great news everyone crypto winter is over we are so back crypto winter bro wasn't that like two years ago I wasn't talking to you Giga Chad I was talking to my VCS here look crypto winter might be long gone for you and I but Venture capitalists the people bankrolling this whole industry well they didn't get the memo VC investment in crypto has been falling for almost 2 years straight well until now that is the latest numbers are in and it looks like the VCS are finally flashing their cash again so like how much how much can I copy trade bro bro patience I'm going to explain how much VC money is coming in where it's going and what it means for us this cycle so just try not to get liquidated while I'm talking okay let's recap venture capital investment in crypto has historically followed the price action of BTC with a lag of about one quarter so when we saw VCS invest a record 122 billion in the first quarter of 2022 this was likely their reaction to the Euphoria of the 2021 bull run now as we all know 2021 was the year when BTC raced up from sub 30k to a new all-time high of over 69k in Q4 the VCS were excited we were excited your taxi driver was excited you know cycle top vibe it was a good time but as usual just when the markets look like they're never going to stop going up well you know what happens next cue a Black Swan or two coming along to spoil the party well in 2022 it was more like a flock of black swans flapping about all over our portfolios 3ac terraluna Celsius alamida FTX blockfi 15K BTC in other words a world of pain now it's hard to overstate just how bad that year was for crypto a lot of people lost a lot of money and crypto's reputation was battered by its association with Hooligans like Sam bankman freed needless to say crypto VC's got wrecked as well if not financially then perhaps reputationally and definitely emotionally ever since that frothy peak in q1 2022 VC investment in crypto has been drying up large generalist VCS who dip their toes into crypto decid to shake the scene while crypto specific VCS basically went into a coma investment continued to fall for seven straight quarters which is remarkable because it's much longer than the downtrend in the crypto Market itself now I don't know about you but when I hear the words crypto winter I specifically think of 2022 BTC dumped the entire year and finally bottomed in Q4 around 15K it was freezing now 2023 on the other hand was a different story BTC started the year around 16 1 12K and finished it around 44k that's a 160% rally doesn't look very wintry to me and yet VC investment continued to fall throughout the year and only found a bottom in Q4 somewhere below $2 billion ironically this was the quarter when BTC hit escape velocity in anticipation of the spot ETF launches in the US it took BTC rallying 60% in the last 3 months of 2023 but Crypt VCS have finally snapped out of their coma and started writing checks again hold up a second there guy sorry to interrupt folks but I just wanted to very quickly tell you about the coin Bureau deals page now this is the place where we have put together some of the very best deals and Promos in all of crypto so you can think things like exchange signup bonuses trading fee discounts and money off of Hardware wallets and much much more besides so if you want to check that out coin.com deals is the place to go or you can just use the link in the description of this video down below thanks very much and now back to you guy so I'm delighted to report that in the first 3 months of 2024 the number of crypto VC deals increased by about 45% and the amount of capital invested was up by more than 40% quarter on quarter this marked the first quarterly increase since the start of 2022 Hallelujah however we might not be out of the woods just yet that's because despite the large uptick in percentage terms VC investment is still at historically low levels in q1 2024 we clawed our way back up to $2.4 billion but that's still 80% down from where we were in q1 of 2022 the number of deals taking place is likewise a fraction of it what it was back then now this has us wondering BTC made a new all-time high in q1 and VC investment data tends to lag btc's price action by one quarter so now that Q2 is over are we not due a massive influx of investment from VC's playing catchup or is the correlation between btc's price and VC investment now a thing of the past well at the time of making this video Q2 2024 has just drawn to a close so we don't have all of the data just yet however the numbers that are available so far aren't exactly swashbuckling just look at this chart from Bloomberg it was published in mid June two weeks before the end of Q2 it shows VC investment in crypto year-to date standing at $4.2 billion and remember how 2.4 billion of that figure came from q1 so either there are some juicy investment deals missing from Bloomberg's data or we're in for another disappointment because if if this chart is to be believed VCS have invested less than $2 billion in crypto this quarter and that my friends is not much to write home about now we'll refrain from drawing conclusions until all of the data from Q2 is available but at the moment you might be wondering why VC investment hasn't caught up with the massive BTC rally we saw in q1 and for that matter what will it take for institutions to really turn the Taps back on well a good place to start looking for answers is in the macroeconomic context this is because the ability and appetite of Institutions to make risky Investments is more or less decided by macroeconomic factors like interest rates for example the impact of macr Trends rather than crypto specific ones becomes clear when you compare investment in crypto to another adjacent sector say fintech you can see from this chart for example that crypto doesn't exist in a bubble just look at 2021 we thought that was a crazy year for crypto but it was even crazier for fintech which raked in $113 billion in investment globally that's more investment in one year than crypto has seen in the last decade and if hearing that makes your stomach ache then I've got two words for you still early anyway after peaking in 2021 investment in fintech fell by 65% over the next 2 years sure that's not quite as down bad as crypto investment which fell by around 80% in the same period but it's a prolonged and severe downtrend nonetheless in other words it's not just us we're all riding the same macroeconomic wave so we probably shouldn't feel too bad about crypto 2022 may have brought the industry almost to its knees but it seems to be macro factors namely High interest rates that have kept it there but one day the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates liquidity conditions will improve and institutional investors will be desperate to fomo into risk assets once again or so goes the bull case at least and hey if you're looking forward to that juicy rate cut announcement then obliterate that like button and if you're enjoying the video then go ahead and subscribe to the channel and ping that notification Bell so you can be the first to see our next one we're actually seeing the beginning of really good results in q1 and after a 2022 which were a complete mess especially firms that had budget at the end of 21 for a strong 22 and massively you know disappointed now while we're on the topic of funding levels it's worth asking just how much VC investment is desirable or appropriate because believe it or not too many VCS throwing too much money around can actually cause problems and arguably the last bull market took us well into overfunded territory the example par ex alance is the nft spending spree led by crypto VC Juggernaut and dreon Horowitz AKA a16z in spring 2022 a16z raised $4.5 billion for its fourth crypto VC fund and led a $450 million funding round for Bard Apes nft developer Yuga Labs that valued the company at $4 billion the outlandish sums associated with Yuga Labs created a bubble of similarly outlandish expectations and we all know how that ended since a16 Z's investment the floor price of board AP nfts has pulled a minus 10x the CEO of yugal lab's jump ship and his replacement told staff earlier this year that the company has quote lost its way in an email announcing layoffs now we could go on about Yuga Labs but no need to flog a dead horse board Apes were just the froest of froth from the last bull market but they aren't the only symptom of overfunding and here is a scorching hot take for you despite VC investment being down 80% from its high in 2022 we may be seeing signs of funding in this cycle already or at least saturation in the VC fundraising scene but don't take it from me just listen to what crypto VCS are saying recently TechCrunch interviewed nine crypto VCS for an article about the state of crypto fundraising in 2024 altogether they describe an upside down landscape where some funding rounds are so oversubscribed that it's the investors rather than the project Founders who have to pitch their own value according to another two of the VC interviewed it is common to see rounds get oversubscribed within days of coming to Market and filling out before investors have time for intensive due diligence as another VC put it quote raises that would have taken months or not happened at all last year even for high quality teams are now happening in weeks or less with better terms for Founders according to another meanwhile the fierce competition has meant that quote valuations are up significantly and even when larger more established firms pass on a deal Founders still have plenty of options with others some of the valuations we're seeing are already a bit outlandish given how early we are in this cycle he's not kidding according to a recent report published by Galaxy quote deal sizes are flat quarter on quarter but valuations are up almost 100% but as yet another VC told Tech crunch investors gladly quote accept lofty value ations in private rounds since they expect that the tokens will be traded publicly at a significant markup now don't get me wrong I love to see crypto Founders and developers being able to secure funding on Fair terms without having to beg for it but after a certain point a packed crowd of hungry VCS competing to throw money at projects before they've even made it through the white paper is going to cause problems down the line I'm reminded of a comment made by hasib keshi managing partner at dragonfly capital and one of the most vocal crypto VCS on the scene today on a recent podcast episode he said if you look at the previous cycle one of the criticisms that many people levied against crypto influencers and and against VCS as well was that there was a lot of that everybody knew was and most people didn't say anything and I think on some level that was one of the lessons that I really took away from 2022 and has wasn't the only one who took a dim view of some of the VC deals from last cycle another VC quoted in the TechCrunch article recalls quote deals in 2021 felt like you had a gun to the back of your head that feeling has kind of returned to the market a bit yikes now the implications of such a fundraising environment are far-reaching from VC's rushing to cut checks for snake oil salespeople and Vapor Weare Founders to new cryptos launching at absurdly high valuations overfunding and saturation in the VC Market are not necessarily a net positive for crypto and if if you need any more convincing you should check out our video breaking down the low float High fdv phenomenon you'll learn how oversaturated VC funding rounds and the so-called Phantom Market have been squeezing every last drop of value out of new cryptos before they've even launched it's a fascinating Rabbit Hole so do give it a watch anyway all of this is just to say that if VC money flowing into crypto doesn't break a new all-time high anytime soon it might not be the end of the world take Paradigm for example they're one of the leading crypto VCS when Paradigm announced its new $850 million fund for early stage crypto projects this year observers were quick to note that this is less than a third of the size of paradigm's last fund from the previous cycle which was $2.5 billion but if you ask us $850 million isn't exactly chump change we've seen what those multi billion dollar funds gave us and frankly it was a lot of monkey piics and Giga High fdv coins so we should have a good think before hoping to run that one back again okay so there's the big picture crypto VCS are finally showing signs of life again the deals aren't as eyeing as they used to be but maybe that isn't the worst thing so that leaves us with only one question just what exactly are the VCS betting on now well for an answer we can turn to this chart shared by Galaxy it breaks down projects into 19 categories and shows that just four of them sucked up around 70% of all the capital invested in q1 but before you start taking notes it's worth asking how these categories are composed because some are much broader than others for example the wallet category is very straightforward you're either a wallet project or you're not now wallets raised 1% of the money spent by VCS in q1 that is nice and easy to understand by contrast however the infrastructure category which took home 24% of the total capital q1 is rather more open to interpretation in Galaxy's formulation infrastructure means staking raking platform tools sequencing services or other tooling for blockchain developers and users and notably infrastructure here excludes actual blockchains including layer ones and layer to scaling and interoperability Solutions which by the way failed to draw in even 10% of VC investment in q1 between them so I guess everyone agrees we have enough chains by now anyway infrastructur share of the pi is carried to a significant extent by the Blockbuster deals closed for enan La the ethereum restak protocol and z a fully homomorphic encryption development platform these were two of the biggest deals closed in q1 igen Lay's series B funding round was led by a16z and raised 00 million in February in March multicoin capital and protocol Labs LED Z's series a round which closed at $73 million and there was a larger deal mentioned in another report on crypto VC activity in q1 shared by pitchbook notably it was absent from Galaxy's report it's a gener gener ative AI startup called together AI that raised $16 million in an early stage round LED by Salesforce and if that doesn't sound very crypto to you well we'd have to agree pitchbook describes together AI as quote the developer of an open-source decentralized Cloud platform for large Foundation models as such they explicitly categorize it as a deepin project however we can't find any crypto or blockchain component to what they're doing so perhaps we should side with Galaxy and leave this one to Silicon Valley anyhow turning back to Galaxy's chart you'll see that projects grouped in the sprawling web 3 nft Dow metaverse gaming category collectively claimed 21% of VC money in q1 the second largest share now I have to say if you're going to make a chart with this many categories to start with then I'm not sure why these five segments should be condensed into just one but well maybe that's just me at any rate Galaxy says that this segment is mostly carried by Gaming deals which s an uptic in q1 now the third largest category covers trading exchanges investing and lending kind of sounds like centralized exchanges to me they took in 177% of the funding in q1 now this is a pretty Evergreen segment and a straightforward category so this isn't especially remarkable what is remarkable though is just how little investment went to some of the narratives considered to be the hottest in the crypto Market proper take AI cryptos for example in q1 they ran hard but AI crypto startups on the other hand attracted just 2% of the capital invested by VCS now Galaxy's chart doesn't have a category named real world assets but there is one for tokenization I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that these terms are more or less synonymous so rwa cryptos attracted a lot of interest in q1 but Galaxy's tokenization segment took in just 1% of VC investment similarly galaxy has no category for deepin which was another one of the hottest buzzwords in crypto this year so far now presumably deep in projects didn't receive zero investment in q1 so it's rather left to our imagination as to which category or categories they belong to here okay now that's enough of that chart here though is another one this time showing Capital invested by stage the stages included are preed seed round early stage and later stage now if you're not familiar with the nomenclature here are what these mean preed investments will be the first investment received by a founder or co-founders who have an idea for a startup they have no Revenue at this stage and are likely spending their own money or funding from friends and family startups can move to a seed round when they have a minimum viable product basically something they can sell to someone early stage startups will have some kind of product Market fit and are clearly solving in some kind of problem but their goto market growth and business model strategies are less certain later stage will mean a company that is overcome these hurdles and is now looking to upscale its operations now in q1 2024 VCS leaned heavily into early stage projects which accounted for the Lion Share of deals closed and capital invested this bodess well for founders with fresh new ideas and a minimum viable product to sell as VCS will compete to hand them more money with more favorable conditions now preed and Seed Rands were decently represented across most market segments these tend to involve smaller amounts of capital so looking at the number of deals closed rather than the amount invested is more instructive here if there was a loser in the q1 fundraising scene it would have to be the wellestablished crypto projects aiming to upscale operations later stage fundraising RS tend to involve the largest sums of money but you wouldn't know it from this chart of VC Capital invested by category and Stage a few categories like payment stroke rewards privacy stroke security banking Ai and Enterprise blockchain saw a large proportion of capital invested going to later stage rounds but on the whole this was not the case Galaxy explains that the exit of large generalist VC firms from crypto since 2022 might be to blame for this to illustrate this point further we can return to pitchbooks report this showed that the median pre-money valuation for projects in early stage fundraising rounds in q1 was $72 million up almost 150% year on-year for projects in late stage rounds the median was $51 Million up just 7.6% year onye does it make sense for wellestablished projects to be valued so much lower than early stage ones perhaps not but the later the stage is the harder it will be to persuade anyone that you are the next unicorn suffice to say the hopium is Flowing freely in those early stage rounds so let's hope that the best new ideas win and a real crypto unicorn emerges this year so then if you want to bid like a VC then should you ditch Ai rwa and deepin for well-funded infrastructure projects and game five well it's hard to say particularly as infrastructure includes a lot of tools and sequencing services that may not plan to release a token if one thing is for certain though there's no shortage of well-funded brand new projects in the pipeline and no doubt many of them will launch their own coins and tokens the current market is extremely saturated and liquidity is highly fragmented as it is this means that as the cycle progresses and more cryptos are launched you're going to have to work harder and take doing your own research even more seriously that is until the levies break and marginal buyers come flooding back in to pump our bags wanly I mean they are coming aren't they you know what let's leave that for another video all right that's enough VC wheeling and dealing for one day if you learn something new in this video be sure to have a strong word with the like button so more people can see it and drop us a comment if you think we missed any important VC developments and don't forget to subscribe and ping the notification bell too that's it for today folks thank you for watching and I'll see you again soon this is Guy signing off [Music] [Music]