are then assigned a subnet, of which there are currently 128. These subnets have different AI-related specialties. 

“Each subnet is like a specialized marketplace for a specific type of AI service – some focus on image generation, others on language models,” said Arrash Yasavolian, the cofounder of Taoshi, which runs a financial intelligence subnet. 

Centralization Versus Decentralization

Concerns about AI often center on a few companies having concentrated power. Concentration in any industry typically means higher prices and poorer services for customers – sometimes both at the same time. 

Bittensor aims to make AI more of a global good with its decentralization characteristics, like having independent node operators power the subnets for its artificial intelligence capabilities. 

“AI is redefining every industry,” said Ken Jon Miyachi, CEO of BitMind, which runs a subnet focused on deepfake detections on Bittensor. ”Bitcoin revolutionized the store of value, but Bittensor is revolutionizing entire economic systems by making intelligence a global commodity.”

But how decentralized is this network? On July 10, 2024, the Bittensor network was halted amidst an $8 million hack that drained wallets. The chain was put into a “safe mode” that produced blocks without any transaction capabilities. 

“There are legitimate centralization concerns today,” noted Taoshi’s Yasavolian. “The OpenTensor foundation is the sole party responsible for validating blocks. The top 10 largest subnet validators comprise about 67% of total network stake weight.”

Some might argue that Bittensor’s security risks and ability to shut down the network are antithetical to decentralization. Proponents of the network say that full decentralization will come later, becoming “credibly neutral” the same way Bitcoin is supposed to be for store-of-value purposes. 

“Bittensor’s long-term strategic goal is to become a credibly neutral AI development tool. It’s progressive decentralization, similar to how Ethereum evolved,” Yasavolian added. 

The AI Alarm

One way to increase the decentralization of Bittensor and to hear more voices of dissent is via subnet operators. These groups are spending time and money to invest in the network, and they, like Yasavolian, voice their opinions. 

And subnet growth has been strong. Since the start of 2025, the number of subnets has increased 97%, from 65 to 128. 

Sergey Khusnetdinov, Director of AI at Gain Ventures, sees the subnet community as critically important to Bittensor’s success. 

“The result is a meritocratic, self-improving ecosystem where useful intelligence doesn’t come from one lab or one corporation but emerges organically from a worldwide, permissionless community.”

Centralized AI companies are valued quite ridiculously these days – OpenAI has a $500 billion valuation, Anthropic is at $350 billion. China-based Deepseek is rumored to have a $150 billion. With that in mind, what would be the value of a powerful AI network like Bittensor? 

Miyachi, the BitMind CEO who runs a deepfake detection subnet, bullishly believes the Bittensor network could someday excel over that of Bitcoin. 

“Value produced by the Bittensor ecosystem could surpass Bitcoin’s in the long run,” he told BeInCrypto. 

This could ultimately depend on how people perceive centralized AI systems over time, or whether anyone is concerned. But Bitcoin’s had huge runs as people reacted to economic instability and centralization failures such as a global pandemic, bank runs, and fiat currency debasement.  

Maybe soon, influencers might be saying, “long Bittensor, short centralized AI.” But who knows? Sometimes the future can be even stranger than AI could predict. 

The post Could Bittensor Ever Be as Successful as Bitcoin? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

In crypto, perhaps being early can really pay off.  This sure seems to be the case for Ripple Labs, the San Francisco-based blockchain firm that is now worth over $40 billion. 

And after years of tangling with the SEC, the company is experiencing much fairer weather in the regulatory climate with Trump in charge. Since the US presidential election, the price of XRP, the altcoin Ripple launched way back in 2012, has stayed above a $2 price point not seen since the blockchain bull run of 2017.

But is there an actual use case for XRP?

The XRP Payments Corridor

Hedy Wang, CEO of crypto liquidity provider Block Street, says Ripple’s foothold in America may grow now, but it already has traction in other parts of the world, too. 

“In the US it’s been more constrained because of the whole SEC saga, so interest skewed retail and offshore venues,” Wang told BeInCrypto. “Historically you see decent XRP traction in Japan, parts of East Asia, and some remittance-heavy corridors like the Philippines or Latin America via partners.” 

What can’t be denied is that investors have been grabbing up XRP over the past year. Since Trump was elected in November 2024, the price of XRP has gone from $0.50 to $2.15, a 330% increase. 

“Bitcoin is viewed as ‘digital gold’, Ethereum is known for smart contracts,” noted certified public accountant Gregory Monaco, who runs an eponymous CPA firm. “XRP gets its value from cross-border payments.” 

Monaco pointed to Ripple’s 300 financial partners in 45 countries and $15 billion in annual cross-border payments as key indicators of its use case. 

It’s possible, then, that a company behind a cryptocurrency, like Ripple, can put in the real manpower and work to achieve an important payments corridor. 

“If Ripple keeps stacking licenses and bank/fintech integrations, XRP can survive as niche financial plumbing,” added Block Street’s Wang. 

Cross-Border Is Not So Simple

The term “cross-border payments” may sound like a lot of corporate jargon. But ask anyone who has sent money from one country to others, and it is obvious this is a problematic process. It can be slow. It can be expensive. 

Additionally, currency exchanges are required. Cryptocurrencies like XRP are borderless, global, and cheap. There’s value in reducing TradFi’s reliance on regular payment systems. 

Still, ‘hopium’ alone doesn’t necessarily mean that XRP’s valuation is that closely tied to its payments use case, noted Paul Holmes, a researcher at BrokerListings. 

“XRP is still heavily a speculative asset,” Holmes told BeInCrypto. “With crypto as a whole, the valuation isn’t supported by its own income stream, so it’s a function of liquidity production and reallocation from other stores of value.”

It may be that crypto investors and OG whales are simply accumulating more XRP because Ripple Labs, as the largest contributor to the cryptocurrency, appears to be a fairly well-performing crypto firm. 

Ripple’s recent influx of $500 million in capital from Fortress Investment Group and Citadel Securities at a $40 billion valuation certainly reflects that. 

XRP as an ETF Catalyst

Recently, UK-based CoinShares backed away from launching a US XRP ETF product, which likely would have increased demand from investors who stick to the public markets. 

“CoinShares likely walked away because the SEC isn’t giving XRP regulatory clarity that it’s ETF-ready,” said BrokerListings’ Holmes.

It’s important to keep in mind that CoinShares also decided not to launch ETFs on Solana or Litecoin either, so it’s not just XRP that there’s some hesitancy from them to launch these crypto-backed products. 

“XRP is already being used to move value between currencies, stablecoins, and across the growing set of tokenized financial assets on the network,” said Raquel Amanda, Senior Communications Lead for Ripple. “As the ecosystem grows, the need for fast and neutral settlement increases, and we see XRP naturally continuing to fill that role.” 

CoinGecko’s data pegs the price of XRP appreciating by over 36,000% since it was first listed on exchanges starting August 3, 2013. 

The irony of a speculative asset being used for payment isn’t lost on BrokerListings’ Homes, however. 

“On-chain activity shows that there are 50-55 million XRP transactions per month, and a majority of those are payments,” he noted. “At the same time, XRP is still used as a speculative asset for many rather than utility and can’t be expected to be a reliable store of value.”

A Rip to the Moon?

While it may seem confusing to use a volatile asset like XRP as a payment rail, it’s important to remember that many cryptocurrencies, like XRP, are highly divisible and fast. 

XRP is essentially ‘programmable money.’ Code can be implemented to use XRP in its required amounts based on its current trading price. 

And for high-end institutional payments, which is what XRP is used for, it doesn’t really matter what the back-end looks like as long as money reaches its destination. 

While stablecoins may be popular for consumer use and trading, XRP serves as a sort of logistical money mover for companies that need to transfer value globally. 

This would explain why, according to the CPA Monaco, 58% of activity on the network comes from just ten wallets. 

That use case, in addition to Ripple Labs’ now-dropped fight with SEC, is likely the reasoning for a bullish narrative. 

By early 2024, the network had over 5 million XRP wallets.  After Trump’s win, on November 13, 2024,  brokerage app Robinhood relisted XRP on its app. 

In May 2025, Ripple Labs agreed to a $50 million satisfaction of judgment in its dispute with the SEC, ending a years-long quagmire that likely stymied XRP for some time. 

And XRP doesn’t necessarily need a CoinShares ETF, as there are already nine live products on the market with total Assets Under Management (AUM) of $1.1 billion. 

So yeah, the XRP Army, which is what fervent investors in the chain like to call themselves, sees a lot of reasons to be hopeful for the future and a lot less risk to the downside – more than ever before. 

The post XRP is Up 330% Since Trump’s Election, But What is it Really Good For? appeared first on BeInCrypto.