paradigm

Recently, discussions surrounding the shutdown of projects invested by a16z have intensified. According to RootData's investment and financing data, after deduplication by project, five institutions—Coinbase Ventures, YZi Labs, Pantera Capital, a16z, and Paradigm—cover a total of 993 independent invested projects, of which 216 are marked as shut down, accounting for a cumulative ratio of 21.75%.Looking at the institutions individually, Pantera has a shutdown rate of 24.76% (51/206), Coinbase Ventures at 22.69% (98/432), a16z at 20.09% (43/214), Paradigm at 19.49% (23/118), and YZi Labs at 13.56% (32/236).Although a16z is at the center of public opinion, it is not the institution with the highest shutdown rate in the sample. Among its 148 lead investment projects, 29 are marked as shut down, accounting for 19.59%, including Linera, which recently announced its closure, and Universal, which has announced its entry into the shutdown process, indicating that even leading institutions cannot eliminate operational risks for projects.

Privacy token Zcash (ZEC) rose about 20% in 24 hours, with Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang revealing that the company has invested in ZEC. ZEC supports shielded transactions that hide addresses and transaction amounts using zero-knowledge proofs, with a price of about $1,338 on Thursday.Huang disclosed in a post that Paradigm is both an investor in the Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) and a holder of ZEC tokens. He described Zcash as "a privacy complement to Bitcoin" and supports its developer fund backed by inflationary funds, believing that long-term funding support remains important in the context of AI network capabilities and the development of quantum computing. He also supports combining Zcash token voting with other forms of governance to reduce its unpredictability as a monetary asset.Today's increase of over 10% has led to a cumulative rise of about 160% for ZEC over the past month, while Bitcoin has risen 18.2% during the same period. Paradigm's investment in the Zcash ecosystem has been publicly disclosed, with ZODL announcing the completion of over $25 million in seed funding in March, with participants including Paradigm, a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, and Winklevoss Capital. As ZEC rises, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 25 basis points to 3.75%-4%, marking the first rate hike of 2023, with the overall cryptocurrency market trending upward.

Paradigm founder Matt Huang commented on Zcash via Twitter. He stated that all blockchain ecosystems face the long-term funding challenge for public goods, and funding developer funds through inflation is a relatively elegant mechanism; how funds are allocated can be discussed and continuously improved. In the context of accelerating AI network attack capabilities and advancements in quantum computing, developer funds remain very important.Regarding governance, Matt Huang mentioned that as Zcash is increasingly accepted by more users as a complementary asset to Bitcoin for privacy, voting solely based on the amount of tokens held will bring uncertainty and may limit its long-term trust as a monetary asset. The project is better off combining token-based voting with other forms of governance.

The head of government affairs at Paradigm stated that the external view that the Clarity Act is almost hopeless to pass is not credible. The related pessimistic rhetoric mostly comes from anonymous staff members who did not participate in the core negotiations (intending to guide public opinion), or from legislators using the media to voice their demands, pressuring the White House and Senate leadership to meet their own requests.Major banks plan to invest heavily in lobbying and advertising next week; if the bill is doomed to fail, the banks would not invest such resources. The time window is indeed tight: the Senate reconvenes on Monday, and the House will recess on Friday in five days. However, the bill is far from dead. Those who assert that the bill has no chance are either seeking attention or trying to create a predetermined narrative of "bill failure."

Huang Licheng posted, "I personally speculate that my proposal to acquire Friend.tech was blocked by Paradigm, so I withdrew my offer. If the project's founder Racer relaunches Friend.tech on the Robinhood Chain, I will support it."

Stanford Business School Professor Ilya Strebulaev, in collaboration with Blake Jackson, released the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Capital Firm Rankings, based on nearly 30 years of data from over 230,000 investments and nearly 13,000 VCs. The research estimates that about 5% of VCs generate approximately 90% of the industry's profits. The top five are Sequoia Capital (10,158 points), Andreessen Horowitz (8,292 points), Accel, DST Global, and Tiger Global. Among them, Parkway Venture Capital (19th place) and Notable (20th place) made it into the top 20, but are not well-known leading brands.The rankings are based on six major factors: discount valuation, dilution adjustment, net profit (after costs), value added (lead investments and board seats), human capital decay (three-and-a-half-year half-life), and credit allocation between institutions and individuals (25% for the investing institution and 75% for the current institution). Of the top 100, 62 are located in California, 19 in New York, and 6 each in Massachusetts and Texas. 21 were established in 2015 or later, and 23 of the best investments are in frontier AI or AI infrastructure companies, with OpenAI listed as the best investment by 4 firms, xAI by 3, and Anthropic and Perplexity by 2 each. The ranking methodology has a correlation of only about 0.27 with the Midas List, with SV Angel investing in about 139 unicorns ranked 31st, and Thrive with only 47 unicorns ranked 8th. This ranking is the result of research by Stanford professors and does not constitute investment advice.

The Frontier Data Research Laboratory idler announced the completion of a $9 million seed round financing, led by Alpo and Frankie from Paradigm, with participation from Y Combinator, Long Journey VC, as well as angel investors including marrc, catheryn_li, dcposch, Janine Leger, Lynett Capital, feross, and nur_daulet_.idler is positioned as a frontier data research laboratory, and this round of funding will be used to build evaluation systems, benchmark testing, and reinforcement learning environments for leading frontier laboratories worldwide to train and measure their model performance.

Former OpenAI research engineer Justin Wang announced that he has joined the cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm as a research partner. He will collaborate with the team under the leadership of Matt Huang and Alana Palmedo to continue cutting-edge research.Justin Wang previously participated in the EVMbench project at OpenAI and has used Paradigm's open-source tools. In the short term, he is focusing on areas related to AI model measurement and evaluation, recursive self-improvement, effective AI policy, as well as network and cryptographic capabilities.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article introducing a novel cryptographic obfuscation technology called Diamond iO. This technology aims to address the extremely low efficiency of traditional indistinguishable obfuscation schemes, allowing programs to run while hiding internal logic and critical data. Although traditional iO technology possesses strong privacy protection capabilities, its operational costs are prohibitively high, making it nearly impractical. Diamond iO, by adopting more aggressive new cryptographic assumptions, enhances computational efficiency from "universe-level time consumption" to "planet-level time consumption," bringing it closer to practical application.Diamond iO is built on technologies such as Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). By encrypting programs, it allows users to execute the encrypted programs and obtain correct outputs without being able to view the internal code or hidden keys. This solution introduces a new input encoding mechanism and conditional decryption method, reducing computational complexity while ensuring the program logic remains hidden. Its core application scenarios include protecting programs that contain private keys, enabling secure software licensing, constructing trustless cryptographic services, and supporting blockchain and artificial intelligence systems with stronger privacy protection.However, Diamond iO is still in the early research stage, and its security relies on new cryptographic assumptions, including All-Product LWE and Evasive LWE, which require further research validation. At the same time, the technology still faces efficiency challenges such as high computational overhead and circuit depth limitations. Researchers believe that by optimizing underlying hash functions, improving homomorphic encryption schemes, and reducing security parameter requirements, Diamond iO is expected to become an important direction for advancing practical program obfuscation technology in the future.

According to TechCrunch, nuclear startup Antares Nuclear has completed a $470 million Series C funding round, co-led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Industrious Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and Shine Capital, including $370 million in equity and $100 million in debt.Antares is developing small modular reactors (SMRs) with a power output of 100 kilowatts to 1 megawatt, using TRISO fuel. The company is one of three finalists in the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Nuclear Power Systems program, planning to launch its first power-generating reactor next year and deploy it to U.S. military bases by 2028. Previously, Antares completed a $96 million Series B funding round last December, bringing its total funding to $604 million. The first batch of SMRs is expected to be operational in the early 2030s, with a cost of approximately $214 per megawatt-hour, higher than most new power plants except for the most expensive gas turbines.

According to Bloomberg, the venture capital firm Paradigm, focused on the cryptocurrency sector, has raised approximately $1.2 billion and plans to increase its investment in artificial intelligence (AI) related projects.According to informed sources, this fundraising will focus on AI infrastructure, AI Agents, and the integration of AI with blockchain technology. Paradigm hopes to capture the next wave of technological innovation through the new fund and expand its investment footprint in emerging technology sectors.Founded in 2018 by Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam, Paradigm is one of the leading cryptocurrency venture capital firms in the industry, having invested in several blockchain projects including Coinbase and Uniswap.This fundraising indicates that after experiencing previous market cycle adjustments, crypto capital is refocusing on the intersection of AI and blockchain. With the rapid development of AI agents, decentralized computing, on-chain data infrastructure, and other areas, more and more crypto investment firms are beginning to see AI as an important growth opportunity for the next stage.

Tokenized sovereign debt startup M1X Global has completed a $5.5 million seed round financing, led by Paradigm, with participation from Breed VC and others.M1X Global previously collaborated with the Republic of the Marshall Islands to assist in issuing the on-chain sovereign debt instrument USDM1. This product is dollar-denominated, backed 1:1 by U.S. Treasury bonds, and is a tokenized sovereign debt instrument natively issued by sovereign nations on public blockchains. USDM1 was initially issued on Stellar and is now also available on Canton and Solana.Jordan Goldman, President and COO of M1X, stated that sovereign debt is one of the largest asset classes globally, but prior to USDM1, it did not exist in a native on-chain form. The company aims to establish USDM1 as on-chain sovereign collateral and expand its use in regulated financial markets. The initial application scenario for USDM1 is domestic government aid disbursement. Citizens of the Marshall Islands can receive funds through the Lomalo wallet, allowing payments to be completed in seconds without relying on traditional banking networks. M1X also stated that recent integration with the U.S. FDIC-insured Bank of Guam further connects USDM1 to regulated banking infrastructure.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, two wallets associated with Paradigm have staked 1 million HYPE, worth 67.75 million dollars.

According to The Block, the Latin American cross-border payment app El Dorado has completed a $9 million Series A funding round, led by Paradigm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Verda Ventures.El Dorado focuses on addressing the issues of low efficiency and high costs in cross-border payments in Latin America, covering 12 countries including Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. It currently has over 100,000 active users and has processed more than 5 million transactions.The company stated that its business has expanded to enterprise-level payment services, supporting cross-border trade and corporate cash flow, and has integrated stablecoin and fiat settlement systems into a unified payment architecture.After this funding round, El Dorado further launched an enterprise payment product based on the Tempo Layer 1 blockchain. This network was co-incubated by Paradigm and Stripe, aiming to provide global enterprises with cross-border settlement capabilities without the need for local entities.Analysts believe that as stablecoins and on-chain payment infrastructure accelerate their implementation in emerging markets, Latin American cross-border payments are becoming one of the important testing grounds for the integration of crypto finance and traditional payment systems.

The collateral-free credit lending protocol supported by Paradigm, 3Jane, announced on social media that the protocol is now open to the public, allowing users to mint USD3 and participate in liquidity mining to earn JANE tokens.It is reported that USD3 is a credit-backed yield stablecoin with a supply cap of $50 million; sUSD3 is the staked version of USD3, offering leveraged exposure. JANE features a variable total supply design, with the final supply to be determined at the final minting in 2026 (ranging from approximately 1.111 billion to 6.666 billion tokens). Currently, 100% of JANE emissions will be allocated to liquidity providers, redeemable every 7 days (locked status) until the final minting.Previously, it was reported that the crypto credit startup 3Jane announced the completion of a $5.2 million seed round financing in June 2025, led by Paradigm.