Crypto venture capital investments grew 26.1% in 2024 compared to the previous year, with 1,535 projects going public, according to a report from Wu Blockchain, citing RootData statistics.
The report highlighted a total of 102 publicly disclosed crypto VC investment projects in December, reflecting a 7.4% month-on-month (MoM) increase from 95 projects in November. However, this represented a decline of 6.4% year-on-year (year-on-year) compared to 109 projects in December 2023.
Total funding for December was $740 million, up 60.9% month-over-month from $460 million in November, but down 18.7% year-over-year from $910 million in December 2023.
For the full year, disclosed funding was $9.33 billion – slightly ahead of 2023’s $9.28 billion by 0.5%.
Sector division
Sector-wise, DeFi led with 24.4% of total projects, followed by NFT/GameFi with 15.1%, Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions with 11%, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects with 9.6% .
Centralized finance (CeFi) accounted for 5.7%, while real-world assets (RWA) and decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) projects accounted for 8.8%. Tools and wallet infrastructure represented 7.3% of the total.
Among the largest funding rounds of 2024, Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge in October stood out as the largest in the crypto industry.
Australian crypto mining company Iris Energy raised $413.4 million through a share issuance in the first half of the year, while Avalanche secured $250 million in a token sale led by Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly and ParaFi Capital in December.
Other offers
Monad Labs raised $225 million in April to develop an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, and Blockstream raised $210 million in October to expand its Layer 2 technologies.
Meanwhile, Robinhood announced plans to acquire crypto exchange Bitstamp for $200 million, with completion expected in the first half of 2025.
Other notable deals included Bitfarms’ $175 million acquisition of Stronghold Digital, CleanSpark’s $155 million merger with GRIID Infrastructure, and Hut 8’s $150 million strategic investment to build AI infrastructure to develop.
Additionally, decentralized social protocol Farcaster raised $150 million in May, bringing its valuation to $1 billion.
