Morning Minute: Paradigm Raises $1.2B Fund as Crypto’s Top VC Pushes Into AI
Paradigm raised a $1.2 billion fund and is expanding beyond crypto into AI and robotics, reflecting a broader shift in venture capital as AI attracts most funding and crypto activity weakens. The firm says it is not abandoning crypto, pointing to recent investments in DeFi, tokenized treasuries, and prediction markets, but it is now evaluating AI opportunities with the same technical team. BNB Chain also announced a 2026 roadmap for a new Layer-1 built for autonomous AI agents that trade, manage portfolios, and provide liquidity. The chain is designed for very high speed, low latency, and self-custody, with no public mempool to reduce front-running and sandwich attacks. It also plans native privacy, account abstraction, AI security, and post-quantum cryptography. The move reflects growing competition to build infrastructure for “agentic” commerce, even though the market is still small today.
