$2.2B Crypto Fund V

Why we're playing the long game

America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts

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Crypto cycles tend to follow a pattern. A wave of speculation pulls in attention and capital. Some of it gets wasted. Some of it funds infrastructure that wouldn’t otherwise get built. When the noise dies down, what’s left is usually more useful than it looked at the peak, and more durable than it looked at the trough.

You see this in every cycle if you look past prices: what actually gets built, and what people keep using when the hype fades. We’re at one of those quieter moments now. And the signal coming through is one of the most encouraging it has been in years.

The clearest evidence is stablecoins. Trading volumes go up and down with the market, but stablecoin usage has kept climbing even through downturns. People are using them to save, to send money across borders, and to pay for things, often exposing just how slow, expensive, and unreliable the alternatives are. Their growth looks less like speculation and more like network adoption: usage compounds because the technology is useful, not because of expectations about price action.

Blockchains are also proving their worth in capital markets. Since the last cycle we’ve seen meaningful growth in perpetual futures for price discovery, prediction markets for surfacing truth, and onchain lending for stablecoin credit markets. Traditional assets are starting to move onchain, and onchain finance is being used for assets beyond network tokens. A new financial system is taking shape that runs continuously, settles nearly instantly, costs almost nothing, and is open to anyone with internet access.

Regulation is moving in the right direction too. The GENIUS Act is a good example of what thoughtful policy can look like: clear definitions, strong safeguards, and room for builders to build. We expect more regulatory progress for the rest of the crypto market through legislation and rulemaking. This gives consumers protection, builders certainty, and mainstream institutions a path to participate.

It’s worth stepping back and asking why this matters now in particular.

Software is getting more complex and harder to trust. AI systems are powerful and largely opaque. The infrastructure the internet runs on is more consolidated than ever. In that environment, the properties that crypto networks were designed to provide become more valuable, not less:

• Systems that are transparent and verifiable

• Networks that are global from day one

• Economic models that align users, creators, developers, and operators

• Infrastructure that doesn’t depend on a small number of intermediaries.

These properties are showing up in real products: in payments, in financial services, in creator platforms, in decentralized infrastructure, in new ways for people and machines to coordinate. Much of this is being built by startups, and increasingly adopted by financial institutions, tech companies, and others to deliver faster, cheaper, and more reliable services.

In practice, this means sending money globally in an instant, holding dollars without relying on a bank, tokenizing assets so they can move frictionlessly anywhere, tapping into composable networks that others can build on, and embedding these capabilities in applications everywhere. It also includes new models that weren’t possible before: where users can own their assets and identities directly, and hold inviolable digital property rights; where swarms of software agents can decide, act, and transact on a user’s behalf, acquiring compute, data, and services as they go; and where increasingly autonomous networks can fund, govern, and evolve themselves through code.

That’s why we’re announcing our new Crypto Fund 5; it is built for this moment. The founders we’re backing with this $2.2 billion fund are working on the part of the cycle that gets less attention and we believe produces more of the lasting value: turning new infrastructure into products people use every day. That is how every important computing platform has eventually mattered, and it is how crypto will too.

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