Coinbase’s venture capital arm leads 2026 crypto investing even as funding withered and unique investors shied away amid the bear market.
Update, July 14, 6:56 am UTC: This article has been updated to include comments from Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures.
Coinbase Ventures, the corporate venture capital (VC) arm of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, led the ranks of crypto-focused VC's with 30 deals in the first half of 2026.
Runner-up Animoca Brands completed 19 investments, while Silicon Valley VC a16z logged 18 deals and stablecoin giant Tether completed 15, according to data aggregator CryptoRank.
In the past 12 months Coinbase Ventures completed a peer-best 75 deals, followed by Animoca Brands with 40, YZi Labs (previously Binance Labs) with 39, GSR with 31 and a16z with 30.
Those VC deals defy a bear market that saw the total amount raised by cryptocurrency companies fall to $1.4 billion in June, down 63% from $3.8 billion in April.
Deal counts also fell in June, to 61 fundraising rounds, down from 89 rounds in May. Still, last month showed a slight recovery compared to April, when crypto VC funding hit a two-year low of $698 million across 71 total fundraising rounds.
So far in July, crypto firms raised $456 million across 12 funding rounds.
The strongest investors “ignore short-term market noise and lean into long-term conviction,” Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures, told Cointelegraph, adding:
Top active investors and top categories by funding deals. Source: CryptoRank
Looking at the deals of the past six months, Coinbase Ventures participated in seven investment rounds tied to payment protocols, four rounds for DeFi projects and three rounds for infrastructure and real-world asset tokenization projects, respectively.
However, the number of unique investors shrunk to 242 in June, from 452 unique investors in October 2025.
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