Coinbase cofounder Fred Ersham raises $2.5bn for new crypto venture fund

Crypto capital-raising activity appears to be reaching a fever pitch amid 2021’s torrid rally in digital-asset prices. 

San Francisco-based investment firm Paradigm on Monday said it was starting a $2.5bn venture-capital fund aimed at the “next generation of crypto companies and protocols”. Coinbase co-founder Fred Ersham 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 first venture 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,” Ersham and Huang wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Indeed, the three-year-old firm’s fundraising outstripped VC firm Andreessen Horowitz’s $2.2bn 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 $100m-plus or as little as $1m, the company’s website says. The shop intends to continue to invest in start-ups with “just a glimmer of an idea” as well as later-stage companies, Ersham and Huang said. 

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