Karla Barker 
New Fund Targets Onchain Infrastructure and Applications
Crypto venture capital firm Archetype has successfully closed its third investment fund, raising over $100 million in total capital commitments. The new fund, called Archetype III, attracted backing from institutional investors including pension funds, academic endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and family offices. This marks the firm’s continued focus on early-stage startups building blockchain infrastructure and applications.
Archetype has previously invested in notable crypto companies like Monad, Privy, Farcaster, Relay, and Ritual. The firm specifically targets projects working on onchain infrastructure, decentralized finance protocols, and emerging blockchain applications. According to the announcement, the capital will be deployed across several key areas including stablecoins, payment solutions, onchain social networks, decentralized physical infrastructure networks, mobile applications built on crypto rails, and crypto AI projects.
Shifting Investment Landscape
This fundraising comes at a time when venture capital activity in crypto has shown mixed results. In May, crypto venture deals dropped to their lowest count in over four years, with only 62 rounds completed. However, those deals still represented more than $909 million in total funding. The market appears to be shifting away from the speculative pre-seed bets and memecoin frenzies that characterized the 2021 bull run.
Instead, investors are increasingly favoring projects with proven business models and predictable revenue streams. There’s been growing interest in Bitcoin-focused projects specifically, with the emerging Bitcoin DeFi sector raising $175 million across 32 deals in the first half of 2025 alone. This suggests a maturation in the investment landscape, with capital flowing toward more established use cases.
Broader Market Trends
Venture funds have been channeling significant capital into tokenization and stablecoin infrastructure recently. Notable deals include $28 million for Stable, a blockchain focused on expanding Tether’s USDt payments, and $22 million for Spiko, a French fintech company offering tokenized money market funds. Inveniam Capital also invested $20 million into layer-1 blockchain Mantra to support bringing institutional real-world assets onto the network.
The broader crypto venture capital market showed strong recovery in the second quarter of 2025, with total investment reaching $10.03 billion. This represents the highest level since the first quarter of 2022, when investment peaked at $16.64 billion. The renewed interest suggests growing confidence in the sector’s long-term prospects, particularly in infrastructure and applications with clear utility.
Archetype founder Ash Egan commented in the release that “blockchains are becoming the commerce rails of the world, and crypto’s ChatGPT moment is set to emerge atop uniquely performant onchain infrastructure and a powerful new class of creator tooling.” This perspective aligns with the fund’s investment thesis, which emphasizes foundational technology rather than speculative applications.
The successful closure of Archetype’s fund, despite the selective market conditions, indicates that institutional capital remains interested in crypto’s infrastructure layer. Perhaps this signals a broader trend toward more sustainable investment approaches in the blockchain space, focusing on projects that can demonstrate real-world utility and revenue potential rather than purely speculative value.