Andreessen Horowitz has closed its fifth dedicated crypto fund at $2.2 billion, bringing total capital raised across all five funds to approximately $9.8 billion. The figure is a significant step down from the firm’s record $4.5 billion Fund 4, closed in May 2022 at the peak of the last crypto cycle. Fund 5 is roughly half that size.

The compression is not a crisis — it is a correction. Fund 4 was raised at a moment of maximum institutional enthusiasm for digital assets, weeks before the market began its protracted collapse. A $2.2 billion raise in the current environment, with crypto markets having recovered but LP appetite for the asset class still recalibrated downward from 2021–2022 excess, represents a durable institutional commitment rather than cycle-driven exuberance. The fund is smaller because the ask was more credible.

Liquid, a trading platform targeting the convergence of crypto and traditional finance, has closed an $18 million Series Seed round co-led by Neo and Left Lane Capital. The round also drew participation from Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, AntiFund, and Sunflower Capital, alongside existing backers Paradigm and General Catalyst — a heavyweight roster that signals serious institutional confidence in the platform’s thesis.

The core premise is straightforward: modern traders don’t stop when Wall Street closes, and their tools shouldn’t either. Liquid consolidates access to over 500 markets — spanning crypto, equities, commodities, FX, and pre-IPO assets — into a single interface available on iOS, Android, and desktop. Users can trade with up to 200x leverage without surrendering custody of their assets. The platform launched in August 2025 and has already processed over $3 billion in trading volume across 40,000 users.

Tangem, the Swiss hardware wallet company, has published a research report arguing that the cold wallet user profile has been fundamentally misread by the broader market. The report, titled From Storage to Participation: The Rise of Active Self-Custody, was commissioned by Tangem and developed by Protocol Theory, an independent consumer research firm, drawing on data from more than 3,172 U.S.-based crypto users.

The central finding cuts against the conventional image of the cold wallet as a passive vault. Cold wallet users are 1.83x more likely to be active traders than passive holders, and short-term traders represent the single most likely cohort to use a cold wallet at 46%, compared to just 11% of passive owners. Only 9% of cold wallet users qualify as passive holders, versus 25% of centralized exchange users. Cold wallet holders are also 20 percentage points more likely to hold stablecoins than CEX users and 12 percentage points more likely to hold altcoins and other non-core assets — a pattern consistent with active, diversified portfolio management rather than long-term storage.

Canada’s digital asset market took a notable step forward with the launch of QCAD trading on Kraken, giving wider access to one of the country’s most prominent regulated Canadian dollar stablecoins. The listing places QCAD on a major global exchange and strengthens the case that locally denominated stablecoins may become an important bridge between traditional banking systems and blockchain-based markets.

QCAD, developed by Stablecorp, has positioned itself as Canada’s first compliant CAD stablecoin. That status matters because stablecoins tied to national currencies can reduce friction for traders, institutions, and businesses seeking blockchain settlement without repeated foreign exchange conversion into U.S. dollars. Easier access to a CAD stablecoin can support trading pairs, treasury management, payments flows, and faster movement of capital between fiat and digital ecosystems.

The convergence of AI agents and blockchain infrastructure was not planned. It emerged from a practical problem: AI agents that operate autonomously — browsing the web, executing tasks, purchasing services on behalf of users — need a way to transact without human approval at every step. Credit cards require a human name, a billing address, and terms of service that presuppose a human accountholder. Bank accounts require identity verification that legal entities find cumbersome and software agents cannot satisfy. Crypto wallets require none of this.