June '26: The Marks Came Back (TVPI). The Cash Didn't (DPI).

Gm!

Welcome to the June Deal Flow Digest, your snapshot of every crypto funding round we tracked last month.

This month's thesis essay digs into VC fund performance…Carta released its Q1 2026 VC Fund Performance report and the headline is "Venture is back." But the marks came back faster than the cash. We dig into what TVPI vs. DPI actually means for GPs and LPs heading into the back half of 2026, who's really winning, and what it means for how we think about crypto venture specifically.

At the bottom, be sure to check out the sheet below with ALL the deals, and the recent hackathon/demo day results (in the links).

According to Carta, which tracks 2,775 funds holding ~$119.3B, median fund values increased across nearly every recent vintage, fundraising activity accelerated, and the overall outlook for venture investors improved significantly.

Median TVPI climbed for nearly every vintage from 2017 to 2024, and it's been climbing for six straight quarters. The valuation reset that gutted everyone's marks in 2022 and 2023 is, for the most part... is over.

This is great news. But, the key part of the story is that the marks came back (paper gains), the cash still has not.

First, the genuinely positive part. Sample median TVPI is up and to the right again for basically every recent vintage. Valuations stopped falling, then started rising, and funds holding those assets mechanically got worth more.

What's driving it? Mostly the top end.

At every stage, 90th-percentile valuations have surged, and most of that is one sector… Carta's companion private-markets report has AI eating a record share of every venture dollar deployed. If your fund had AI exposure, your marks are healthy. If you were running picks-and-shovels or anything outside the narrative, your "recovery" is more muted.

So the rising tide isn't lifting all boats. It's basically lifting (bigly) the boats with foundation models in them. Shocker.

This matters for how you read the headline number. Higher TVPI is not the same as a good fund. It's a snapshot of what someone, somewhere, would theoretically pay, not what landed in an LP's account.

Here's the part the recovery story skips... DPI, the cash a fund has actually sent back, is still very low.

In the 2019 and 2020 vintages, median DPI is barely above zero, and less than half of those funds have returned a single dollar to LPs. These are five- and six-year-old funds.

It gets worse for the older cohorts, where it should be getting better. 2017 and 2018 funds are pushing ten years old, the back half of their life, when distributions are supposed to show up. Fewer than 20% have hit even 1x DPI, or in other words, returned the money LPs originally put in.

The mechanism is the J-curve refusing to do the second half of its job. IRRs go negative early while you deploy, then the curve is supposed to bend up as valuations rise and exits land. Right now the valuations are rising (TVPI proves it), but the exits aren't landing. IPO windows crack open for a handful of names, M&A is selective, and everything else just sits there marked up and illiquid.

PitchBook, Preqin, NVCA, Wellington. They're all pointing at the same thing for 2026. Liquidity is the bottleneck, full stop. The fix everyone's circling is the secondary market: continuation vehicles, GP-leds, LPs selling stakes to get cash without waiting for a traditional exit. Expect that to go from niche to more normal, and fast.

The read for GPs is uncomfortable but simple. A fund with a great TVPI and a DPI near zero is going to start getting hard questions in the next 12 to 18 months. LPs were patient through the reset. They're going to want to see cash before they re-up. Whoever manages a liquidity path proactively (partial exits, secondaries, continuation funds) has an edge over whoever just keeps emailing pretty mark-ups.

Recovery or not, the dispersion is the permanent feature within Venture.

For nearly every vintage, the 90th-percentile net IRR clears 20%, while the 75th percentile sits below 15.5%. The jump from "top quartile" to "top decile" is enormous. Most funds cluster in the merely-fine zone.

And the gap compounds... For reference: 10 years at 20% growth is 6.2x. 10 years at 10% growth is 2.6x.

VC isn't just the highest-return asset class... it's the highest-*dispersion* one.

Translation for LPs: manager selection isn't one input among many. It's the input. Index the asset class and you get the median, and the median venture fund is a slow, illiquid 2.6x at best.

Last piece, and maybe the most structural, a key theme from my recent writings. The money is concentrating.

Funds of $100M+ took 57% of all venture capital raised in 2025. Eight years ago that number was 31%. Most funds being formed are still under $25M, but the big ones are inhaling a bigger slice of the pie every year.

That's a barbell. Mega-funds raise on balance sheet and brand. Genuinely differentiated micro-funds raise on edge. The undifferentiated middle is where fundraises go to die. The VC Manager tourists are going home. The crossover and generalist money that piled into private tech at the 2021 peak is retreating to its day job.

Fundraising overall is stabilizing (Carta logged 86 new funds and $3.9B in Q1, the strongest start since 2022), but "stabilizing" is not "evenly distributed." The dollars are walking toward track record and away from everyone else.

Strip it down and you get four things:

• Marks recovered, cash didn't. TVPI is a story about sentiment. DPI is the only number LPs spend.

• The power law is alive. A few funds win big, most are mediocre, and the spread between them is the entire game.

• Liquidity is the next regime. The funds that engineer distributions, not just report mark-ups, win the next fundraise.

• Capital Concentration Trend. Be big, or be sharp. Don't be in between.

Carta doesn't break out crypto, so none of this is our numbers. But the physics are the same, only louder.

Crypto venture runs more dispersed, more concentrated, and more reflexive than the broad market. The tourists left here first and hardest. Which suits me fine: at pre-seed, the only durable edge is picking the right person before the crowd shows up. The data just keeps confirming it... the median is a trap, and the work is in the tails.

Now on to the rest of the crypto / web3 fundraising :)

Securitize | SPAC Merger / PIPE | RWA Tokenization | ~$400M | 2026-06-26

The BlackRock-backed tokenization leader is going public on the NYSE (ticker SECZ) via a merger with Cantor Equity Partners II, with ~$400M in gross proceeds including an oversubscribed $225M PIPE. Clients include Apollo, KKR, Hamilton Lane, and VanEck, and Securitize is helping the NYSE build its own tokenized-securities platform. This is a public listing rather than a private venture round, so it's the asterisk at the top of the list, but it's also the cleanest "tokenization went mainstream" milestone of the year. Deal expected to close around July 1.

Digital Asset | Strategic | Institutional Infrastructure / L1 | $355M | 2026-06-11

a16z crypto led the largest true crypto raise of the month at a $2B valuation, with a syndicate that reads like a Wall Street roll call: Citadel Securities, an ADIA subsidiary, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Apollo, Optiver, Tradeweb, CME Ventures, S&P Global, SBI, SoFi, Coinbase Ventures, and Polychain. Digital Asset builds Canton, a privacy-enabled public L1 for regulated capital markets that has supported roughly $6T in tokenized asset issuance and counts JPMorgan, DTCC, and Visa as users. If you wanted one data point for "TradFi is picking the rails," this is it.

Morpho | Strategic | DeFi Lending | $175M | 2026-06-09

Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, and a16z crypto co-led, with Apollo Funds, Circle's venture unit, and VanEck participating, at a valuation up to $2B. Reported as the largest DeFi round to date. Morpho lets anyone "build their own Aave" with customizable lending markets, and its client list (Coinbase, Kraken, Anchorage, Galaxy) is why institutional capital is suddenly comfortable underwriting onchain credit. The "DeFi is the back end for fintech" thesis, funded.

Fomo | Series B | Consumer Trading | $75M | 2026-06-22

Index Ventures led the $75M round at a $550M valuation, with Union Square Ventures and angels including Mark Pincus, Kevin Hartz, and Humam Sakhnini. Fomo is a non-custodial social trading app that abstracts away wallets, gas, and bridges. Onboard, fund, and buy a token in ~30 seconds, with a leaderboard and a social feed on top. 625K+ users and $4B in volume, and the standout consumer raise of the month.

SignalPlus | Series B | 50M | 2026-06-02

HashKey Capital led at a $500M valuation, with BlockBooster ($10M anchor) and AppWorks joining and Goldman Sachs advising. SignalPlus is the institutional-grade options and derivatives terminal... think Bloomberg Terminal for crypto options... serving Cumberland, FalconX, and Galaxy Digital. Posted $160B in platform volumes in Q4 2025 alone, growing at a 74% quarterly CAGR since 2023. The options market is crypto's next liquidity layer, and this is the dominant infrastructure play for it.

Allium | Series B | Onchain Data / Analytics | $40M | 2026-06-23

Amplify Partners led, with Kleiner Perkins and Theory Ventures. Allium cleans and structures onchain data across 150+ chains for institutional clients, a list that reportedly includes Visa, the U.S. Federal Reserve, a16z, and Coinbase. The picks-and-shovels play on institutional crypto adoption, with an obvious second act once the "agentic" buyers show up.

Trace Finance | Series A | Stablecoin Payments | $32M | 2026-06-17

CoinFund led, with Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Jump Capital, Paxos, and Chainlink Labs, plus angels including Solana's Anatoly Yakovenko. The Brazil-based firm combines local banking rails, FX, compliance, and stablecoin settlement into cross-border payments infra, has processed $10B+ in institutional volume, and raised at roughly 10x its 2022 seed valuation. The stablecoin-as-payments thesis, playing out where it actually changes lives.

EDGE Markets | Series A | Prediction Markets Infrastructure | $29.2M | 2026-06-08

CoinFund led again, with Indicator Ventures, Mantis VC, StepStone Group, and Bullpen Capital. EDGE builds the plumbing under regulated prediction and gaming markets: EDGE Pro, a high-throughput deposit account for market makers across CFTC-regulated venues, and EDGE Connect, real-time payment rails that cut costs 70%+. The unglamorous layer that the prediction-market boom can't scale without.

Onyx Odds | Series A | Prediction Markets | $20M | 2026-06-24

Payward, Kraken's parent, led the $20M round at a $220M valuation. Onyx Odds is a sports-focused prediction-markets app, and as part of the deal it'll plug into Payward Services (Kraken's B2B infra) and add crypto trading inside the app. Kraken buying its way into the prediction-markets land grab, the other side of the Kalshi/Polymarket arms race.

Karta | Series A | Stablecoin / Credit Cards | $15M | 2026-06-17

Galaxy Ventures led the $15M equity round, part of a broader $140M raise that includes a $125M credit facility from Community Investment Management. Karta issues WhatsApp-run U.S. credit cards to global travelers and high-net-worth non-residents, stitching stablecoin infrastructure and an AI concierge underneath. Revenue and payment volume rose 10x in 2025 and 4x again in Q1 2026.

El Dorado | Series A | Stablecoin Wallet / Payments | $9M | 2026-06-18

Paradigm led, with Coinbase Ventures and Verda Ventures, bringing El Dorado's total raised to ~$12M. The peer-to-peer stablecoin wallet powers cross-border payments across underserved Latin American markets and has expanded into business payments on the Tempo blockchain, onboarding 100+ corporate clients (including EV imports from China). Small check, exactly the right end of the stablecoin thesis.

Two new fund announcements this month, both expanding their mandate beyond pure crypto into the AI / agentic theme.

• Variant | Variant 4 $222M | June 2026

Variant raised $222M for its fourth early-stage fund, built around an "autonomy" thesis: any application that gives users more agency, spanning permissionless finance, crypto infrastructure, and agentic AI. The framing is that crypto is the "plumbing" that enables products (Uniswap, Morpho) rather than the product itself. *(First vs. final close wasn't specified.)*

• Framework Ventures | Framework Fund IV $400M | June 2026

Framework closed an oversubscribed $400M fourth fund (FVIV), roughly half already deployed. Checks run $1M–$50M from pre-seed through Series A, and the mandate now stretches from crypto (stablecoins, tokenization) into AI, robotics, energy, and fintech. LP base is heavily institutional, anchored by an Ivy League endowment, sovereign wealth funds, and funds of funds.

As a reminder, if you are interested in learning more about Bankless Ventures Fund II, please fill out this form and we will be in touch!

Upcoming

ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026 | July 24-26, 2026

Lisbon, Portugal, in-person. Pragma Lisbon runs alongside the hackathon. (unfortunately I will not be in town :()

ETHOnline 2026 | September 4-16, 2026

Online, async hackathon. ETHGlobal's flagship remote event.

Colosseum Fall Hackathon | September 28 - November 2, 2026

Online. The next edition of Colosseum's Solana-ecosystem competition, following the record-breaking Frontier Hackathon.

Ongoing

Colosseum "Eternal" | Rolling

Online. Colosseum's always-on onchain competition between its flagship hackathons; standout teams are considered for pre-seed funding and the accelerator.

Finished (results in links)

Solana Frontier Hackathon | April 6 - May 11, 2026

Online. Crypto's largest-ever hackathon: 2,857 final projects, 10,000+ participants, ~$2.75M in prizes and investment. Winners are now announced, headlined by Peaks, Alpha Group Trading, Bench, Mentioned, Flovia, Senthos, and Dropset, with the top teams advancing to Colosseum's accelerator.

ETHGlobal New York 2026 | June 12-14, 2026

New York City, in-person. 36-hour hackathon with 500+ builders and $225K+ in prizes from sponsors including ENS, Sui, and Worldcoin. Preceded by ETHConf NYC and Pragma NYC.

Upcoming

Colosseum Accelerator Demo Day | Summer 2026 (date TBC)

Private demo day for the top ~10 teams from the Frontier Hackathon accelerator cohort (8-week program, first two weeks in San Francisco), pitching to leading crypto VCs. *(Exact 2026 date not yet posted.)*

Alliance DAO Demo Day | ~August 2026 (date TBC)

Tied to the ALL17 cohort that started in May. Date not officially confirmed.

Finished

CryptoOracle Collective AI x Web3 Accelerator Demo Day (Cohort 1) | June 26, 2026

Online. 10 teams across L1 protocols, AI-enabled DeFi, and AI fairness pitched at the cohort's first demo day.

Alliance DAO (ALL18) | Open / Rolling

Virtual plus IRL retreats. ALL18 cohort starts September 7, 2026; interview decisions within ~2 weeks of applying, year-round. ~5% acceptance rate; median graduate raises $3.5M at $25M post. Free program; takes $500K on founder-friendly terms.

Colosseum Accelerator | Rolling (via Eternal)

2 weeks in San Francisco plus 6 weeks remote-friendly. Primary entry is through the Frontier Hackathon (closed) and the always-on Eternal competition. $250K per startup on founder-friendly terms.

Outlier Ventures Base Camp | Open / Rolling

Virtual plus in-person. 12-week, token-design-focused accelerator accepting early applications for 2026 cohorts across DeAI, DeFi, RWA, and DePIN.

Techstars Web3 | Open

Virtual plus in-person. 2026 applications reported open; standard Techstars terms.

That's a wrap for June!

Thank you and good luck out there!

Ben Lakoff, CFA

https://twitter.com/benlakoff