Cryptocurrency VC Investment Level Overview: Who Are the Real Winners?

Author: Eli Nuss

Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

Who has performed best in the crypto venture capital space?

We referenced fundraising data provided by @tokenterminal and market data from @artemis__xyz to answer this question.

For our complete analysis, please refer here.

Summary

It is important to note that we rely on the accuracy of this data. There are often undisclosed funding rounds or key data missing from other announcements. However, even so, we can still derive some interesting insights from the existing data.

First, let's review the most successful crypto investments in history.

We ranked them by calculating the ratio of fully diluted market cap (FDMC) at the end of Q3 to the amount raised in each funding round.

Then, we categorized by fundraising cycle to identify the best-performing investments for each year.

Here are the top investment cases from 2015 to 2017:

Chart compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

Notes:

• "FDMC" refers to fully diluted market cap.

• "FDMC/Funding Amount" represents the ratio of market cap to funding amount.

Here are the top investment cases from 2018 to 2021:

Chart compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

Here are the top investment cases from 2022 to 2024:

Chart compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

After identifying the highest-return investments, let's take a look at which funds participated in these funding rounds.

We distinguish between lead investors and co-investors. Here is a list of those who led or co-led these high-return rounds:

@multicoincap

@polychaincap

@paradigm

@PanteraCapita

Notably, @animocabrands and @a16zcrypto stand out as the only companies that have repeatedly led these high-return deals.

In our dataset, out of over 5,000 unique investors, only 42 companies or individuals actually led one or more rounds of projects whose tokens still had significant appreciation based on Q3 2024 prices.

Here are the funds most frequently participating in these rounds:

@cbventures

@dragonfly_xyz

@Delphi_Digital

@usv

@slow

@naval

@BlockTower

@scalarcapital

@placeholdervc

@Maven11Capital

@MaelstromFund

@lightspeedvp

@hypersphere_vc

@hashed_official

@Dialectic_Group

@Consensys

@1kxnetwork

Overall, 221 companies or individuals participated in a top venture deal, whose liquid tokens had significant appreciation in valuation in Q3 2024.

This chart highlights the top 27 companies that participated in at least 3 or more deals.

Considering that some investors are more active than others, it is also important to look at hit rates. We not only used previous data but also considered the total number of deals each investor participated in to find the highest hit rates. Notably, @BlockTower performed particularly well in this regard!

Based on the above information, we constructed a matrix to provide an overview for funds in this field.

This matrix is dynamic, as sometimes a significant success can move a fund into a new quadrant.

We look forward to the day when all funds can enter the upper right corner of the matrix.

We hope this analysis is as interesting to everyone as it is to us.

We welcome any feedback or suggestions to help us improve our analysis in the future. We plan to update this data regularly, so we hope to be as accurate as possible.