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This week’s headlines made tokens look strong. Robinhood launched a blockchain with tokenized stocks and perpetual futures. A perpetual future is a bet on a price with no end date. One trader turned $800 into $1 million on that chain in a few days. Memecoins traded heavily again. Bitcoin went up.
We looked at every partnership announced in the last ten days. 714 were between crypto companies only. 88 included a large mainstream company, like a bank, a card network, or a big consumer app. So about 9 in 10 crypto partnerships this week stayed inside crypto. The memecoin trading is part of that 9. It is crypto companies and crypto traders dealing with each other.
One caveat. The 714 number is inflated by older posts that got re-published this week. Treat it as rough. The gap between 714 and 88 is still real.
The deals that reached normal people came from the 88. Robinhood is a stock app with 27 million users, so its blockchain reached those users on day one. Coinbase’s x402 had its biggest month. x402 lets one piece of software pay another automatically using stablecoins. The companies using it this week were Amazon, Solana, and Exa. USDC reached 70% of stablecoin trading volume. That is people using it to move money.
The biggest checks went to infrastructure, not to tokens. Infrastructure means the tools other products run on: compute, payments, model serving. Paradigm is a crypto-native fund. It raised $1.2 billion and said it will also invest in AI.
Across the last six months, the crypto categories with the most funding rounds are the infrastructure ones. Real-world asset tokenization had 304 rounds. Stablecoin payments had 235. Stablecoins had 221. DeFi had 175. Bitcoin mining had 7. New token projects and Bitcoin mining are at the bottom.
Crypto is also not where most venture money goes right now. AI takes most of it. AI agents alone had 863 funding rounds in six months. That is more than any single crypto category.
Crypto had an active week, but the activity and the growth are two different things. The activity was in tokens: memecoins, a new chain, a $1 million trade. The growth was in payment tools and in products that already have users. USDC moved money. Robinhood reached 27 million people. x402 got Amazon. The funding followed the same line, this week and across six months: the money is in payments, tokenization, and stablecoins, not in new tokens.
This is one week of headlines on top of six months of funding data. The six months is the solid part. Big companies can also stop caring about crypto quickly, and they have before. This is a pattern in the data, not a forecast.
714 crypto-only partnerships against 88 with a large mainstream company, last ten days. Rough count, inflated by re-published posts. The gap is clear.
Biggest raises this week: Together AI $800M, Baseten $1.5B, Anysphere $900M, Fireworks $250M. All infrastructure. Paradigm closed a $1.2B fund and is expanding into AI.
USDC reached 70% of stablecoin volume. Robinhood's chain reached its 27 million users.
Six-month funding rounds: RWA tokenization 304, stablecoin payments 235, stablecoins 221, DeFi 175, Bitcoin mining 7.
AI agents had 863 funding rounds in six months. That is more than any single crypto category.
Method: Byblos ingests the published output of 500+ Web3 VC firms and research desks into a tagged database. Deal and funding counts come from that database. Partnership counts cover the last ten days. Funding-by-category counts cover the last six months. Company figures were checked against public announcements where available. Two figures (USDC share, Robinhood user count) come from newsletter mentions and are worth a second check before quoting. Not investment advice.
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