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Today’s the day. 

The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, and your favorite crypto executive is on his way to the Trump White House for this afternoon’s crypto summit. 

Notably, the list of attendees — which includes Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Paradigm’s Matt Huang, Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev, among others — is missing a female presence. 

But putting that aside, let’s grab a coffee and get started.

💰 Securing the bag

To end the first week of March, let’s look back at venture capital activity in February, shall we?

Perhaps we can sum it up to a shorter month, but overall venture capital funding in February was down slightly from January, though the number of companies raising was up marginally.

Last month, $1.11 billion was raised by 137 companies, though we saw $1.57 billion go to 132 companies to kick the year off, per TIE Terminal data. 

DeFi paved the way last month, with 20 companies raising around $175 million. Perhaps that’s a sign of a trend of where money’s going, because DeFi also led deals in January, with 21 companies raising $339 million.

But it’s not just DeFi receiving the attention. There were notable raises from a couple of other firms, including Bitwise, which raised $70 million through an equity raise in a round led by Electric Capital. 

And Raise, the gift card company looking to use its $63 million round to beef up its blockchain-based gift card offerings. I don’t choose favorites when it comes to VC rounds, but this one certainly caught my eye when it was announced late last month. 

When comparing the raises (not just the gift card company) to January, the rounds are smaller. Phantom and Movement Labs both had rounds of $150 million and $100 million, respectively. 

When looking at the deal sizes so far this year, there is a noticeable drop. 

I’m cautious to read too much into it yet, given the overall bullish environment and the fact that I’ve had plenty of conversations with VCs in which they affirm that they’re pretty active, but this is the trend we’re currently looking at. 

As you can see, the number of larger deals seems to have peaked in December of last year, though we’re still seeing deals above $50 million — take Raise and Bitwise, for example. 

The average deal size, if we’re looking this week, sits at $9 million. On the last day of February, it was slightly higher at $10 million.

We’re only two months into the year, so I’m cautious to call any of this data a trend yet, and we’re still a ways off from the peak of crypto VC activity, which topped $23 billion in 2022. 

But consider my interest piqued, especially because PitchBook’s Robert Le told us last year that he expected more of a bull market in 2025.

Bring it on.

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Learn more at ZKsync.io/empire.

ICYMI — and if you did, I want to talk to you about healthy screentime habits — President Donald Trump signed an executive order that establishes two things: a bitcoin strategic reserve and a digital asset stockpile. 

The bitcoin reserve is expected to be made up of BTC previously seized by the US government — roughly 198,000 BTC. Notably, crypto czar David Sacks said that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will be working on “budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on American taxpayers.” 

Which, yes, is something but arguably still a pretty vague statement. Hopefully we’ll get some more information later today at the White House Digital Asset Summit (not to be confused with the Blockworks Digital Asset Summit, so if you bought a ticket, make sure you’re booked to go to NYC not DC). 

The stockpile, on the other hand, is pretty clear… kind of.

It’s going to be made up of crypto (sans bitcoin) that the US government holds. What that basket will consist of is where we, again, don’t have answers. What we do have is a social media post from Trump last Sunday, which seemed to imply that SOL, ADA and XRP are going to play a part. 

But the clear thing is that the US government will not be buying additional digital assets for the stockpile, which should ease the anxiety of some folks, including Empire host Jason Yanowitz who discussed the government’s moves with co-host Santiago Santos on today’s episode of Empire. 

The big theme from Santos and Yanowitz’s conversation is disclosures. They want more of them, and I think it’s fair to say that a lot of crypto wants more of them, too. Speaking from my Wall Street background, it would be incredibly clutch for crypto to have its equivalent of Edgar to track disclosures (which is the SEC’s database if you want to nerd out and see what firms are doing), as Santos suggested. 

So here are the questions going into the summit today: What assets are going to make up the stockpile? Is it just going to be any crypto that the US government has seized? And a bonus would be any details on how they plan to add to the reserve. 

I’m sure there’ll be a lot more, too, but we’ll take what we can get around here. 

And now you know.

Brought to you by:

ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization. Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance. With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.

Learn more at ZKsync.io/empire.

Last week, we asked: “Who’s the real Satoshi Nakamoto?”

55% of you said “the friends we make along the way.” Aw, how sweet. 

A few of you think Nakamoto is just an ad-hoc collective of cypherpunks, but no one believes Peter Todd’s the real Satoshi. I’m glad we’re all on the same page there.

This week, we want to know: