Venture capital funding directed towards crypto startups totaled $4.5 billion during the second quarter, down 22% versus the previous three months.

According to DefiLlama data, the breakdown of the second quarter shows monthly flows of roughly $1.29 billion in April, $624 million in May, and $2.5 billion in June. 

June’s figure is over 4x larger than May’s funding and ranked as the second-largest month of 2025, trailing only March’s $3.5 billion surge that was driven by Binance’s $2 billion MGX investment.

Despite the late-quarter rebound, the combined amount for the second quarter could not match the nearly $6 billion invested in crypto startups between January and March.

Nevertheless, it is still double the amount of venture capital money flowing into crypto in last year’s second quarter.

Stand-out Q2 transactions

Large cheques remained selective in the second quarter. Twenty One Capital received $585 million, the largest funding round of the previous quarter.

Furthermore, Eigen Labs received $70 million from Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z, which purchased additional EIGEN tokens.

Other significant funding rounds from the second quarter include Hypernative’s $40 million round and Symbiotic’s $29 million.

While the deal count slipped to multi-year lows in May, at just 62 rounds, the quarter’s median round size remained above $10 million, indicating that investors continued to fund later-stage and infrastructure projects.

Sector mix and geographic notes

DeFi infrastructure, restaking, and AI-linked middleware captured the largest tickets, mirroring the public market’s narrative rotation.

North American companies attracted the majority of the raises last quarter, primarily due to larger Series B and later rounds of funding. At the same time, early-stage activity in Asia and the Middle East edged higher in token-focused seed deals.

Despite the slower pace of funding registered in the previous quarter, the year-to-date total of roughly $10.3 billion already exceeds the full-year figure of $9.6 billion for 2024.

Mentioned in this article

Solana (SOL) futures traded for the first time on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group’s US derivatives exchange on March 17 as the cryptocurrency’s mainstream adoption gains momentum.

In February, CME tipped plans to list two types of SOL futures contracts: standard contracts representing 500 SOL and retail-friendly “micro” contracts representing 25 SOL each. 

They are the first regulated Solana futures to hit the US market after Coinbase’s launched in February. The contracts are settled in cash, not physical SOL.

On March 17, the contracts’ first trading day, SOL futures representing a notional value of nearly 40,000 SOL, or nearly $5 million at current prices, changed hands on the exchange, according to preliminary data from CME’s website.

Early pricing data indicates a potentially bearish sentiment on SOL among traders. The CME does not publish finalized data on daily trading volumes until the subsequent business day. 

The CME’s April futures contracts traded at a price of $127 per SOL — $2 per token less than contracts expiring in March, CME data shows. 

On March 16, trading firms FalconX and StoneX completed the first-ever SOL futures trade on CME, they said.

“Solana has come a long way in the last five years,” Chris Chung, founder of Solana-based swap platform Titan, told Cointelegraph on March 17.

“Solana futures are going live on the CME today, and SOL [exchange-traded funds] will surely follow shortly behind,” Chung said. 

Related: Solana CME futures tip impending US ETF approvals — Exec

ETF approval odds

On March 13, Chung told Cointelegraph he expects the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to approve asset managers VanEck and Canary Capital’s proposed spot Solana ETFs as soon as May.

At least five ETF issuers have filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to list spot Solana ETFs. The regulator has until October 2025 to make a final decision on the filings. 

Bloomberg Intelligence gauges the likelihood that SOL ETFs are ultimately approved at approximately 70%.

Futures contracts are standardized agreements to buy or sell an underlying asset at a future date. 

They are commonly used for hedging and speculation by retail and institutional investors. Futures also play a crucial supporting role for spot cryptocurrency ETFs because regulated futures markets provide a stable benchmark for measuring a digital asset’s performance.

CME already lists futures contracts for Bitcoin BTC and Ether ETH. US regulators approved ETFs for both of those cryptocurrencies last year.

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