🎉 New year, new deals

We’ve written about some pretty bullish calls on Empire (some of which you’ll find below). Why not keep that trend going? 

So far this year, crypto venture capital looked a lot like a roller coaster. Third-quarter activity was slightly down, PitchBook’s Robert Le told me, but that could be associated with the summer lull. 

“There was a lot of momentum and positive sentiment at the beginning of the year, and then … around the summer time … there was a slowdown in investments. And I think the thing with … the crypto native VCs who are supposed to … only invest in crypto, they really slowed down their investments. They didn't really pick up their investments, even the ones that have, you know, a lot of dry powder in their funds,” Le said.

After the election, however, it seems activity has picked back up. Unfortunately, though, we don’t have the data yet to back up that observation. But Le thinks that, based on anecdotal evidence, we could see an uptick in this final quarter. 

Now here’s the really juicy part: Le thinks we could be in for quite a year in venture activity. His prediction is that we could see over $18 billion in venture investments, with “multiple $5 billion quarters.”

Let’s just put that figure in perspective: 2023 overall saw roughly $9 or so billion. This year’s shaping up to look like it’ll land something around $11 billion, if not slightly over. Of those totals, we saw between $2 billion and $2.5 billion per quarter, Le added.

And part of that is going to come from the generalist VC firms, which he expects to come back to crypto next year. 

As for some specific areas prime for investment, Le thinks that the crypto x AI narrative will stay hot after taking off earlier this year. 

He admitted that he initially thought the crypto x AI narrative was just a mishmash of buzzwords. But the use cases this year have convinced him that there are real business applications there. 

“As the AI ecosystem grows bigger … some of the glaring issues you see in AI become more obvious. And when that happens, you're going to see opportunistic crypto companies come in and say, ‘Look [this is the] crypto answer to this AI” problem, Le said. 

— Katherine

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