Crypto VC funding drops 22% in Q2 despite strong June finish

Venture capital funding directed towards crypto startups totaled $4.5 billion during the second quarter, down 22% versus the previous three months.

According to DefiLlama data, the breakdown of the second quarter shows monthly flows of roughly $1.29 billion in April, $624 million in May, and $2.5 billion in June. 

June’s figure is over 4x larger than May’s funding and ranked as the second-largest month of 2025, trailing only March’s $3.5 billion surge that was driven by Binance’s $2 billion MGX investment.

Despite the late-quarter rebound, the combined amount for the second quarter could not match the nearly $6 billion invested in crypto startups between January and March.

Nevertheless, it is still double the amount of venture capital money flowing into crypto in last year’s second quarter.

Stand-out Q2 transactions

Large cheques remained selective in the second quarter. Twenty One Capital received $585 million, the largest funding round of the previous quarter.

Furthermore, Eigen Labs received $70 million from Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z, which purchased additional EIGEN tokens.

Other significant funding rounds from the second quarter include Hypernative’s $40 million round and Symbiotic’s $29 million.

While the deal count slipped to multi-year lows in May, at just 62 rounds, the quarter’s median round size remained above $10 million, indicating that investors continued to fund later-stage and infrastructure projects.

Sector mix and geographic notes

DeFi infrastructure, restaking, and AI-linked middleware captured the largest tickets, mirroring the public market’s narrative rotation.

North American companies attracted the majority of the raises last quarter, primarily due to larger Series B and later rounds of funding. At the same time, early-stage activity in Asia and the Middle East edged higher in token-focused seed deals.

Despite the slower pace of funding registered in the previous quarter, the year-to-date total of roughly $10.3 billion already exceeds the full-year figure of $9.6 billion for 2024.

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