Inventory of Paradigm's recent layout: ETH and LDO are the largest holdings, BaaS and infrastructure are the main investment directions

Although he moved to AI, the projects laid out by Paradigm still cannot be ignored.

Written by: Surf, encrypted KOL

Compiled by: Felix

Paradigm is considered the most unique crypto VC fund. As a San Francisco-based VC, it was established in 2018 and mainly invests in cryptocurrencies. Although Paradigm is getting involved in the field of AI, Paradigm's investment projects are still worthy of traders' attention. This article is Paradigm's investment layout in the first quarter of 2023.

Paradigm is widely regarded as one of the most exclusive venture capital firms, as they only select a select few projects to invest in. Notable projects include: Optimism, Blur, Synthetix, etc.

Assets under management: $13.2 billion

Investment focus:

• Cryptocurrency (mainly)
• Artificial intelligence (new)
• Emerging technologies (new)

trend

Paradigm's recent investments have focused on Blockchain as a Service (Blockchain as a Service) and blockchain infrastructure. However, with their recent shift of focus to emerging technologies, AI is another hot narrative that Paradigm hopes to capture.

Paradigm's cryptocurrency holdings, maximum holdings:

• ETH: $187.9 million
• LDOs: $154 million

Comparison with other VC fund holdings (ERC-20 tokens):

• *

Source: VC trackooor dashboard by defi_mochi

As of June:

• Paradigm's open interest is $142.8M (only LDO holdings shown).
• Jump's total holdings are about 96.56 million USD, the largest holdings are USDC (20.59 million USD) and wETH (15.33 million USD).
• A16z's total holdings are about 81.51 million USD, and the holdings are UNI (75.97 million USD), MKR (2.67 million USD) and COMP (1.61 million USD).
• Wintermute’s total holdings are about USD 52.9 million, and the largest holdings are DYDX (USD 13.96 million), LDO (USD 9.33 million), and USDC (USD 9.18 million). *Gragonfly's total holdings are about USD 18.3 million, and the largest holding is LDO (USD 17.43 million).
• DeFiance Capital’s total holdings are about USD 16.78 million, the largest holdings are USDC (USD 7.48 million), LDO (USD 3.85 million), DODO (USD 2.46 million)

Top 5 Cryptocurrency Investments for Q1 2023

Conduit

Funding: $7 million, seed round

Lead investor: Paradigm

Other investors: Robert Miller, Ludwig Pettersson, Dan Romero, Guillaume Poncin, Joshua Ma and Lakshman Sankar.

• Conduit is a Rollup-as-a-Service project (aiming to revolutionize rollup deployment by providing user-friendly tools and services) that enables teams to rapidly scale dApps by delivering production-grade rollups built on top of OPs.
• It is intended to be a more accessible and cost-effective solution for projects looking for their own dedicated rollup.

Wolf Tooth

Funding: $15 million, seed round

Lead investor: Bain Capital Crypto and Paradigm

Other investors: Jump Crypto

*Ulvetanna is a ZKP hardware infrastructure company.

• They build hardware to speed up the process of generating ZKPs.
• Focus on generating ZKP for L2 zk EVM network

Related reading: Inventory of recent key financing projects on the ZK track: How ZK-VM will build the future of Web3

code4rena

Funding raised: $6 million, token purchase funds

Lead investor: Paradigm

Other investors: none

• Code4rena offers a transparent and gamified alternative to traditional auditing.
• Provide incentives for independent auditors to compete to find bugs.

nxyz (Q4 2022)

Funding raised: $40 million

Lead investor: Paradigm

Other investors: Coinbase Ventures, Greylock Partners, Sequoia, Balaji Srinivasan, Jaynti Kanani, Jing Wang, Packy McCormick, Surojit Chatterjee, and Ryan Selkis.

• A multi-chain index product suite that exposes real-time blockchain data through a low-latency API.
• Aims to enable builders to build a better Internet by providing more efficient blockchain indexing and data infrastructure.

Related reading: Understanding middleware Nxyz: a reliable, low-latency, multi-chain Web3 data indexing solution

Exponential (Q4 2022)

Funding raised: $14 million

Lead investor: Paradigm

Other investors: Haun Ventures, Solana Ventures, Polygon Ventures, Circle Ventures

• DeFi investment discovery and risk assessment platform
• Analyze investment risks by looking at protocol codes, team experience, and market conditions.
• Provide users with a DeFi investment rating system (A to F)

Related reading: Understanding DeFi risk rating platform Exponential in one article: Why did it get $14 million in seed round financing?

Paradigm's recent shift from a cryptocurrency focus to now potentially include emerging tech/artificial intelligence as part of its portfolio is a means of diversification and may follow in the footsteps of A16z in increasing its AI investments.

Take a look at the AI-related projects Paradigm has invested in below:

ArenaX Good

Funding: $5 million, October 2021

*ArenaX Labs is the parent company of digital platform AI Arena.

• AI Arena is an Ethereum-native game where players around the world can purchase, train, and battle AI-powered NFT characters.

Numbers

Funding raised: $11 million, March 2019

• Numerai is a hedge fund that uses machine learning to develop trading strategies.
• Instead of developing models in-house, Numerai utilizes forecasts from global data scientists to make investment decisions and provides incentives with NMR tokens.

Related Reading: Fleeing the Web3 Revolution? Paradigm's Difficulties and Situations