Anna Karenina never invested in alt-coins, but had she done so in the second quarter of this 2025th year since the Nativity of Christ, even she would have slammed her velvet purse shut.
Capital, once flooding into blockchain ventures like spring meltwater into the Moskva, now trickles with a parsimony that would make old Count Rostov blush.
Galaxy, whose researchers must be commended for their industrious sorrow, report a paltry $1.97 billion-yes, billion with a b, like the bewilderment of Moscow shopkeepers watching another Czarist decree.
Down a full 59 %, the chief statistician Alex Thorn (who looks too cheerful for his own doom-mongering) reminds us that the prior quarter was inflated by a lone $2 billion Emirati love-letter to Binance.
Take that fluke away and we are down a merely mortal 29 %, which is like telling Pierre that the bear took only one leg-comfort of sorts.
Pre-seed, that dewy dawn of human hope, withers like a dandelion under Aunt Betsy’s heel
Later-stage rounds-those portly gentlemen already in top-hats and monocles-snapped up 52 % of the coins, the second time since ’21 they have out-lunched the barefoot children of pre-seed.
What does this portend? Nothing more nor less than the senescence of a market that once imagined it would never age, like Natasha Rostova dancing at her first ball forever.
Mining, an activity once confined to Siberian gulags and fevered dreams, topped the charts with $300 million, most of it shovelled into a mysterious cloud-mining outfit called XY Miners-possibly operated by gnomes under the Ural mountains (no confirmation, but optimism dies hard).
Privacy, security and other polite euphemisms followed, trailing vapors of respectability.
“Crypto VC activity remains depressed compared to prior bull markets,” writes Mr. Thorn, who perhaps believes that stating the obvious is itself a form of penance.
“Investment is the second smallest since Q4 2020,” he adds, as though reciting Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead Quarter.
Indeed, the macro world has become the sort of dinner host who serves turnip soup and expects gratitude.
Spot ETFs, DATCOs (acronymic horrors spawned by MBA grads), and the glittering allure of artificial intelligence now compete for capital in a gladiatorial arena where your humble crypto fund is the Christian with poor dental coverage.
AI, of course, never accidentally forgets a seed phrase.
Geographically, the United States clutched 47.8 % of funds and 41.2 % of deals-Uncle Sam, ever the portly relative hogging the samovar at Easter.
The United Kingdom stood second, stiff-upper-lipping its 7 % with characteristic pride concealed by fog.
Pre-seed volume faded, but “remained robust” in the same sense that Russian soldiers at Borodino “remained hopeful.”
Venture fundraising-raising money to raise money-mustered only $1.76 billion across a mere 21 newborn funds.
In another century, such a figure would launch a Siberian rail line or three wars.
Now it barely buys a Manhattan penthouse replete with NFT wallpaper. 🤷‍♂️
Yet not all is gloom.
Sustained deal flow in AI, infrastructure, and degenerate trading apps persists, proving that cockroaches, memes, and Russian literature all survive apocalypse.
“Sustained deal flow” is, after all, the economist’s way of whispering: God is not yet bored with us.
Thus the chronicle ends, with Bitcoin soaring above the carnage like Kutuzov surveying the abandoned guns at Austerlitz-smiling, perhaps, at the folly of men and the durability of stories we tell ourselves about numbers on a screen.
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2025-08-13 01:28