Cointelegraph Research’s latest report provides a data-driven outlook on fundraising in the crypto market and the key VC trends of 2025. Venture capital investments in Web3 startups doubled in 2025 versus 2024, driven by institutional interest and a pronounced shift toward tokenized real-world assets (RWA). There was also a marked rise in mergers and acquisitions and other large-scale corporate financings.
In 2025, venture capital investment in crypto startups exceeded $8 billion in every quarter for the first time since 2022. Total funding for the year reached more than $34 billion, up from $17 billion in 2024. Despite the increase in funding, 2025 remained a risk-off environment: investors favored bonds and safe-haven assets like precious metals amid geopolitical uncertainty and higher interest rates.
This reduced risk appetite changed how fund managers evaluated crypto business models. In 2025, investors prioritized sustainable revenue models, organic user metrics and strong product–market fit over projects showing early traction but limited revenue visibility. That shift translated into a move away from pre-seed and seed rounds toward later-stage financings. Seed-stage financing declined by 18% while Series B funding rose by 90%, indicating deeper investor involvement in maturing projects and a focus on ecosystem development rather than early-stage experimentation.
The top narrative of the year was RWA tokenization. What began as a narrative has matured into a fast-growing sector over the past three years. According to RWA.xyz data, tokenized real-world assets surpassed a capitalization of $38 billion in 2025, a 744% increase from $4.5 billion in 2022. RWAs have become one of the market’s fastest-growing segments, second only to stablecoins. Nonetheless, the crypto RWA sector remains small compared with traditional markets—$156 trillion in fixed-income and $146 trillion in global equities—signaling substantial room for growth. On the investment side, VC funding for RWA tokenization projects exceeded $2.5 billion in 2025.
While overall VC interest grew, certain narratives cooled. Ethereum layer-2 projects and modular infrastructure saw a clear decline. Layer-2 funding fell to $162 million in 2025, a 72% drop from 2024. This fall likely reflects a saturated L2 landscape: the rapid proliferation of layer-2 chains—now above 50—reduced demand for additional blockspace and dampened VC appetite for new entrants.
The report’s findings reflect a maturing market where institutional capital is returning but deploying more selectively, favoring projects with proven revenue and clearer paths to scale. RWA tokenization emerged as a primary beneficiary of that trend, while previously hyped infrastructure narratives lost momentum as the market reassessed supply, demand and long-term utility.
We would like to thank Canton Foundation, CryptoRank, DWF Labs, Everest Ventures Group, Mercuryo, and RWA.xyz for contributing data, insights, and opinions to this report.
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