Crypto funding surpassed $9.3B in 2024, boosted by merger deals and large private rounds

After record funding rounds in December, crypto projects wrapped up a successful year of funding. The whole of 2024 mostly repeated the performance of 2023 but with a shift in the types of deals and funding targets. 

Crypto funding for the whole of 2024 reached $9.33B, with minimal growth compared to 2023. However, the deal profile and size shifted, as VC funds mixed early-stage seed rounds with advanced, undisclosed, and private funding. While Tier 1 funds secured large-scale funding, Animoca Brands was the leader in the number of completed deals. After an active year, Animoca Brands completed 106 rounds as a participant, becoming the lead VC in 20 rounds.

In the past year, a total of 1,535 projects were disclosed, a 26.1% increase from the previous year. The final results for the year may change slightly, as not all rounds are disclosed in the same month. The crypto funding landscape tracked the overall outflow of funding. VC backers were also more selective about their deals, both in crypto and general investments.

Based on the methodology of RootData, the final tally for the year is relatively lower, though it includes some of the large merger deals. Other methodologies measured up to $13.6B in funding, calculated through the methodology of Galaxy Research. 

Funding may continue to grow in the coming months, expecting a total of $18B for the year. The VC funding levels are still comparatively lower, not reaching the levels of 2022, when even quarterly funding exceeded $10B at the peak of the market. 

Web3 funding retains a large market share

A mix of inertia and legitimate projects expanded the share of Web3 deals. In the past 12 months, a total of 276 general Web3 projects received funding. DeFi was the biggest sector, with 375 projects. Only 88 centralized projects caught the attention of VC backers. 

Over a yearly period, VC funding is still resembling the mix of earlier years. In the short term, however, AI deals expanded to over 27% of the total on a monthly basis, driven by the recent launch of platforms for AI agents. For the whole year, however, AI funding amounted to around 9.6% of all deals by number, depending on trend and project branding. 

VC funds continued to support infrastructure, wallet and developer tools, data services, payment gateways and other smaller use cases. Despite the slowdown in token prices, funds still picked L2 projects, in addition to new games and GameFi. Funding overall followed the fluctuations of the crypto market, accelerating at the end of the year. 

Large-scale deals boosted total funding

The last quarter of 2024 hosted some of the most significant crypto deals. The acquisition of Bridge by Stripe was the largest crypto merger deal, valued at $1.1B. The purchase was also the biggest for Stripe, marking its dedication to crypto usage. 

The other significant deal from a fintech company was the preliminary acquisition deal for Bitstamp. Robinhood agreed to acquire the exchange in cash, which is pending regulatory approval. The deal was counted toward the 2024 total but will be finalized by H1, 2025.

Monad Labs received one of the biggest purely crypto deals, raising $225M in a round led by Paradigm. Monad Labs was tasked with creating another EVM-compatible L1 chain. A similar deal was completed by Avalanche, which raised $250M to expand its Avalanche9000 chain, an improved and rebranded version of its network. 

Blockstream achieved a round of a similar size, raising $210M to test L2 technologies. Farcaster was close behind, raising $150M from top VC funds Paradigm and a16z, raising its valuation to $1B.

Other deals for the past year included fundraising from mining and data center companies. Hut8 secured $150M, while CleanSpark reached an all-stock deal at $155M. Iris Farms raised $413.4M in stock issuance for future developments. The funding for crypto deals excludes fundraising to buy BTC for treasuries. The recent miner deals did not reflect the developments inside tokenized projects, but showed a general readiness to support BTC as the central point of the crypto market.

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