Breaking! Top VC Paradigm shifts focus to AI and robotics, is $BTC falling out of favor?

Today, let's talk about a piece of news that might make you rethink the Crypto landscape. Paradigm, the top-tier venture capital firm founded in 2018 that only invests in blockchain, has just raised $1.2 billion for its fourth fund.

But this time, a key sentence was added to the fundraising statement — the investment scope has expanded to include artificial intelligence, robotics, and cutting-edge technology. It is no longer that 'research-driven crypto investment firm'.

Three months ago, Paradigm's official Twitter bio had already been changed: the original 'a research-driven crypto investment firm' was replaced with 'we build and invest in companies and ideas that shape the frontier.' No one paid much attention at the time, but looking back now, the groundwork was already laid.

Managing partner Alana Palmedo stated directly in the announcement: Cryptocurrency was once our first frontier, but now the technological changes brought by AI and robotics have reached a level that cannot be ignored.

The data is even more staggering. According to Crunchbase, global venture capital totaled $510 billion in the first half of 2026, surpassing the $440 billion for the full year of 2025. Where did the money go? OpenAI and Anthropic alone accounted for $217 billion — meaning 43% of all startup funding in the first half was absorbed by these two AI giants.

Facing the macro cycle of AI's rapid rise and crypto's adjustment, simply telling the Crypto story can no longer bear the top institutions' desire for exponential growth. So Paradigm is not abandoning crypto, but defining itself more broadly than a 'Crypto VC'.

Some might ask: the fundraising target of $1.5 billion only reached $1.2 billion, does that mean Crypto is no longer attractive? The Wall Street Journal previously reported an expectation of $1.5 billion, but the final official announcement on July 8 was $1.2 billion. Founder Matt Huang's take: this era favors those willing to discard old scripts and constantly reconstruct their understanding.

More noteworthy is that before the fund was officially announced, it had already quietly invested in several hard-tech companies: Zipline, a drone logistics delivery network, valued at $7.6 billion; True Anomaly, a space company focused on orbital space defense, valued at $2.2 billion; SendCutSend, which uses software-controlled automation to transform traditional metal processing, valued at $1 billion.

So you might ask: are they still investing in Crypto?

Paradigm's answer is clear: we still hold the crypto fort. But in their view, the best intersection of AI and crypto lies in AI autonomous agents. When AI agents need to make autonomous decisions, pay, and collaborate, decentralized blockchain networks and stablecoins are the natural digital-native financial infrastructure.

Specifically, in April 2025, Paradigm led a $50 million investment in decentralized AI project Nous Research, almost entirely funded by them, supporting open-source AI models and the agent framework Hermes Agent.

They also deeply incubated a project called Tempo — founded by a Stripe co-founder, it is a Layer1 designed for large-scale payment scenarios, with underlying logic natively optimized for agent interactions.

On the tooling side, they collaborated with OpenAI to develop EVMbench, an AI evaluation tool for the Ethereum Virtual Machine; together with Tempo, they developed Centaur, a self-hosted AI agent runtime platform, which has been in internal use for over six months.

As for Crypto's core business, Paradigm listed three key directions: derivatives and new liquidity layers, represented by on-chain perpetual contract exchange Hyperliquid; prediction markets, they continue to support Kalshi, and partner Arjun Balaji is leading the development of a prediction market trading terminal for professional traders, possibly even setting up an internal market-making department; developer tools, continuing to double down on the Ethereum execution layer client Reth and the smart contract development toolkit Foundry.

From a geek VC that only invested in blockchain in 2018 to now simultaneously laying out drones, space defense, AI agents, and on-chain derivatives, Paradigm's evolution reflects a shift in the narrative center of gravity in the primary market. The AI track siphons massive funding, and a single crypto narrative cannot support exponential growth expectations, forcing top VCs to inevitably broaden their boundaries.

But the crypto track has not been abandoned. Stablecoins, RWA, on-chain derivatives, prediction markets, Crypto×AI agents — these infrastructures that are close to real financial scenarios and have cash flow generation are still the main lines of institutional betting.

For retail investors, the core is not to panic about Paradigm leaving, but to understand this signal: Crypto is no longer the only 'frontier', but it remains an indispensable part of that 'frontier'. $BTC and $ETH , as the narrative foundation, will not lose their value anchor due to VC diversification, but will instead gain new long-term support from the AI+crypto fusion narrative.

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