Gate Ventures Shows Crypto Venture Funding Rebounds Through 2025, With Capital Shifting Toward Late-Stage And Core Infra
In Brief
Gate Ventures’ report shows that cryptocurrency venture funding rebounded sharply from 2023 lows through 2025, with capital increasingly concentrated in late-stage deals and core sectors such as infrastructure, DeFi, stablecoins, and regulated exchanges, signaling a shift toward institutional-grade, revenue-generating projects ahead of 2026.
Gate Ventures, the venture capital arm of cryptocurrency exchange Gate, has released a new report analyzing trends in crypto startup funding and capital repricing for 2026.
The report indicates that cryptocurrency venture funding hit a cyclical low in 2023 before rebounding sharply through 2024 and 2025. In 2023, investment totaled approximately $12 billion across more than 1,500 deals, representing a 72% decline from 2022 as valuations cooled after the frothy 2021–2022 period. Funding declined further in 2024, falling to $9 billion with around 950 deals, though capital began accelerating in the second half of the year, particularly in Q4, when $3.2 billion was deployed across 261 deals despite a slight drop in deal volume.
The resurgence intensified in 2025, with year-to-date funding exceeding $30 billion by Q4, surpassing 2024 totals by $21 billion. Quarterly investment reached multi-year highs, including $13 billion in Q3 alone, driven largely by a small number of mega-deals. While total deal counts have stagnated or declined slightly, averaging around 800 deals in 2025 to date, the average deal size has grown significantly. Notable mega-deals, including Binance’s $2 billion funding round in Q1 and Polymarket and Kalshi’s multi-billion-dollar raises in late 2025, skewed aggregate figures, increasing late-stage share and highlighting a divergence between median and mean deal sizes. Excluding outliers, funding levels still roughly doubled year-on-year from 2024, reflecting an underlying positive trend.
Compared with the peaks of 2021–early 2022, current funding remains moderate, signaling a more sustainable market. Whereas crypto startups raised over $36 billion in 2021 and $44 billion in 2022, the 2023–2024 period marked a reset to lower, steadier levels. The 2025 revival reflects a market emphasizing larger, later-stage deals, rigorous due diligence, and selective investment, suggesting a cautious but growing cryptocurrency venture environment positioned for potential expansion in 2026 and beyond.
Between 2023 and 2025, the distribution of cryptocurrency venture deals shifted noticeably toward larger funding rounds. In 2024, deals under $10 million comprised more than three-quarters of all transactions, with the $5–10 million segment representing the bulk of that activity. By 2025, the share of sub-$10 million deals declined to approximately 61 percent, while growth was concentrated in the $10–50 million and $50 million-plus segments, creating a pronounced barbell pattern: early-stage deals clustered below $5 million, mid-sized rounds thinned, and large-ticket investments increased.
Several factors contributed to this trend. Late-stage rounds accounted for nearly half of total capital deployed, while early-stage Seed and Series A deals generally remained below $10 million. By the third quarter of 2025, roughly 10% of all deals exceeded $50 million, up from about 8% in 2024, signaling a resurgence in mega-round financing. Large rounds were concentrated in centralized finance and infrastructure sectors, including exchanges, brokers, and core blockchain systems, often exceeding $100 million. In contrast, entertainment, gaming, and non-fungible token (NFT) projects largely remained in smaller funding brackets, typically under $5 million. Micro-rounds below $1 million were mostly driven by angel investors and niche cryptocurrency funds, whereas the largest deals were led by major traditional financial institutions and corporate venture arms.
Overall, the market has become polarized: while the majority of deals remain relatively small, a limited number of very large rounds capture a disproportionate share of total capital, shaping aggregate statistics despite representing a minority of transactions. The pattern highlights a growing “go big or stay small” dynamic, with substantial capital available for high-performing later-stage ventures, while early-stage startups face intensified competition for smaller investments.
Crypto Venture Funding Shifts: Early-Stage Dominates By Deal Count While Late-Stage Capital Surges In 2025
Between 2023 and 2025, the distribution of cryptocurrency venture funding shifted markedly across stages. During the 2022–2023 downturn, late-stage rounds nearly disappeared, leaving Pre-Seed, Seed, and occasional Series A deals as the main activity. By mid-2025, this trend reversed: Series B and later-stage rounds accounted for the majority of capital deployed, while early-stage deals continued to dominate by count. Funding rounds with undisclosed stages declined as market transparency improved.
Pre-Seed deals remained active through 2023 and 2024, often small in value and supported by DAO grants, accelerators, or cryptocurrency-native funds seeking low-cost optionality, keeping the pipeline steady despite broader market stress. Seed funding maintained consistent activity, although checks were smaller than in the 2021 cycle. Median seed sizes gradually increased, reflecting modest recovery, but the overall share of capital declined as larger rounds returned. Early-stage rounds, including Series A, saw modest growth in 2024 and expanded further in 2025, particularly in infrastructure and decentralized finance (DeFi), reaching $10–50 million ranges, retaining high deal volumes but a smaller portion of total capital compared with late-stage deployments.
Late-stage funding, nearly absent in 2022–2023 due to post-unicorn caution, rebounded in 2024 and surged in 2025, with over half of H1 2025 capital allocated to a concentrated number of Series B+ deals. Undisclosed or unknown-stage rounds, which had proliferated in 2023 to mask down-rounds or bridge financings, became less common as market confidence returned, and standard stage classifications were restored.
The stage rotation reflects broader market dynamics: 2023 prioritized early-stage survival, 2024 saw the first signs of late-stage recovery, and 2025 marked a full late-stage comeback, paired with a barbell strategy that combined active pre-seed pipelines with concentrated late-stage deployments. Analysts suggest that 2026 could see a more balanced distribution if macroeconomic conditions remain favorable.
Crypto Venture Funding Rotates Toward Core Infra, DeFi, And Stablecoins As Sector Priorities Shift 2023–2025
Between 2023 and 2025, venture capital flows in the cryptocurrency sector reflected a pronounced rotation in investor focus, moving from consumer-facing applications toward core infrastructure, financial plumbing, and emerging themes such as AI integration and real-world assets.
CeFi reached a post-FTX low in 2023, with most raises distressed and sector share collapsing, but rebounded modestly in 2024–2025, driven by regulated exchanges and compliance-oriented institutional capital, including headline rounds such as Binance’s $2 billion raise.
DeFi funding cooled following the 2020–21 boom, focusing initially on infrastructure-like protocols before accelerating in 2025, led by stablecoin issuers, institutional DeFi, and revenue-generating financial infrastructure, with round sizes increasing alongside institutional demand. Infrastructure remained a consistently top-funded category, encompassing Layer 1/ Layer 2 scaling, interoperability, dev tooling, and mining, with larger rounds and high valuations signaling continued foundational importance.
Payments and stablecoins emerged as core infrastructure, expanding to asset-backed stablecoins, cross-border rails, and merchant integration, while AI-cryptocurrency convergence grew from early-stage experiments in 2023 to a recognized niche by 2025.
Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization became a major narrative, contributing to DeFi and financial infrastructure funding. Middleware, security, custody, lending, and data services sustained steady investment, supporting regulatory compliance and operational infrastructure.
Entertainment, NFTs, and gaming, which had previously dominated deal count, fell sharply in share of capital, highlighting a shift toward “serious” sectors. Across sub-categories, exchanges, asset management, payments, Layer 1 chains, and prediction markets captured over half of total funding between 2023–2025, with late-stage mega-rounds driving headline figures while early-stage activity remained widespread.
Overall, the data indicate a maturing and more diversified cryptocurrency venture landscape, where capital increasingly targets institutional-grade infrastructure, compliance-aligned projects, and emerging narratives such as AI integration and tokenized real-world assets, setting the stage for continued sector evolution in 2026.
The sub-category analysis highlights the structure of cryptocurrency venture funding in 2025, with capital concentrated in regulated exchanges, asset management, payments and stablecoin networks, prediction markets, and core infrastructure such as Layer 1 chains, mining, and data services.
These areas absorbed the majority of late-stage and mega-deal activity, while sectors like AI, identity, and InfoFi remained primarily early- and mid-stage investments, focusing on automated and data-driven financial tools.
Consumer-oriented categories, including gaming, NFTs, and SocialFi, continued to receive funding but no longer dominated investment activity. The market has become clearly bifurcated, with high-conviction, revenue-generating verticals—such as stablecoins, real-world asset platforms, Layer 1/ Layer 2 infrastructure, exchange systems, and compliance/security—attracting the largest investments, while speculative narratives from earlier cycles received selective support.
Looking toward 2026, the focus will be on whether these newly funded platforms—covering payments, stablecoins, RWA projects, prediction markets, and regulated CEX/CeDeFi venues—translate into sustained transaction activity and revenue. Investors increasingly emphasize real-world integration, scalable infrastructure, and advanced AI adoption, indicating a clear shift toward functional, regulated, and foundational cryptocurrency infrastructure, Gate Ventures noted.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
