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AI’s Lead Over Crypto for VC Dollars Increased in Q1’25, But Does This Race Really Matter?

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Crypto venture funding in the U.S. clocked in at approximately $861 million for the first three months of 2025, but was dwarfed by artificial intelligence’s nearly $20 billion haul, according to data provided by Pitchbook, showing how investors continue to pivot towards AI.

Data shows that investors closed 795 deals in the U.S in AI from January to March, with blockbuster deals like Databricks’ $15.3 billion round and Anthropic’s $2 billion raise dominating headlines.

Crypto’s largest blockbuster deal, in comparison, was Abu Dhabi’s MGX, with a $2 billion investment into Binance – the first institutional placement in the crypto exchange. Other deals of note include a $82 million raise from payment infrastructure company Mesh, ETF issuer Bitwise’s $70 million round, and digital asset bank Sygnum’s $58 million offering.

Prior reporting by Pitchbook shows that AI startups attracted one-third of global VC investment in 2024, totaling $131.5 billion, with nearly a quarter of new startups being an AI company across 4,318 VC deals, compared to crypto’s $4.9 billion across just 706 deals.

Analysis: Has AI stolen crypto’s venture dollars?

Blockbuster rounds from VCs in the AI space and headline-grabbing antics, such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman seeking trillions, and AI’s rise from technological novelty to household name thanks to transformer models, would make one think that there’s suddenly an investor preference for one over the other.

Historically, all data shows that VCs have generally favored AI over crypto, with AI and machine learning attracting consistent funding that’s expanded exponentially, according to Statista data, growing from $670 million in 2011 to $36 billion in 2020.

There’s only been one year where crypto beat AI for funding, and that comes with a caveat: narrower AI categorizations, like ABI Research‘s $22.3 billion AI estimate in 2021, suggest crypto briefly outpaced AI funding during the bullish crypto cycle before AI funding surged again to over $100 billion by 2024.

Keep in mind that all of this ignores crypto-native quirks like airdrops, which put fresh capital in the hands of users and, in turn, pump the token price, inflating the size of projects’ treasuries.

A recent report from Dragonfly found that between 2020 and 2024, the 11 largest airdrops generated $7 billion. This won’t close the gap between AI and crypto, but it shows that there are more ways to get a dollar than traditional venture capital.

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Court Approves 3AC’s $1.53B Claim Against FTX, Setting Up Major Creditor Battle

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The Delaware bankruptcy court handling the FTX estate approved a petition on Thursday from Three Arrows Capital (3AC) to significantly expand its claim against the estate from $120 million to $1.53 billion, marking a major development in the ongoing fallout from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire.

3AC, once a dominant crypto hedge fund with over $3 billion in reported net assets, collapsed in 2022 while it still had deep financial ties to FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried’s soon-to-collapse crypto exchange. The hedge fund initially filed a proof of claim worth $120 million against FTX in July 2023 — adding its name to a long list of users and investors in FTX who lost money as a result of its sudden insolvency.

In November 2024, 3AC’s liquidators amended their claim after discovering new evidence suggesting that FTX had liquidated $1.53 billion in 3AC’s assets just two weeks before the hedge fund commenced its own liquidation proceedings two years prior. They argued that FTX’s liquidation of 3AC’s funds was carried out to satisfy a $1.3 billion liability to FTX, an obligation that 3AC claimed was not sufficiently substantiated.

FTX’s bankruptcy said the $1.3 billion liability represented collateral for a loan FTX made to 3AC, but the court ruled in favor of 3AC, finding insufficient evidence to support FTX’s loan claim.

The ruling allows 3AC to pursue a significantly larger portion of FTX’s remaining assets, potentially reshaping creditor payouts.

FTX, which began distributing funds to creditors in February 2025, said the expanded claim should have come sooner, arguing that it would burden other creditors and complicate its reorganization plan. The court, however, determined that 3AC’s delay was justified, given that the liquidators only uncovered the full extent of their claim in mid-2024 due to missing financial records from FTX and a lack of cooperation from 3AC’s founders, Zhu Su and Kyle Davies.

3AC, founded in 2012, had grown into one of the most influential financial firms in the cryptocurrency industry by 2022. Its collapse was among the first and largest dominoes to fall before the broader crypto market imploded in 2022, which ultimately set off the chain of events that revealed fraud in Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire.

Bankman-Fried is currently pursuing an appeal of his criminal conviction and 25-year prison sentence. Following the collapse of 3AC, Su was detained in Singapore and sentenced to four months in prison for failing to cooperate with 3AC’s liquidators. Davies did not face any charges connected to the hedge fund’s collapse.

The 3AC founders reunited in 2023 to launch a short-lived crypto exchange called OPNX — designed to allow users to trade bankruptcy claims of failed crypto companies — which shut down in February.

With the court’s decision, 3AC’s liquidators now have a significantly larger position in the FTX. bankruptcy proceedings, raising questions about how the expanded claim will impact distributions to other creditors. The ruling also underscores the lack of transparency at both FTX and 3AC — further complicating efforts to untangle both firms’ assets and obligations.

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Weekly Recap: Regulatory Wins, Market Doldrums

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It was a week of red in crypto and traditional markets, with bitcoin plummeting below $80K on March 10 and ETH falling to $1,821 the same day. So much for the “Trump Bump.” With the new administration on a tariff-tear this week, the markets were spooked about a recession and crypto was not immune.

Still, progress in digital assets was all around, and our reporters reported it all with alacrity. BlackRock’s bellwether BUIDL fund topped $1 billion and tokenized treasuries hit $4.2 billion, Kris Sandor reported. MoonPay, a payments aggregator, made an important stablecoin acquisition, Will Canny wrote. Ripple won a payments license in the UAE (Shaurya Malwa). OKX won a license to operate in Europe, Camomile Shumba reported. Coinbase announced plans to offer 24/7 futures trading in the U.S., Helene Braun reported.

There was also big regulatory news. The U.S. House voted to overturn the IRS’s controversial “broker rule” in a big win for DeFi operators. And a Senate committee voted to send the GENIUS stablecoin bill to the floor, ahead of probable approval there.

The Trump Family continued to be front-and-center in the crypto news. World Liberty Financial completed a $590 million token sale (for accredited investors for now), with an assist from adviser/investor and TRON founder Justin Sun. The Wall Street Journal reported that a Trump family representative also explored buying a stake in Binance.US, through World Liberty Financial.

From our Asia team, Sam Reynolds examined how the latest draft of the GENIUS act aims to split stablecoin regulation between state and federal authorities.

Parikshit Mishra reported on Coinbase returning to India after a two-year hiatus, setting off discussion about the future of crypto in India.

Shaurya Malwa continued his excellent reporting on XRP, pushing out multiple reports on Ripple. Malwa also reported on the implications of over-leveraging in the crypto market, as Hyperliquid lost $4 million due to a massive leveraged trade in ETH.

Market maven, Omkar Godbole, pushed out a timely piece on bitcoin’s bullish signal ahead of the U.S. CPI report, and was also early to spot how Eric Trump’s tweet on crypto were setting up short-term traders for disappointment.

Meanwhile, Tom Carreras had an excellent feature on how Bitdeer, a Singapore-based miner, hopes to shake up the mining machine market.

Hopefully next week brings better news in the markets. But, either way, our reporters will be there to cover what matters.

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Bitcoin Tops $84K, Battling Key Level for Bulls; SOL, LINK Lead Gains

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Sellers of risk assets are taking a breather on Friday, with crypto markets posting sizable gains along with U.S. stocks after a week of lame price action.

Bitcoin topped $85,000 at one point during U.S. hours and is now trading at $84,400, up 4.7% over the past 24 hours. All cryptos in the CoinDesk 20 Index were higher during the same period, with Chainlink’s LINK, Solana’s SOL and SUI leading gains.

The price action happened as risk appetite returned to traditional markets as well. The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq indexes were 1.7% and 2.3 up, respectively. Meanwhile, gold, whose price action trounced that of bitcoin during the selling of the past few weeks, backed down below $3,000 after crossing the level yesterday for the first time in its history.

Today’s bounce also propelled BTC back above its 200-day moving average after dipping below that trendline for the first time since last August’s crypto correction. The 200-day moving average is a widely-used benchmark for traders and investors to gauge long-term trends for asset prices, often serving as support for prices to bounce in a bull market, while losing the level providing a risk-off or bear market signal.

Closing the day above the moving average, currently at $83,767, would be a win for bulls, fueling hopes that the worst of the correction might be over for now. Otherwise, confirming the moving average as resistance could foreshadow a deeper pullback.

Well-followed cross-asset trader Bob Loukas noted that bitcoin and stocks have more room to run «at least for a while,» bouncing from oversold levels. «Feels like should be close to end of panic, for now at least, and spend at least a few weeks back recovering,» he said earlier this week. «Then the market reassess.»

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