Analyzing the holdings of top crypto VCs, what are their investment strategies in this cycle?

Original title: We Analyzed The Top Crypto Venture Capital Wallets (Here's What We Found)
Original author: Edgy, DeFi researcher

Original translation: Luffy, Foresight News

We are in the strangest crypto cycle in history, and no one knows what will happen next. At this time, it may be inspiring to see what others are doing. So, I spent the whole weekend to find out what VCs are doing recently.

I know some of you are thinking: "They just need to sow and pray, and benefit from early entry."

I don't think they are the smartest people in this market, but we should still pay attention: they do have information advantages, are well-capitalized, and are closer to builders than we are.

I'm curious:

· Do they have any interesting moves?

· Are they as into shitcoins as we are?

· Or are they still holding onto some of the tokens from the past?

I’ve compiled hours of research into an easy 5 minute read for you, to see what the degenerates in suits are up to.

Please note:

· Do not copy what VCs do. They have access to better deals than we do, and they play a different game.

· We only analyzed a portion of the wallets of several VCs. We selected a few funds and sorted them by size.

· We’ll cover the total size of each fund’s holdings, their top holdings, their light holdings, and recent interesting moves.

Top Cryptocurrency Venture Capital Firms and Their Holdings

1. a16z ($482.3 million)

Main assets:

· UNI: $436 million

· OP: $31 million

· COMP: $14 million

Small assets: ETH ($14,000), COLLE ($6,000)

a16z is one of the largest UNI holders in the market. They have enough power to veto proposals, and they have held UNI for many years.

The latest change to the a16z wallet is its initial OP vesting, which they will continue to hold.

2. Galaxy Digital ($364.5M)

Main assets:

· BTC: $194M

· ETH: $115M

· USDC: $40M

· USDT: $5M

· AVAX: $4M

· AAVE: $1.14M

Small assets worth mentioning ($100k-500k): MKR, OXT, UNI, TOKE

Galaxy does a lot of trading, mostly stablecoins and BTC, and they also do some arbitrage strategy trading.

They recently withdrew $3.3 million worth of AVAX from Binance.

3.Jump Trading (US$286.4 million)

Main assets:

· USDC: US$78 million

· USDT: US$70.38 million

· stETH: US$70.38 million

· ETH: US$54.9 million

· T: US$2.15 million

· WETH: US$1.24 million

· SHIB: US$1.20 million

· SNX: US$1.16 million

Small assets include ($200,000 - US$700,000): MKR, LDO, GRT, DAI, UNI, KNC, HMT, BNB, CVX, COMP, INJ, MNT.

Jump's VC portfolio is pretty typical, with investments in ETH and stablecoins. Notably, they hold Threshold Network, SHIB, and SNX.

Although many say Jump has left the crypto space, they are still doing something now.

Jump recently started depositing ETH into LMAX (an institutional crypto exchange)

4. Wintermute ($159.8 million)

Main assets:

· USDC: $16.6 million

· WBTC: $11.15 million

· PEPECOIN: $10.52 million

· ETH: $10.39 million

· USDT: $9.11 million

· TKO: $4.67 million

· CBBTC: $4.63 million

· MATIC: $4.41 million

· BMC: $4.36 million

· NEIRO: $3.48 million

Small assets ($200,000 - $3 million) include BASEDAI, TON, ZK, MOG , stETH, ARB, ENA, ARKM, APE, LDO, ONDO, etc.

Wintermute is a heavyweight player in Memecoin. In addition to their largest holdings of PEPECOIN (note: this is not PEPE, but another memecoin), they also hold a considerable amount of MOG, NEIRO, COQ, APU, SHIB, BENJI, etc.

Wintermute wallets have recently been accumulating CBBTC (Coinbase BTC) and BTC. They also sent more than $6 million worth of SHIB to Binance.

5. Pantera Capital ($161.15 million)

Main assets:

· ONDO: $152 million

· ETHX: $4.4 million

· SD: $1.11 million

· ECOX: $941.6 million

· LDO: $388,000

· PERC: $375,000

· NOTE: $274,000

Recently, Pantera transferred nearly $3 million worth of MATIC to Coinbase.

They also transferred $1 million worth of LDO to Anchorage, a cryptocurrency staking platform for institutions.

Interestingly, most of their ETH was moved to centralized exchanges. In addition to this, the value of their investment in ONDO dropped by 56%. Note that Pantera was one of the early investors in ONDO.

6. Blockchain Capital ($67.1 million)

Main assets:

· AAVe: $32.8 million

· UNI: $18.35 million

· ETH: $4.16 million

· UMA: $2.12 million

· SAFE: $1.89 million

· 1INCH: $1.88 million

· COW: $1.62 million

· FORT $1.31 million

· USDC: $1 million

Small assets ($100,000-$600,000): SUSHI, BAL, PSP, USDC, PERP

Blockchain Capital’s largest holding is AAVE, which they already hold AAVE has been around for years. Since AAVE price has been trending upward recently, it might be worth a closer look.

They also transferred more than $5 million worth of ETH to Anchorage, just like Pantera

7. Spartan Group ($35.38 million)

Main assets:

· PENDLE: $16.93 million

· GAL: $2.65 million

· MNT: $2.49 million

· OP: $1.40 million

· IMX: $1.18 million

· WILD: $1.09 million

· GRT: $1.04 million

· AEVO: $982,000

· USDC: $841,000

· PTU: $800,000

· RBN: $778,000

· 1INCH: $700,000

Small assets ($100,000 - $500,000) include: MAV, CHESS, MPL, G, DYDX, ALI, BETA, PSTAKE, ETH.

Spartan Group's holdings on Pendle are doing well. Other than that, we haven't seen much substantive trading. They are mainly using USDC for arbitrage strategies.

Interestingly, they have moved all BEAM assets to Sophon, an upcoming chain where you can already deposit assets to get the airdrop.

8. DeFiance Capital ($33.6M)

Main assets:

· PYUSD: $20M

· LDO: $6.08M

· BEAM: $3.94M

· USDC: $1.1M

· TBILL: $1.04M

Small assets ($50K-$300K) include VIRTUAL, AVAX, BAL, MCB, USDT, INSUR.

DeFiance specializes in betting on gaming tokens. Their recent trades include several investments in Shrapnel, a Web3 shooter game.

They also recently extracted a large amount of ETH from Morpho.

Some trends we see in VC

· Common holdings: a16z, Jump, Wintermute and Blockchain capital prefer top DeFi tokens (UNI, AAVE), ETH and stablecoins. They are more focused on liquidity and DeFi protocols, probably due to the bear market.

· Long-term holding: a16z and Blockchain Capital have diamond hands, and they have held assets such as UNI and AAVE for many years.

· They will do stablecoin arbitrage, which can be seen from their large stablecoin trading volume.

· Bitcoin L2 continues to receive a lot of investment. Bitcoin L2 companies and projects raised $94.6 million, up 174% month-over-month.

· Early-stage investing still dominates. Pre-seed deals account for 13% of all deals.

· Trending investments. Despite the popularity of NFTs and GameFi in 2021, the sector has cooled in 2024. VCs are now leaning more towards trends like AI, infrastructure, and even Meme.

We recently read Galaxy’s 2024 VC Trends report and summarized some of the highlights:

VC funding fell sharply compared to the same period in 2021-2022. Despite this, VCs invested $3.19 billion in Q2 2024 (up 28% QoQ)

Interestingly, investment size does not completely follow Bitcoin price, while in the past, the correlation between the two was extremely high.

Most investments are focused on NFTs, games, and DAOs, followed by infrastructure.

Companies and projects in the “Web3/NFT/DAO/Metaverse/Gaming” category raised the largest share of crypto venture capital (24%) in the second quarter of 2024, totaling $758 million. The two largest deals in this category were Farcaster and Zentry, which raised $150 million and $140 million, respectively.

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