Coinbase co-founder launches $2.5 billion crypto venture fund

San Francisco-based investment firm Paradigm on Monday said it was starting a $2.5 billion venture-capital fund aimed at the “next generation of crypto companies and protocols.” Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam and former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Huang’s Paradigm One would be the largest new venture-capital fund aimed at the industry, according to the Financial Times, which reported on it earlier. 

The size of Paradigm’s fund highlights a continuing boom in the crypto industry. 

“This new fund and its size are reflective of crypto being the most exciting frontier in technology. Over the past decade, crypto has come a long way,” Ehrsam and Huang wrote in a blog post on Monday. Indeed, the three-year-old firm’s fund raising outstripped VC firm Andreessen Horowitz’s $2.2 billion fund earlier in 2021 amid record-breaking venture capital raising activity this year. 

Paradigm invests in crypto shops big and small, with as much as $100 million-plus or as little as $1 million, the company’s website says. The shop intends to continue to invest in startups with “just a glimmer of an idea” as well as later-stage companies, Ehrsam and Huang said. 

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.