Paradigm is one of the largest dedicated crypto-native venture firms in the world. Matt Huang, a former partner at Sequoia Capital, and Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, launched the firm in 2018 with an initial fund of roughly $400 million. The partnership operates from San Francisco and focuses exclusively on crypto and Web3 companies, with no diversified tech allocation. Unlike generalist firms that added a crypto sleeve, Paradigm was built from day one around blockchain assets and protocols.
In late 2021, Paradigm closed its second fund at $2.5 billion – at the time the largest dedicated crypto venture fund ever raised. The firm targets the full spectrum from pre-seed protocol research to late-stage infrastructure rounds. It is known for writing large lead checks and taking an active technical role: several Paradigm researchers have published influential work on MEV, smart contract security, and mechanism design. The firm's research blog is widely read across the developer community.
Notable investments
- Uniswap – early backer of the leading decentralized exchange by volume
- Compound – DeFi lending protocol, one of Paradigm's earliest headline bets
- Optimism – Ethereum L2 scaling network
- dYdX – decentralized perpetuals exchange
- Blur – NFT marketplace that captured significant market share from OpenSea
- Magic Eden – multichain NFT and gaming marketplace
- Celestia – modular data availability layer
- Berachain – proof-of-liquidity L1
- Polymarket – prediction markets platform, consistent with the firm's stated focus on this vertical
- Farcaster – decentralized social protocol
Team
Matt Huang (Managing Partner) leads the firm day-to-day. Before Paradigm, he was a partner at Sequoia Capital and an early Bitcoin investor. Fred Ehrsam (Co-founder) was Coinbase's co-founder and a Goldman Sachs currency trader before that. Ehrsam is less operationally active at the firm today, though he remains a partner. Paradigm's team also includes researchers with backgrounds at Google DeepMind, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon who contribute directly to portfolio companies' technical development. Public information on individual junior partners and principals is limited beyond the founding pair.
Recent activity
Paradigm has stayed active through the 2024–2026 cycle, backing infrastructure and consumer crypto projects. Its most recent disclosed deal per available data is a $25 million round for the Zcash Open Development Lab (Zodl) in March 2026, signaling continued interest in privacy-preserving infrastructure. The firm has also participated in rounds for AI-adjacent crypto projects and zkVM infrastructure as zero-knowledge proof technology matures toward production deployments.
The firm's most prominent loss came with FTX, the Sam Bankman-Fried exchange that collapsed in November 2022. Paradigm wrote down approximately $278 million invested across FTX and its trading arm Alameda Research – a significant but not existential hit given the size of Fund II. The firm publicly acknowledged the loss and called the investment a mistake, a rare degree of transparency in venture. More details on Paradigm's disclosures and fund structure can be found on Crunchbase.
With a track record of leading 86 rounds and a portfolio count that reflects concentrated high-conviction bets, Paradigm occupies a distinct position: a firm small enough to be selective but capitalized heavily enough to lead nine-figure rounds without a syndicate. Its focus on prediction markets, privacy infrastructure, and DeFi primitives positions it to participate in the next wave of crypto adoption if on-chain financial markets continue to grow. Whether Fund II ultimately returns capital above its 2021 vintage valuation marks depends heavily on token price cycles and the long-term success of its L2 and DeFi bets.
