"Is crypto VC dead?" became the question of the week. MegaETH's parent cut 20% of staff and turned toward AI. One of Alliance's founders argued that crypto-specialist funds won't last: "For a $2 billion fund to generate a 3 times return, it has to return $6 billion." A Compound partner called crypto venture "in a deep sleep" for two years.

We counted every private crypto round since January 2021 to check. The money isn't gone. In 2026 it went somewhere else.

The headline number is fine

From January 1 to November 13, 2026, crypto companies raised $12.3B in private rounds. That is 59% of the same window in 2021, 1.75x 2024 and 2.4x 2023. The median round grew from $5.0M in 2021 to $7.1M.

Same window every year, January 1 to November 13 (total raised · median round · rounds of $100M+ · DeFi, infra, chains, games · prediction markets + exchanges/payments, share of $):

• 2021: $20.96B · $5.0M · 49 · $10.65B · 35%
• 2023: $5.17B · $5.0M · 4 · $3.94B · 9%
• 2024: $7.02B · $5.2M · 6 · $5.26B · 11%
• 2025: $15.18B · $7.0M · 23 · $6.26B · 48%
• 2026: $12.29B · $7.1M · 23 · $3.06B · 61%

The total looks healthy, but the composition changed completely.

61% went to prediction markets and exchanges

Prediction markets were close to zero in 2021. In 2026 they raised $3.09B across 38 rounds. Kalshi and Polymarket alone took $2.8B, or 23% of all crypto venture money this year. Add exchanges and payment companies, and the share hits 61%.

Single deals carry entire months. In March 2026, Kalshi's $1B and Polymarket's $600M made up 67% of the month's $2.40B. In October, Kalshi's $1B Series G was 58% of $1.72B. Without it, October was $725M.

Large checks dominate: 23 rounds of $100M or more brought in $6.47B, 53% of the year's money.

The builders' share hit a six-year low

DeFi, infrastructure, L1/L2 networks and games raised $3.06B in 2026 so far. That is the lowest figure in the six-year series and 3.5x less than in 2021. It is also half of 2025.

• Gaming and NFT: $4.29B and 167 rounds in 2021, $79M and 9 rounds in 2026. That is 54x less money.
• DeFi: $0.83B, its weakest year in the series (2021: $1.40B, 2025: $2.20B).
• By quarter: Q1 2026 brought builders $0.59B, the smallest quarter since 2021. Even the 2023 bear market never dropped below $0.86B.

The seed layer is thinning fastest

Seed is where new projects start, and it shrinks faster than anything else. DeFi, infra, chains and games had 316 seed rounds in this window in 2024. In 2026 they had 76, 4.2x fewer. Q3 2026 had 43 seed rounds across all categories, the lowest full quarter in the series.

The surviving seeds are larger. The median seed check rose to $5.0M. Fewer teams get funded, and they get more each.

AI is a pitch, not where the money goes

About one crypto round in four now mentions AI in its description. In 2021 it was 1–3%. But rounds that are AI at their core got $0.74B in 2026, 6% of the year's money. AI is in the pitch deck, but it gets little of the money.

Pace vs the 2021 peak

The last three months (August to October 2026) brought $3.31B over 168 rounds. At the October to December 2021 peak it was $9.29B over 355 rounds, so money is 2.8x lower and rounds are 2.1x fewer. That is still 3.3x above the 2023 low of $1.01B. The total isn't at a bottom. Builders' money and seed rounds are.

Other trackers show the same picture. In Q3 2026, trading and exchange companies took about half of all crypto VC dollars, and only three new crypto VC funds closed, the fewest since 2019. Monthly deal counts fell to around 50, a level last seen before 2021.

What it means

Crypto venture money hasn't left. It has concentrated in businesses that already make money: exchanges, payment rails and prediction markets, with billion-dollar checks at $20B+ valuations. The money for people building new protocols, chains and games is at its lowest in six years, and seed rounds fell 4x in two years.

"Crypto VC is dead" is wrong about the total. For anyone launching a new crypto project in 2026, it is close to true.

Methodology

Data: DefiLlama raises, January 1, 2021 to November 13, 2026, snapshot November 15, 2026. Private rounds only (seed to Series G, strategic rounds, private token sales). IPOs, debt, public token sales, secondary stake sales (Dunamu, Coinone) and non-crypto companies are excluded. Kalshi's $22B-valuation round appears twice in the source and is counted once. Year-over-year comparisons use the same January 1 to November 13 window for every year. 2022 is excluded from round-count comparisons because of a coverage gap in the source for H1 2022. "Builders" = DeFi, infrastructure, L1/L2 and gaming/NFT; this is our grouping. Round counts cover tracked deals, not every deal in the market, so we compare ratios rather than absolute counts. Dollar totals were cross-checked against The Block in control months, within ±15%.

Not financial advice.

The edge, by the trader's own account, came from public data rather than leaks. Pseudonymous X user @3i says the team tracked BitGo's public GitHub repository and Wintermute's wallets on Robinhood Chain since July to spot upcoming Robinhood listings.

BitGo developers added CASHCAT to the Robinhood Chain token list in the public BitGoJS repo on July 27, while Robinhood listed the memecoin only on August 6. The team says it sold into the post-listing rush for over $4M, then made about $2M more on PONS.

Public records and wallet activity match parts of the timeline, but the $6M profit figure has not been independently verified.

The trader says most of these information advantages have since disappeared. The case shows how custody code commits and market maker wallets can leak listing intent before an official announcement.

Bitcoin mining operators woke up to an unauthorized switch of their machines to a different pool overnight. The attack reportedly began around 8 PM Central Time, with payouts pointed to a Bitcoin address controlled by the attackers.

About 64,000 machines and 13 EH/s of hashrate were redirected to the OCEAN mining pool, whose dashboard briefly approached 50 EH/s before falling back to about 40 EH/s.

CoreX Hosting raised the first alarm and later said the attack appeared to be over, with hijacked hashrate dropping to about 100 PH/s. The attackers mined no blocks, so they collected no block rewards, but affected miners lost the revenue they would have earned during the incident.

One affected operator blamed Luxor's Commander mining management software, and others reported similar unauthorized pool changes days earlier. Whether Commander was compromised, and the full scope of the damage, has not been independently confirmed.

South Korean exchange Coinone confirmed that an attacker broke into the server of MetaM, its outsourced customer support contractor, and viewed or leaked customer support records. The intrusion happened around 4 a.m. on November 12, and the contractor reported it to Coinone the same morning.

Exposed data may include names, phone numbers, resident registration numbers, bank account numbers, passwords, home addresses and wallet addresses shared during chat or phone support.

Coinone says member accounts, trading and wallet systems run separately from the MetaM server and shows no sign of a direct breach. Only users who contacted support are affected. The exchange moved support to email, blocked the attacking IPs and reported the incident to KISA, the Personal Information Protection Commission and the Financial Supervisory Service.

Users who shared passwords with support are urged to change them on Coinone and any service using the same password, and to ignore anyone posing as Coinone who asks for OTP codes, withdrawals or wallet address changes. Affected customers may seek statutory damages of up to 3 million won.

A wallet affiliated with the Ethereum Foundation has sold another 2,500 ETH through CoW Swap, receiving 4.597 million USDS in return. The proceeds were then moved to a multi-signature Safe wallet.

Over the past four days, the wallet has sold a total of 7,500 ETH for roughly $14.52 million in USDS.

The latest batch implies an average price of about $1,839 per ETH, below the roughly $1,936 average across the full four-day series. Sales from foundation-linked wallets are closely watched by the market as a signal of treasury management and potential sell pressure.

Unusual cross-chain transfers and sales of KAVA on BNB Smart Chain hit the Kava ecosystem on November 14, and the team traced the incident to Kava Lend, its lending and borrowing protocol. Kava said it was not the result of an infinite mint.

As a precaution, Kava paused its Axelar bridge, halting cross-chain asset withdrawals through the service. Upbit, Bithumb and Coinone suspended KAVA deposits and withdrawals, and Upbit also placed the token on its delisting watchlist.

KAVA fell from about $0.068 to $0.041 in 24 hours, a 41% drop.

Kava is a DeFi-focused Layer-1 built on the Cosmos SDK with an Ethereum co-chain. The team said it will publish a full incident report once the investigation is complete.

Two weeks into its recovery from the record $6.3B hack, Binance has widened its withdrawal restart well beyond the major chains, reopening withdrawals for 87 more networks this week.

The batch covers 87 networks, including HYPE, APT, NEAR, LTC, PLASMA, AVAX, ADA, TAO, ATOM, ICP, STARKNET, LINEA and MEGAETH.

The exchange aims to reopen withdrawals for all remaining networks and assets by the end of next week. Users may still see delays or longer processing times during the rollout, and should check each asset's withdrawal page or the network status page before sending funds.

Days after rebranding from the MegaETH Foundation, the organization behind the Ethereum L2 is restructuring around first-party products, co-founder Shuyao Kong confirmed on X.

The cuts mainly hit early chain development, wallet development and ecosystem support. The core founders and engineering team stay, and $30M from the existing treasury is set aside for new products, starting with a public AI inference marketplace planned for December 2026.

MegaETH TVL has fallen from a peak above $245M in May 2026 to roughly $12M.

The MEGA token listed on April 30, 2026. The pivot gives the network a product the team controls directly, but a smaller team and reduced ecosystem support may make it harder to attract outside builders.

The jurisdiction fight over event contracts has turned personal. Speaking at the Cantor Convergence conference, CFTC Chair Michael Selig called state suits against prediction market platforms "really egregious", saying states are bringing criminal charges to "lock up founders and CEOs" of companies offering lawful products under a federal regime.

The CFTC is fighting roughly a dozen states and cities over whether contracts on Kalshi, Polymarket and similar platforms are illegal gambling. On Thursday, the Justice Department and the CFTC sued Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin to block his action against Kalshi, while Louisiana filed a lawsuit targeting Kalshi, Polymarket, Robinhood and Coinbase.

Selig wants the dispute taken to the Supreme Court instead of being fought state by state, to settle the CFTC's claim of exclusive jurisdiction over prediction markets.

Until a ruling arrives, platforms and their executives remain exposed to parallel state enforcement, including criminal cases such as the Utah charges against Kalshi and its co-founders.

Japan's largest Bitcoin treasury company used its third-quarter results to reset expectations: the board lowered the full-year revenue target from ¥16 billion (about $100M) to ¥6.5 billion (about $41M), and operating profit guidance from ¥11.4 billion to ¥3 billion.

For January to September, Metaplanet booked a net loss of ¥27.2 billion (about $170M), against a ¥13.5 billion profit a year earlier. Revenue still rose 30.5% and operating profit 26.5%, but a ¥8 billion Bitcoin valuation loss and a ¥19.2 billion loss on Bitcoin sold in Q3 pushed the bottom line into the red.

The company sold 10,000 BTC in Q3, then bought back more, ending September with 44,000 BTC.

Metaplanet tied the cut to its mNAV staying below 1.0x, which blocked share issuance at the planned scale and slowed BTC buying. Proceeds from ¥52 billion in October convertible bonds will go to share buybacks first, while the company says its Bitcoin strategy is unchanged.