Paradigm

Paradigm was founded in 2018 by Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam and initially invested around crypto assets, blockchain protocols, and related companies. Huang was previously a partner at Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, and Ehrsam is a co-founder of Coinbase. The firm combines technical research, software development, and investing to support projects from early founding to scaled operations.⁠[1][2][3]

Paradigm’s first fund initially raised about $400 million in an open-ended structure with no fixed return-of-capital deadline, with investors including institutions such as Harvard, StanfordStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, and YaleYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry, as well as Sequoia. About 90% of the fund’s early allocation was in Bitcoin and Ethereum, with an average BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry purchase price of about $4,000 to $5,000. These figures describe the first fund’s early allocation and do not cover subsequent rebalancing, sales, or distributions to investors.⁠[4]

Paradigm led the $30 million Series B round of digital asset infrastructure company Fireblocks, with participation from existing investors including Cyberstarts, Tenaya Capital, Swisscom, Galaxy DigitalGalaxy DigitalGalaxy Digital (Galaxy Digital Inc., Nasdaq and Toronto Stock Exchange: GLXY) is a New York-based digital asset financial services and data center infrastructure company founded by Mike Novogratz, which says it was founded in 2018. It provides institutional clients with digital asset trading, lending, investment banking, asset management, staking, and custody technology services, and is building data centers in Texas for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.Open the full entry, and DCGDigital Currency GroupDigital Currency Group (DCG) is a crypto asset investment and holding company headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, founded by Barry Silbert in 2015. It invests in blockchain startups with permanent capital and owns subsidiaries including the digital asset manager Grayscale. In 2022, its crypto lender Genesis suffered losses after major client Three Arrows Capital defaulted and filed for bankruptcy the following year, leaving DCG and Silbert facing a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General, an SEC penalty, and multiple civil suits.Open the full entry. The round brought Fireblocks’ total funding to $46 million; Fred Ehrsam also joined the board. Fireblocks provides wallet, custody, and settlement infrastructure that supports institutional access to digital asset markets.⁠[5]

BlockFi announced a $350 million Series D round at a $3 billion valuation, with Paradigm among the participating investors. The lead investors included Bain Capital Ventures, DST GlobalDST GlobalDST Global is a technology investment firm founded by Yuri Milner in 2009 that focuses on growth-stage investments in internet companies worldwide; it has invested in companies including Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Airbnb and Spotify, and in 2026 led the US$400 million Series B round of the AI visual content company Higgsfield.Open the full entry partners, Pomp Investments, and Tiger Global. The announcement also stated that the round included a secondary tender arrangement providing partial equity liquidity to employees meeting tenure requirements, so the $350 million was not entirely new operating capital.⁠[6]

CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry, a publicly listed Paradigm investment, began trading on NasdaqNasdaqNasdaq is an exchange operator and financial technology company headquartered in New York. It runs The Nasdaq Stock Market and other markets and provides capital markets technology, regulatory technology, and data and index services. Founded in 1971, it combined with OMX AB in 2008, and in March 2026 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved its rules for trading tokenized securities.Open the full entry through a direct listing under the ticker symbol COIN. The direct listing created a public trading market for the company’s shares. Ehrsam’s personal shares as a Coinbase co-founder and the assets of funds managed by Paradigm belong to different entities and cannot be combined.⁠[7][8][3]

Paradigm announced a $2.5 billion venture fund to invest, alongside its existing flagship fund, in crypto companies and protocols across different stages and regions. The firm stated that it would continue to incubate ideas, invest in early-stage teams, and support growth-stage companies. The fund size is the capital committed to the fund and is counted separately from the funding amounts of individual projects and the firm’s assets under management.⁠[9]

Paradigm and Coatue co-led OpenSea’s $300 million Series C round at a post-money valuation of $13.3 billion. OpenSea planned to use the funds for product development, user support and safety, ecosystem grants, and hiring. A 2025 ColossusColossusColossus is a business and investing media company founded by Patrick O’Shaughnessy in 2020. It publishes podcasts, digital journalism and a print magazine, including Invest Like the Best, Business Breakdowns and programs made with independent creators.Open the full entry profile of Paradigm looked back at the impact of the subsequent downturn in the NFT trading market on OpenSea’s business; this is a separate question from whether Paradigm has sold its investment and how much it has actually recovered.⁠[10][4]

Citadel SecuritiesCitadel SecuritiesCitadel Securities is an American market maker founded in Chicago in 2002 by Ken Griffin and partners and headquartered in Miami, providing liquidity to institutional and retail investors across a range of financial products. It is a separate company from Citadel, the hedge fund Griffin founded in 1990.Open the full entry announced a combined $1.15 billion minority investment from Sequoia and Paradigm at a valuation of about $22 billion. Sequoia led the investment, and its partner Alfred LinAlfred LinAlfred Lin is an American venture capitalist who has been a partner at Sequoia Capital since 2010 and, since November 2025, one of the firm’s co-stewards together with Pat Grady. Before joining Sequoia he was an executive at LinkExchange, Tellme Networks, and Zappos, companies acquired by Microsoft and Amazon; at Sequoia he has represented the firm on the boards of companies including Airbnb and DoorDash.Open the full entry joined the board; Paradigm did not disclose its individual contribution in the announcement. Citadel Securities is a market maker whose business includes trading and liquidity services in equities, fixed income, and other markets.⁠[11]

Fireblocks announced a $550 million Series E round at an $8 billion valuation, co-led by D1 Capital Partners and Spark CapitalSpark CapitalSpark Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in Boston in 2005, with offices in San Francisco, New York and Boston. Its early-stage and growth funds back technology businesses across fintech, enterprise software, AI and consumer products. Investments have included Twitter, Tumblr, Oculus, Plaid and Anthropic.Open the full entry. The funding amount and valuation in this announcement reflect the company’s follow-on financing and cannot substitute for Paradigm’s actual contribution to the 2020 Series B or its investment returns.⁠[12]

EthereumEthereumEthereum is an open, general-purpose smart contract blockchain that launched in 2015, and its native asset is ether (ETH). The project was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and advanced jointly by eight co-founders; the network now uses proof of stake and centers on the EVM, the account model, a rollup scaling roadmap, and the open EIP process.Open the full entry scaling project Optimism announced a $150 million Series B round at a $1.65 billion valuation, co-led by Paradigm and a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry. Optimism develops optimistic rollup scaling technology; Paradigm later listed it in its third fund announcement as one of the projects it had backed and supported early.⁠[13][14]

Uniswap Labs announced a $165 million Series B round led by Polychain CapitalPolychain CapitalPolychain Capital is a digital asset investment firm founded in 2016 by Olaf Carlson-Wee and headquartered in San Francisco. Its business covers actively managed blockchain asset portfolios and investments in related companies, with public investments spanning base networks, cryptography, on-chain finance, payments, data and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, with participation from existing investors including Paradigm, a16z crypto, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, and Variant. Uniswap Labs planned to expand its apps and developer tools, including mobile products. The company’s funding supports its product development, while the Uniswap protocol, foundation, and UNI token each have their own governance and economic arrangements.⁠[15]

After FTXFTXFTX was a cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang that operated FTX.com, moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas in 2021 and was valued at $32 billion in January 2022. In November 2022 it filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection amid a liquidity crisis, and Bankman-Fried was later convicted of fraud and related charges. Its reorganization plan took effect in January 2025, after which the FTX Recovery Trust began paying creditors in stages.Open the full entry went bankrupt in November 2022, Paradigm wrote its equity investment down to zero. In trial testimony on October 5, 2023, Matt Huang stated that Paradigm had invested $278 million in FTX and had not been told before investing that FTX and Alameda commingled funds. The $278 million here is the amount Paradigm invested; the write-down is a valuation treatment of the investment, not sale proceeds.⁠[16][4]

BlockFi and eight affiliated companies filed for Chapter 11 in New Jersey. The company stated that the restructuring would include pursuing amounts owed by counterparties including FTX, and expected the FTX bankruptcy to delay recoveries. Paradigm’s participation in BlockFi’s funding is supported by company announcements, but its specific investment cost and ultimate loss were not disclosed in these announcements. Recovery arrangements for clients or creditors are also not equivalent to repayments to equity investors.⁠[17][6]

Flashbots confirmed to CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry the completion of a $60 million Series B round led by Paradigm, with the funds going toward developing the SUAVE network. Flashbots researches maximal extractable value (MEV) in transaction ordering and develops tools related to block building. A $1 billion valuation figure was not confirmed by a company spokesperson and cannot be treated as information as certain as the funding amount the company confirmed.⁠[18]

OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry announced its acquisition of the Global Illumination team, with all members joining OpenAI to work on core products including ChatGPT. Global Illumination had previously used artificial intelligence to build creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences, and is also listed in Paradigm’s investment disclosures. The announcement did not disclose the transaction consideration or any proceeds to Paradigm.⁠[19][20]

Paradigm announced that its third fund had raised $850 million, focused on early-stage crypto projects. The announcement looked back on early investments and technical contributions including Uniswap, Optimism, and Flashbots, and stated that the firm would increase its incubation work and continue to support open-source tools such as Foundry and Reth.⁠[14]

Paradigm published an introduction to the Unichain white paper, whose listed authors include researchers such as Dan RobinsonDan RobinsonDan Robinson is a general partner and protocol researcher at Paradigm.Open the full entry and Hayden AdamsHayden AdamsHayden Adams is an American software developer, the inventor of the Uniswap protocol, and the founder and chief executive officer of Uniswap Labs. Originally a mechanical engineer, he taught himself Ethereum, Solidity, and JavaScript after losing his job in 2017, built Uniswap drawing on Vitalik Buterin’s automated market-making idea and with Karl Floersch’s encouragement, and has continued to lead development of the protocol, trading products, Unichain, and more.Open the full entry. The design improves on-chain market settlement through faster state updates, in-application handling of MEV, and a cross-chain economic finality mechanism. It reflects concrete work by the firm’s researchers in protocol design.⁠[21]

Paradigm announced a $20 million investment in Ithaca. Ithaca aims to accelerate crypto software development and is made up of core contributors and maintainers of several open-source projects. Georgios Konstantopoulos became chief executive officer of Ithaca while continuing as Paradigm’s chief technology officer and general partner; Matt Huang became chairman of Ithaca.⁠[22]

Coinbase announced that the Utopia Labs team would join Base to advance Coinbase Wallet’s on-chain payments business. Utopia Labs had previously developed on-chain payments and treasury management products and is a publicly listed Paradigm investment. The announcement explicitly concerns the team joining and the product roadmap, and does not disclose the outcome of Paradigm’s equity disposition.⁠[23][8]

In its 2025 annual review, Stripe confirmed that it acquired embedded wallet infrastructure company Privy in July of that year. Privy had first announced the acquisition on June 11, and its product continues to operate independently. Both Privy and Stripe are listed in the investment directory on Paradigm’s website; the acquisition does not by itself show that Paradigm has fully exited.⁠[24][25][8]

Paradigm and Stripe announced Tempo, a payments blockchain they co-incubated. The project is designed around stablecoins and real-world payments and is developed by an independent full-time team led by Matt Huang, who continues to co-manage Paradigm with Alana Palmedo. The initial design partners come from the artificial intelligence, e-commerce, and financial services industries and include AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry, OpenAI, VisaVisaVisa Inc. is one of the world’s leaders in digital payments, with roots going back to 1958, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.Open the full entry, Deutsche Bank, and Shopify.⁠[26]

Ithaca announced that its team would join Tempo to accelerate payments infrastructure development. On the same day, Tempo completed a $500 million Series A round at a $5 billion valuation, led by Greenoaks and Thrive CapitalThrive CapitalThrive Capital is an investment firm led by chief executive Joshua Kushner that builds and invests in internet, software and technology-enabled companies, with investments including Cursor and Chai Discovery. Kushner is also chief executive of Thrive Holdings, a long-term holding company.Open the full entry, with Stripe and Paradigm not contributing new capital in that round. This funding amount is Tempo’s external financing and cannot be counted as Paradigm’s own investment.⁠[27][28]

KalshiKalshiKalshi is a New York-based prediction-market and derivatives platform founded by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. Users trade outcomes of economic, election, sports and cultural events through event contracts. KalshiEX is a CFTC-designated contract market, and Kalshi Klear provides clearing. The platform has added brokerage and crypto-wallet access, perpetual futures and Kalshi Pro. Its election contracts, the application of state law to sports trading, insider trading and settlement rules have remained subjects of regulatory and legal disputes.Open the full entry announced a $1 billion Series E round at an $11 billion valuation, led by Paradigm with participation from Sequoia, a16z, Meritech, IVPIVPIVP (Institutional Venture Partners) is a growth-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, founded by Reid W. Dennis in 1980; it has invested in companies including Twitter, Dropbox, Coinbase and Figma.Open the full entry, ARK InvestARK InvestARK Invest (ARK Investment Management LLC) is a U.S. investment management firm founded by Cathie Wood in 2013, known for actively managed ETFs focused on disruptive innovation such as ARK Innovation ETF; it is headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida.Open the full entry, and others. The funds are for expanding user reach, broker integrations, and product lines. Matt Huang also discloses his Kalshi board seat on his Paradigm profile page.⁠[29][2]

Neynar announced that it was taking over Farcaster from Merkle and would begin maintaining the protocol, running the client, and operating Clanker, with part of the Clanker team joining as well. Farcaster had been a publicly listed Paradigm investment. The transaction corresponds to a handover of maintenance and operation of the protocol and products, and does not establish that Paradigm received any specific amount as an investment return.⁠[30][8]

Paradigm and OpenAI jointly launched EVMbench, which evaluates the ability of AI agents to detect, patch, and exploit smart contract vulnerabilities. Evaluation tasks are drawn from publicly audited vulnerabilities and custom tasks in unreleased contracts, with solvability checked through isolated environments and reference solutions. The firm has extended the research framework into an auditing agent to support smart contract security work.⁠[31]

Tempo’s mainnet launched, and Tempo and Stripe introduced the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP). MPP provides an open standard for payment requests, authorization, and settlement between AI agents and services, supporting payment methods including stablecoins and bank cards; the protocol design can extend to different payment networks.⁠[32]

Paradigm participated in Zipline’s additional $200 million in funding, bringing the round to a cumulative $800 million. Zipline’s January announcement had disclosed that it had raised more than $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation.⁠[33][34]

Space security company True Anomaly announced a $650 million Series D round, co-led by Eclipse and Riot Ventures, with Paradigm participating as a new investor. The financing includes $50 million in debt provided by Stifel Bank. The company plans to expand development of orbital vehicles, mission software, and payloads; the $650 million is therefore neither entirely equity financing nor Paradigm’s contribution alone.⁠[35]

Kalshi announced a $1 billion Series F round at a $22 billion valuation, led by CoatueCoatueCoatue is a technology- and innovation-focused investment management firm founded by Philippe Laffont in 1999, operating in both public and private markets. Its current website lists Thomas Laffont as co-founder and chief investment officer of private investments; a Form ADV filed on July 29, 2026, disclosed regulatory assets under management of $92,705,722,582.Open the full entry with participation from Paradigm, Sequoia, a16z, IVP, Morgan StanleyMorgan StanleyMorgan Stanley is an American global financial services firm that grew from an investment banking partnership into a publicly traded financial group spanning investment banking, securities trading, wealth management, and investment management.Open the full entry, ARK Invest, and others. This company announcement directly confirms Paradigm’s follow-on participation; it and the December 2025 Series E, led by Paradigm at an $11 billion valuation, are two separate rounds.⁠[36][29]

In an interview, SendCutSend founder Jim Belosic disclosed that the company had raised $110 million and described how it established investment partnerships with Sequoia, Paradigm, and the Collison brothers. SendCutSend provides custom metal parts through an online process of design upload, fabrication, and delivery. The deal is part of Paradigm’s investment expansion into manufacturing technology, and the total funding does not represent Paradigm’s contribution alone.⁠[37][38]

Paradigm announced that it had become the new custodian of the secret archive of Jim Sanborn’s Kryptos and uses a cryptographic verification system to check answers to the K4 puzzle, so that the custodial team does not need to see the plaintext answer. The project also announced a puzzle-solving event and holds the K5 ciphertext provided by Sanborn. The project is a cryptography research and cultural project and was not described in the announcement as an ordinary corporate equity investment.⁠[39]

Ithaca announced that it would sunset the Porto project and shift its focus to other work, asking users to move their funds out by July 24. Its website later confirmed that the team had joined Tempo and stopped maintaining Porto in August 2026, while keeping the open-source code and fund recovery tools available.⁠[40][41]

Paradigm announced that its fourth fund had raised $1.2 billion, with an investment scope covering crypto technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other emerging technologies. The announcement cited investments including Zipline, SendCutSend, True Anomaly, and Nous ResearchNous ResearchNous Research is an open-source artificial intelligence research company that develops the Hermes series of open-weight language models, the Solana-coordinated decentralized training network Psyche, and the open-source Hermes Agent.Open the full entry, and continued to highlight HyperliquidHyperliquidHyperliquid is a layer-one blockchain designed from scratch for financial trading. It uses its own HyperBFT consensus, has perpetual futures and spot order books built into the chain (HyperCore), and offers an Ethereum-compatible smart contract environment (HyperEVM); its native token is HYPE. Launched in 2023, it became one of the largest decentralized perpetual futures venues thanks to its fully onchain order books, and later opened permissionless deployment of perpetual markets on commodities, stock indices and FX, as well as outcome markets, through HIP-3 and HIP-4.Open the full entry, Tempo, and Kalshi. This announcement gave the size of the fund after its raise was completed.⁠[42]

Paradigm released Centaur 2.0, improving its multi-user agent tool for Slack around permissions, context, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Centaur is offered as self-hostable open source and is part of the firm’s engineering work on AI agent tools.⁠[43][44]

Paradigm’s investment stages extend from initial funding to public markets, covering technologies including crypto assets, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The firm supports projects through investment, research papers, open-source code, product collaboration, and company incubation. Matt Huang and Alana Palmedo jointly lead investing, research, and firm management; Fred Ehrsam is currently co-founder and senior advisor.⁠[1][45][3]

The investment directory on the website lists both current and historical investments, with 109 entries as of this review; two companies both named Harmonic, one in artificial intelligence research and one in SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry block building, are distinguished by their website links. The investments below are grouped by business area, without implying whether each is still held. The firm’s disclosure statement also excludes certain projects that are confidential, pending announcement, or written down to zero after ceasing operations without receiving replacement assets.⁠[8][20]

The separate investment disclosures page also lists Art Gobblers, EDX Markets, Fab2, Global Illumination, Guidestar, Intrinsic, Jet Protocol, M1X Global, Namebase, Nebulous, NXYZ, ParagonDAO, Parallel Editions, Pixie Chess, Reddio, Showtime, Sup, Tagomi, Talarion, Tendermint, Tessera, and Veil. These names are part of the firm’s publicly disclosed investment record; the main directory and the disclosures page differ in display scope and update timing.⁠[20]

Some publicly listed projects have undergone acquisitions or business changes. For example, Blowfish was acquired by Phantom and its original standalone security service was discontinued; Yield’s website has also announced its closure. Public companies, tradable tokens, acquired companies, and historical projects in the firm’s public directory therefore cannot uniformly be interpreted as current holdings, nor can project funding amounts, company valuations, token market prices, or client claim recovery rates be treated as returns Paradigm has realized.⁠[49][48][20]