KEYTAKEAWAYS
- 2025 regulation reshaped crypto investing, improving clarity for stablecoins and market structure while changing how risk and returns are priced.
- Fundraising diverged from price cycles, with fewer deals but larger checks signaling higher conviction and selective capital deployment.
- Capital rotated toward infrastructure, prediction markets, AI, and RWA, marking a shift from broad speculation to focused, mature investment.
CONTENT
In 2025, crypto funding shifted from hype to structure as regulation advanced, deal counts fell, capital concentrated, and investors focused on certainty, compliance, and scalable growth.
2025 marked a year of substantive breakthroughs for the crypto market at the institutional level, as well as a clear shift away from unchecked expansion toward closer integration with the mainstream financial system. In terms of scale, global crypto market capitalization reached $3.2 trillion, while stablecoin transaction volume exceeded $50 trillion—a figure surpassing traditional payment giants such as Visa and PayPal. Behind these headline numbers lie two pivotal legislative developments.
First, stablecoin legislation was formally enacted, clearly defining issuers, reserve requirements, and supervisory mechanisms. This provided “on-chain dollars” with a concrete legal status, significantly reducing policy uncertainty around stablecoin businesses. As a result, investment activity across stablecoins, payments, and settlement-related sectors accelerated. Second, crypto market structure legislation continued to advance steadily, introducing a classification-based regulatory framework rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. This gave both projects and investors a more predictable and navigable compliance path.
Taken together, these legislative milestones are reshaping how the primary market evaluates risk and return, altering capital allocation logic at a structural level.
However, in contrast to the improving institutional backdrop, the secondary market in 2025 failed to deliver equally strong feedback. Bitcoin experienced heightened volatility, while altcoins broadly underperformed. Against this backdrop, the primary market did not enter the kind of indiscriminate frenzy seen in the previous bull cycle. Instead, activity remained cautiously constructive, with clear shifts in fundraising pace and investor preferences.
A 4-YEAR CYCLE REVIEW: TWO DIVERGENCES BETWEEN DEAL COUNT AND CAPITAL DEPLOYED
A review of crypto fundraising trends over the past four years reveals a clear evolution in the relationship between the primary market and secondary market performance.
In early 2022, fundraising activity still benefited from the residual momentum of the bull market, with both the number of deals and total capital raised remaining elevated. As Bitcoin entered a sustained downtrend, fundraising gradually contracted. Between 2022 and 2023, investment activity was highly correlated with price performance, and overall sentiment remained subdued under prolonged bear-market pressure.
2024 marked a critical inflection point—and the first divergence between deal count and funding volume.
As the Bitcoin halving narrative regained prominence, the number of fundraising deals rebounded noticeably. However, the total amount raised remained restrained. Quarterly funding volumes hovered between $1.8 billion and $2.8 billion, levels comparable to the depths of the bear market. The key reason lay in market leadership: unlike the previous cycle, where VC-backed projects sat at the center of market narratives, the 2024 rally was dominated by Bitcoin and the memecoin sector. VC projects, by contrast, struggled to gain traction and exert meaningful influence, limiting the emergence of large-ticket financings.
Entering 2025, divergence appeared once again—but with the direction reversed.
The number of deals declined sharply, while total funding volumes rebounded. Quarterly fundraising rose to approximately $3.7–$5.1 billion, signaling a meaningful increase in average deal size. This shift suggests that investors are deliberately reducing the frequency of investments, instead concentrating capital into a smaller set of projects viewed as having higher certainty and scalable potential.
>>> More to read: Bitcoin Is Rebounding, but the Data Suggests the Recovery Is Still Incomplete
12 SECTORS, $17.89 BILLION: STRUCTURAL SHIFTS IN THE PRIMARY MARKET
In 2025, total funding in the crypto primary market reached $17.89 billion, spanning 569 disclosed financing rounds. To better capture changes in investor preferences, all disclosed deals (noting that actual close dates often precede public announcements) were categorized into 12 sectors based on business model, target users, and functional focus. These sectors include CeFi, Infrastructure, RWA, AI, DeFi, SocialFi, Prediction Markets, PayFi, DePIN, BTCFi, L1, and GameFi.
✏️ A breakdown by sector reveals several notable structural trends:
✅ CeFi and Infrastructure ranked at the top in both capital raised and deal count. Core capabilities—such as trading, custody, clearing, security, and cross-chain infrastructure—remain priority areas for sustained capital deployment. The market consensus around “infrastructure first” has not weakened.
✅ DeFi continued to show strong activity. Demand for innovation in DeFi protocols remains resilient, with the success of Hyperliquid serving as a direct proof point that decentralized exchanges can absorb large-scale capital efficiently. As a result, perpetual DEXs emerged as a new fundraising hotspot.
✅ AI and RWA became key narrative pillars. AI aligned with the broader global technology cycle, while RWA directly benefited from regulatory progress enabling traditional financial assets to move on-chain. Both sectors share a defining trait: their growth logic no longer relies solely on crypto-native demand, but increasingly extends into the wider technology and traditional financial systems.
✅ The most unexpected standout was prediction markets. While the number of projects in this category was not particularly large, the total funding amount surged, making it the second-largest sector by capital raised, behind infrastructure. This indicates a high degree of capital concentration into a small number of leading projects.
✅ In contrast, formerly popular sectors such as DePIN and GameFi continued to see new projects emerge, but their ability to attract capital declined sharply. Funding is clearly rotating toward areas perceived to offer greater certainty and stronger scalability.
Overall, the primary market is shifting away from a strategy of broad, exploratory deployment toward one of focused, high-conviction investment.
>>> More to read: Real Estate “Shorting Tool” Emerges, Polymarket Launches Real Estate Prediction Market
POLYMARKET: SHIFTING CONSENSUS BEHIND 2025’S TOP FUNDRAISING STORY
An examination of the Top 10 fundraising deals of 2025 shows that Polymarket and Kalshi together accounted for nearly the entire fundraising narrative of the year.
Polymarket has completed multiple funding rounds totaling nearly $2.5 billion, with backing from prominent crypto investors including Polychain, Dragonfly, and Coinbase. Kalshi, by contrast, began accelerating its fundraising efforts in 2025, raising approximately $1.5 billion, supported by Paradigm, a16z, and Coinbase. Unlike Polymarket, Kalshi places stronger emphasis on federal regulatory compliance. What both share, however, is a clear signal: prediction markets are increasingly viewed as a financial primitive with genuine, sustained demand, making the sector one of the most dynamic and positively trending areas in the primary market.
In the L1 segment, investor preferences also showed continuity. Aside from the established blockchain Ripple, other projects appearing on the list—such as Tempo and Mond—represent a new generation of Layer 1 networks. Mond has already launched its token, while Tempo has yet to do so. This pattern reflects investors’ ongoing commitment to base-layer infrastructure, with high-performance L1s still regarded as long-term foundations for ecosystem expansion.
>>> More to read: What is Polymarket? Web3 Prediction Market
CONCLUSION
Overall, the primary market in 2025 did not cool down—it consolidated and restructured.
Capital continued to flow, but no longer chased volume for its own sake. Instead, it became increasingly concentrated around certainty, regulatory alignment, and scalability. This shift does not necessarily signal a shrinking opportunity set. On the contrary, it suggests that the crypto market may be entering a more rational and mature phase, where capital allocation is driven less by momentum and more by long-term viability.
