What happened
Galaxy Research, the research arm of Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital, released its Q2 2026 crypto venture capital review on Tuesday. The topline: $5. 7 billion deployed across the quarter, a figure the firm calls the strongest since the fourth quarter of 2022.
CryptoBriefing first reported the note. Galaxy's team frames the rebound as a return of institutional VC appetite after roughly seven quarters of muted activity that followed the 2022 credit unwind and the FTX collapse. The report does not disclose a full deal-by-deal breakdown in the summary, but Galaxy flags that trading-adjacent businesses - exchanges, market makers, derivatives venues, prime brokerages - absorbed a disproportionate share of the capital.
Why it matters
A $5. 7 billion print is not a normalisation. It's a signal that later-stage checks are back on the table for crypto-native businesses, and that LP capital has cleared internal committees that spent two years saying no.
The last time quarterly funding cleared this bar, Bitcoin was above $47k and the Terra collapse was months away. The concentration in trading matters more than the headline. If most of the money is chasing basis trades, perp venues, and market infrastructure, the ecosystem is doubling down on activity that only pays when volumes stay elevated.
That's a narrower risk profile than the 2021 crop of consumer apps, gaming studios, and DeFi primitives that spread bets across use cases. Galaxy's own language flags this. The rebound looks bullish on the surface.
The composition suggests VCs are underwriting a specific bet on trading infrastructure, not a broad crypto revival.