blockchain-infrastructure
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Parity built the machinery. Now comes the human part.
The engineers behind Polkadot spent a decade making blockchains work together. Their next test is whether people can use the result without needing a blockchain education.
Variant Bet on Ownership. Now It Wants to Fund Autonomy.
The New York venture firm made its name arguing that internet users should become owners. Its new $222 million fund stretches that idea into a broader test: does the technology give people more agency, or merely automate them?
The Crypto Fund With No LPs - and a Very Particular Map of the Future
UDHC is betting that decentralized finance will not replace the old system. It will quietly connect to it - with better plumbing, clearer rules and products ordinary customers can use.
DBA Wants to Be the Crypto Fund Inside the Machine
Most venture firms study a company before writing a check. DBA keeps studying after it invests - then publishes the homework for everyone to argue with.
The Checkout Counter Where Crypto Becomes Ordinary Money
BitPay spent 15 years making one volatile idea feel routine: a customer pays from a crypto wallet, while the merchant can wake up to ordinary money in the bank.
The Company Running the Pipes Under Institutional Crypto
Most people will never hear of Blockdaemon. The institutions moving billions on-chain can't operate without it.
tZERO Spent a Decade Building the Boring Parts of an On-Chain Wall Street
The blockchain pioneer began with a moonshot: rebuild capital markets. Now its more practical pitch is regulated plumbing - one stack for issuing, trading, holding and connecting tokenized assets.
The Crypto Company You Never See Is Moving $1 Trillion
Alphapoint spent 13 years becoming the machinery behind other companies' crypto products. Now it is turning that exchange technology into an operating system for the stablecoin treasury.
The Internet's Best Addresses Have Been Sitting Still. D3 Wants Them to Move.
D3 is putting real .com, .ai and .xyz domains onchain without cutting them loose from the web. The bet is simple and difficult: make internet real estate liquid while keeping the plumbing intact.
Polygon Labs Wants to Make the Blockchain Disappear
The Ethereum scaler has become a payments company. Its new pitch is not another chain to think about, but a stack that makes chains somebody else’s problem.
The VC That Writes the Code It Bets On
Most venture firms wire the money and wait. Paradigm wires the money and then builds the developer tools its founders use to ship.
MoonPay Is Building the Checkout Counter for Money That Never Sits Still
MoonPay made its name turning cards into crypto. Now it is assembling the payments, trading and compliance machinery for a financial system that runs across bank accounts, wallets and hundreds of blockchains.
Bloccelerate VC
Bloccelerate built a crypto venture firm around a stubborn observation: capital is often easier to find than a real market. Its answer is equal parts research desk, founder workshop and bridge to institutional finance.
Finality Capital
A Santa Monica firm that has been quietly backing blockchain builders since 2018 - before it had a fund - now runs venture, liquid, and credit strategies on a single conviction: the next internet gets settled onchain.
August Digital
August Digital is a New York-based institutional crypto company building on-chain prime brokerage infrastructure. Its platform gives trading desks, funds, protocols and treasuries secure smart-contract accounts, real-time risk and pricing engines, cross-margining, lending, and structured products so they can borrow, lend, trade and settle across DeFi and CeFi with any liquid collateral - all with on-chain auditability. August also operates Upshift, a vault product that opens institutional-grade yield strategies to a wider set of users. The company raised a $10M Series A led by Dragonfly in March 2025 and reports having processed roughly $45B in cumulative volume.
Noble
Noble is a purpose-built blockchain for native asset issuance, focused on stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. Built on the Cosmos SDK and connected through IBC, it is the canonical home of native USDC in the Cosmos ecosystem and the issuer of the yield-bearing Noble Dollar (USDN). Founded in 2022 by Jelena Djuric, Stefan Coolican and John Letey after the collapse of Terra's UST, Noble gives issuers such as Circle, Ondo Finance, Hashnote and Monerium a neutral, compliant rail to mint dollars and distribute them across dozens of connected chains - with no gas token required and fees paid in USDC.
OP Labs PBC
OP Labs PBC is the core software development company behind Optimism, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, and the OP Stack, the open-source framework that powers the Superchain - a network of blockchains including chains launched by Sony, Uniswap, Kraken and (until 2026) Coinbase's Base. Founded in 2019 out of the nonprofit Plasma Group, OP Labs raised $178.5M from Paradigm and a16z at a $1.65B valuation and structures itself as a Public Benefit Corporation committed to scaling Ethereum's technology and values, including funding open-source public goods.
Verbwire
Verbwire was a Web3 infrastructure company that collapsed the entire smart-contract stack into a single REST API. Founded by two former Wall Street quants, it let developers in any language - Python, Java, JavaScript, C++ - deploy contracts, mint NFTs, manage wallets, store files on IPFS and query on-chain data without ever touching Solidity or Hardhat. With 60+ endpoints across 10+ EVM blockchains, it served tens of thousands of developers and processed millions of API calls before the founders wound it down, noting that AI had begun to close the very complexity gap they were built to bridge.