Venture capitalists have started 2026 with significant activity, investing $588 million in cryptocurrency startups during the first two weeks of January, data from DefiLlama shows.
Notable investors this month include Arthur Hayes’ Maelstrom Fund, Revolut’s Vlad Yatsenko, Citadel Securities, and venture capital firms such as Lightspeed, Paradigm, and YZi Labs.
Funding has focused on payments, trading, and centralized exchanges across various venture rounds. Analysts note that privacy is becoming central as crypto integrates more with traditional finance.
Tim Sun, a senior researcher at HashKey Group, told DL News that privacy is "a prerequisite for traditional institutions to migrate on-chain at scale." He added, "Interest in privacy is clearly rising, with a stronger focus on building privacy infrastructure capable of supporting institutional-grade financial use cases." Sun mentioned key technical areas attracting investor interest, including zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, compliant privacy computing, and privacy-preserving payments.
Among the top raises so far in 2026, crypto payments startup Rain led with a $250 million Series C round. This capital injection raises the company's value to nearly $2 billion and positions its technology as core infrastructure for stablecoin commerce. Rain, often compared to Stripe but for stablecoins, enables businesses to issue customized payment cards accepted anywhere Visa is supported. The platform reports processing over $3 billion in annualized transaction volume, with major partners including Western Union. Fresh capital will be used to accelerate international expansion across five continents as the firm pushes stablecoins deeper into mainstream commerce.
Trading infrastructure firm Alpaca raised $150 million in a Series D, lifting its valuation to $1.2 billion. Investors included Citadel Securities, Revolut’s Vlad Yatsenko, and a group of venture capitalists. Built as an API-first business, Alpaca supports trading, data, and custody for millions of accounts across 40 countries, serving clients such as Kraken. The company stated, "This milestone comes after a busy 2025, where we launched several key products and features, including 24/5 trading, fixed income, Instant Tokenisation Network, Fully Paid Securities Lending, and Omnibus Subaccounting technology."
Indonesian centralized exchange ICEx raised $70 million to expand its spot trading infrastructure and deepen digital asset services for retail and institutional clients. The exchange is positioning itself as a regulated gateway for South East Asia, anchored by compliant fiat off-ramps aligned with local banking rules. This raise highlights the growth of localized products as regional exchanges in many countries compete with international giants like Coinbase.