paradigm

Stanford Business School Professor Ilya Strebulaev, in collaboration with Blake Jackson, released the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Capital Firm Rankings, based on nearly 30 years of data from over 230,000 investments and nearly 13,000 VCs. The research estimates that about 5% of VCs generate approximately 90% of the industry's profits. The top five are Sequoia Capital (10,158 points), Andreessen Horowitz (8,292 points), Accel, DST Global, and Tiger Global. Among them, Parkway Venture Capital (19th place) and Notable (20th place) made it into the top 20, but are not well-known leading brands.The rankings are based on six major factors: discount valuation, dilution adjustment, net profit (after costs), value added (lead investments and board seats), human capital decay (three-and-a-half-year half-life), and credit allocation between institutions and individuals (25% for the investing institution and 75% for the current institution). Of the top 100, 62 are located in California, 19 in New York, and 6 each in Massachusetts and Texas. 21 were established in 2015 or later, and 23 of the best investments are in frontier AI or AI infrastructure companies, with OpenAI listed as the best investment by 4 firms, xAI by 3, and Anthropic and Perplexity by 2 each. The ranking methodology has a correlation of only about 0.27 with the Midas List, with SV Angel investing in about 139 unicorns ranked 31st, and Thrive with only 47 unicorns ranked 8th. This ranking is the result of research by Stanford professors and does not constitute investment advice.

The Frontier Data Research Laboratory idler announced the completion of a $9 million seed round financing, led by Alpo and Frankie from Paradigm, with participation from Y Combinator, Long Journey VC, as well as angel investors including marrc, catheryn_li, dcposch, Janine Leger, Lynett Capital, feross, and nur_daulet_.idler is positioned as a frontier data research laboratory, and this round of funding will be used to build evaluation systems, benchmark testing, and reinforcement learning environments for leading frontier laboratories worldwide to train and measure their model performance.

Former OpenAI research engineer Justin Wang announced that he has joined the cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm as a research partner. He will collaborate with the team under the leadership of Matt Huang and Alana Palmedo to continue cutting-edge research.Justin Wang previously participated in the EVMbench project at OpenAI and has used Paradigm's open-source tools. In the short term, he is focusing on areas related to AI model measurement and evaluation, recursive self-improvement, effective AI policy, as well as network and cryptographic capabilities.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article introducing a novel cryptographic obfuscation technology called Diamond iO. This technology aims to address the extremely low efficiency of traditional indistinguishable obfuscation schemes, allowing programs to run while hiding internal logic and critical data. Although traditional iO technology possesses strong privacy protection capabilities, its operational costs are prohibitively high, making it nearly impractical. Diamond iO, by adopting more aggressive new cryptographic assumptions, enhances computational efficiency from "universe-level time consumption" to "planet-level time consumption," bringing it closer to practical application.Diamond iO is built on technologies such as Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). By encrypting programs, it allows users to execute the encrypted programs and obtain correct outputs without being able to view the internal code or hidden keys. This solution introduces a new input encoding mechanism and conditional decryption method, reducing computational complexity while ensuring the program logic remains hidden. Its core application scenarios include protecting programs that contain private keys, enabling secure software licensing, constructing trustless cryptographic services, and supporting blockchain and artificial intelligence systems with stronger privacy protection.However, Diamond iO is still in the early research stage, and its security relies on new cryptographic assumptions, including All-Product LWE and Evasive LWE, which require further research validation. At the same time, the technology still faces efficiency challenges such as high computational overhead and circuit depth limitations. Researchers believe that by optimizing underlying hash functions, improving homomorphic encryption schemes, and reducing security parameter requirements, Diamond iO is expected to become an important direction for advancing practical program obfuscation technology in the future.

According to TechCrunch, nuclear startup Antares Nuclear has completed a $470 million Series C funding round, co-led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Industrious Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and Shine Capital, including $370 million in equity and $100 million in debt.Antares is developing small modular reactors (SMRs) with a power output of 100 kilowatts to 1 megawatt, using TRISO fuel. The company is one of three finalists in the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Nuclear Power Systems program, planning to launch its first power-generating reactor next year and deploy it to U.S. military bases by 2028. Previously, Antares completed a $96 million Series B funding round last December, bringing its total funding to $604 million. The first batch of SMRs is expected to be operational in the early 2030s, with a cost of approximately $214 per megawatt-hour, higher than most new power plants except for the most expensive gas turbines.

According to Bloomberg, the venture capital firm Paradigm, focused on the cryptocurrency sector, has raised approximately $1.2 billion and plans to increase its investment in artificial intelligence (AI) related projects.According to informed sources, this fundraising will focus on AI infrastructure, AI Agents, and the integration of AI with blockchain technology. Paradigm hopes to capture the next wave of technological innovation through the new fund and expand its investment footprint in emerging technology sectors.Founded in 2018 by Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam, Paradigm is one of the leading cryptocurrency venture capital firms in the industry, having invested in several blockchain projects including Coinbase and Uniswap.This fundraising indicates that after experiencing previous market cycle adjustments, crypto capital is refocusing on the intersection of AI and blockchain. With the rapid development of AI agents, decentralized computing, on-chain data infrastructure, and other areas, more and more crypto investment firms are beginning to see AI as an important growth opportunity for the next stage.

Tokenized sovereign debt startup M1X Global has completed a $5.5 million seed round financing, led by Paradigm, with participation from Breed VC and others.M1X Global previously collaborated with the Republic of the Marshall Islands to assist in issuing the on-chain sovereign debt instrument USDM1. This product is dollar-denominated, backed 1:1 by U.S. Treasury bonds, and is a tokenized sovereign debt instrument natively issued by sovereign nations on public blockchains. USDM1 was initially issued on Stellar and is now also available on Canton and Solana.Jordan Goldman, President and COO of M1X, stated that sovereign debt is one of the largest asset classes globally, but prior to USDM1, it did not exist in a native on-chain form. The company aims to establish USDM1 as on-chain sovereign collateral and expand its use in regulated financial markets. The initial application scenario for USDM1 is domestic government aid disbursement. Citizens of the Marshall Islands can receive funds through the Lomalo wallet, allowing payments to be completed in seconds without relying on traditional banking networks. M1X also stated that recent integration with the U.S. FDIC-insured Bank of Guam further connects USDM1 to regulated banking infrastructure.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, two wallets associated with Paradigm have staked 1 million HYPE, worth 67.75 million dollars.

According to The Block, the Latin American cross-border payment app El Dorado has completed a $9 million Series A funding round, led by Paradigm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Verda Ventures.El Dorado focuses on addressing the issues of low efficiency and high costs in cross-border payments in Latin America, covering 12 countries including Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. It currently has over 100,000 active users and has processed more than 5 million transactions.The company stated that its business has expanded to enterprise-level payment services, supporting cross-border trade and corporate cash flow, and has integrated stablecoin and fiat settlement systems into a unified payment architecture.After this funding round, El Dorado further launched an enterprise payment product based on the Tempo Layer 1 blockchain. This network was co-incubated by Paradigm and Stripe, aiming to provide global enterprises with cross-border settlement capabilities without the need for local entities.Analysts believe that as stablecoins and on-chain payment infrastructure accelerate their implementation in emerging markets, Latin American cross-border payments are becoming one of the important testing grounds for the integration of crypto finance and traditional payment systems.

The collateral-free credit lending protocol supported by Paradigm, 3Jane, announced on social media that the protocol is now open to the public, allowing users to mint USD3 and participate in liquidity mining to earn JANE tokens.It is reported that USD3 is a credit-backed yield stablecoin with a supply cap of $50 million; sUSD3 is the staked version of USD3, offering leveraged exposure. JANE features a variable total supply design, with the final supply to be determined at the final minting in 2026 (ranging from approximately 1.111 billion to 6.666 billion tokens). Currently, 100% of JANE emissions will be allocated to liquidity providers, redeemable every 7 days (locked status) until the final minting.Previously, it was reported that the crypto credit startup 3Jane announced the completion of a $5.2 million seed round financing in June 2025, led by Paradigm.

According to The Block, the Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) and venture capital firm Paradigm jointly wrote to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, requesting modifications to a proposed anti-money laundering rule. This rule was jointly proposed in April by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), aiming to treat stablecoin issuers as financial institutions and requiring them to bear strict liability for transactions that cannot be effectively monitored.HPC and Paradigm stated in the letter that they support FinCEN's focus on compliance obligations in the primary market, where issuers know their customers; however, in the secondary market, where issuers only see wallet addresses and transaction amounts, a more lenient approach should be taken. They believe that extending issuer liability to secondary market activities conducted through smart contracts will lead issuers to only deploy stablecoins in licensed environments, causing regulated stablecoins to exit DeFi and be replaced by unregulated offshore non-U.S. alternatives.HPC and Paradigm suggested narrowing the definition of "activities related to payment stablecoins" and reconsidering OFAC's handling of interactions involving smart contracts.

According to the official blog, Paradigm has submitted a comment letter to the U.S. Department of the Treasury regarding the rulemaking for state-level regulatory pathways under the GENIUS Act. Paradigm supports the core framework of the proposal but points out that without addressing four issues, the state-level pathway will not effectively serve issuers.First, the proposal anchors the federal framework to the yet-to-be-finalized OCC regulations, requiring states and issuers to plan based on an undecided benchmark, which directly hinders market access. The Treasury should not finalize this rule before the OCC's implementation rules are finalized.Second, the proposal requires unanimous agreement from the heads of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC to certify the state-level system, but does not set a decision timeline, veto explanation standards, or mechanisms to prevent a single member from indefinitely blocking certification. Paradigm suggests establishing a 180-day decision deadline, creating a corrective process for supplementary submissions, and requiring specific veto explanations.Third, the proposal mandates that the state-level system maintain a reserve fund for 12 months of operating expenses, which may crowd out early issuers. It is suggested that states be allowed to adjust reserve fund requirements based on the size and risk profile of the issuer. Fourth, the proposal fails to adequately preempt hostile actions from individual states, and this loophole must be addressed.

Paradigm officially announced the open-sourcing of Centaur, a self-hosted AI Agent Runtime developed jointly by Paradigm and Tempo that supports multi-user collaboration and secure operation. Paradigm stated that since January of this year, the fund has been using Centaur internally, which has completely transformed the way the team works, covering various task scenarios such as investment, engineering, design, recruitment, events, and customer service.Centaur can be understood as a "shared Agent" that can call tools, run continuously for hours or even days, continue working after a system restart, and perform operations using real credentials without ever touching the raw secrets. Users can communicate with it via Slack or call it through an API.

According to The Wall Street Journal, manufacturing startup SendCutSend has completed a $110 million financing round, co-led by Sequoia Capital, cryptocurrency venture capital fund Paradigm, and Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, bringing its valuation to $1 billion.It is reported that Paradigm was originally a top-tier crypto-native venture capital firm, managing approximately $12.7 billion in assets. However, since 2023, the firm has begun to adjust its strategic direction: it removed references to "crypto" and "Web3" from its official website, and co-founder Matt Huang publicly stated, "The development of AI is too interesting to ignore." Against this backdrop, investing in SendCutSend aligns with Paradigm's logic of expanding towards "AI + robotics + advanced manufacturing."