BTC breaks new highs, VC is still waiting and watching: May's crypto market is intertwined with hot and cold
Reprinted from chaincatcher
05/31/2025·3DCompiled by: Darren, RootData
Market sentiment rebounded, BTC made a strong breakthrough, and VC
investment and financing popularity cooled down slightly
In May 2025, Bitcoin (BTC) broke through a record high with a strong momentum of $111,980, with an extremely strong trend. Since May, the fear and greed index in the cryptocurrency market has continued to remain above 50, indicating that market sentiment has recovered significantly from the sluggish period in the previous two months, investor confidence has gradually recovered, and the overall market trend has continued to improve.
However, in contrast to market price performance, investment and financing activities in the primary market continue to cool down. In May, there were about 50 financing events in the crypto sector, a month-on-month decrease of about 24% and a year-on-year decrease of nearly 70%; the total financing amount was about US$450 million, a month-on-month decrease of 35% and a year-on-year decrease of 56%. This reflects that despite the sharp rise in market prices, venture capital institutions are taking fewer attempts and showing a more cautious attitude.
Judging from the financing structure, the average single financing amount this month was US$21.9161 million, and the median was US$6.2 million, indicating that although some projects can still obtain large amounts of financing, the overall financing distribution tends to polarize, and the difficulty of fundraising for small and medium-sized projects is still relatively high.
In summary, although BTC prices hit a new high, the market sentiment has significantly heated up, the VC shooting rhythm of the primary market has not recovered simultaneously, indicating that the strength of the secondary market has not yet been fully transmitted to the project investment end. What is worth paying attention to in the future is whether if market sentiment continues to rise, will it drive the renewed activity of primary market financing in the next few months.
In this article, we will focus on specific financing data, active investors, hot search projects and other aspects to present the changing trends of the crypto market for everyone.
1. Financing data
In May 2025, there were many eye-catching large-scale financing and mergers and acquisitions in the crypto market. Although the overall number has dropped slightly, the strong actions of leading exchanges and celebrity projects still reflect the trend of internal resources in the industry being concentrated towards leading companies.
The most influential event this month is Coinbase’s acquisition of Deribit, the world’s largest crypto options exchange, for $2.9 billion . This merger is not only the largest so far this year, but also one of the most important strategic integrations in the history of the crypto market, marking that centralized exchanges are achieving strong alliances by expanding their derivatives market territory.
In addition to the merger, there was one financing amount exceeding US$100 million, and another 15 financing or merger events exceeded US$10 million, indicating that medium and large transactions are still active. Some representative financing events include:
- Worldcoin completed a US$135 million OTC financing, with leading institutions such as a16z and Bain Capital Crypto;
- Conduit completed a US$36 million Series A financing, led by Dragonfly, and the participants include DCG, Sound Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Commerce Ventures;
- Doppel completed a US$35 million Series B financing led by Bessemer Ventures, with investments from a16z, 9Yards Capital and others.
Although the above major events are still interesting, from the overall number, there were only 7 mergers and acquisitions in the crypto industry in May , the same as April, and far lower than the level of more than 10 in the first quarter of this year. This trend shows that although leading projects can still obtain large amounts of funds or conduct capital integration, the overall activity of mergers and acquisitions in the industry is slowing down, and capital parties prefer to concentrate on targets with stronger certainty.
In general , large-scale mergers and acquisitions and financing events in May were still active, and the leading platforms further consolidated their market position with the help of capital actions. However, the total number of mergers and acquisitions incidents has been at a low level for two consecutive months, reflecting that after the industry experienced a rebound in the market at the beginning of the year, investors and mergers and acquisitions still maintained a certain cautious attitude. In the future, we still need to pay attention to whether the continuous recovery of the secondary market can drive the recovery of mergers and acquisitions in the primary market in the third quarter.
2. VC dynamics
a16z The venture capital firm with the highest investment frequency in May, with four shots: Worldcoi n ($135 million), Catena Labs ($18 million), KYD Labs ($7 million), Doppel ($35 million).
The activity was followed by Raj Gokal, Dragonfly, Mirana Ventures, Maelstrom Capital , CMS Holdings, Coinbase Ventures , and Borderless Capital, all of which took three shots.
At the same time, several funds disclosed the progress of fundraising this month: dao5 completed a $220 million fundraising on May 1; Theta Blockchain Ventures completed a $175 million fundraising on May 21; 10K Ventures announced on May 30 that it had officially completed the first $10 million crypto-mixed strategy investment fundraising.
3. Character dynamics
RootData also records the career trends of tens of thousands of well-known crypto industry personnel and executives. Here are some of the career trends of people worth noting:
Scott Elliot's new head of compliance at Beam, a payments service provider ;
James Greenwood is the new CEO (CEO) of UAE cryptocurrency Exchange M2, who previously worked at Bitstamp;
Nenter Chow is the new global CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Bitmart, who previously was a partner at Animoca Brands;
Diana Zhang's new Grayscale COO, who was previously the COO of BlockTower Capital;
Victor Estival 's new head of product marketing for the Algorand Foundation, previously head of product marketing for Polygon and worked at Parity Technologies and Chainlink;
Paul Burak is the new US Compliance Manager at Crypto.com , who was previously the Chief Compliance Officer of Stablecorp; for more information, please see: https://www.rootdata.com/zh/people
4. Popular projects
RootData popularity value is calculated by normalizing the platform search volume, click volume, user voting and Twitter popularity index. The most popular items in May include:
Movement is a modular framework for building and deploying Move-based infrastructure, applications, and blockchains in any distributed environment. The team is building a suite of products and services that enable non-Move protocols to leverage the power of the Move programming language without writing a single line of Move code. The team’s first version M1 redefines L1 as a vertically combinable and horizontally scalable Layer 1 framework that is compatible with Solidity, connects EVM and Move liquidity, and allows builders to customize modular and interoperable application chains with different user bases and liquidity out of the box.
B² Network is an EVM-compatible Rollup based on Bitcoin’s zero-knowledge proof verification commitment. Rollup data and zk proof verification commitments are recorded on the Bitcoin network and are eventually confirmed through the challenge-response mechanism.
Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the largest and oldest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Kraken is committed to making cryptocurrencies available to use and access all over the world and to enable people from all walks of life to invest in their independence. In September 2020, Wyoming granted Kraken permission to create a crypto bank in the state, making Kraken the first cryptocurrency exchange in the United States to create a bank.
Tether is the world's largest stablecoin issuer, a company that issues stablecoins 1:1 pegged to fiat currencies, aiming to promote the digital use of fiat currencies. It currently has four departments: Tether Data focuses on AI and P2P technology investment; Tether Finance manages stablecoin services; Tether Power is responsible for sustainable Bitcoin mining; and Tether Edu promotes digital skills education.
Space and Time is a web3 native decentralized data platform that supports low-latency query and tamper-proof analysis across Web3. Built on Space and Time, Dapps become blockchain interoperable, handling SQL + machine learning for gaming/DeFi data and any decentralized applications that require verified tamper-proof, blockchain security or enterprise-scale.
Deribit is currently the largest cryptocurrency options exchange, with its Bitcoin option trading volume accounting for more than 80% of the total market trading volume and Ethereum option trading volume accounting for more than 90% of the total market trading volume. Like most cryptocurrency exchanges, Deribit trades at 24x7. Although Deribit accounts for the vast majority of the Bitcoin options market trading volume, it is an unregulated exchange.
Redact is a Web3 entertainment ecosystem. Utilizing the power of blockchain and artificial intelligence, Redact is building an ecosystem of products to form an entertainment data circle where Web3 users can do their favorite things – play, trade, watch and receive rewards. Supported by RDAC tokens, Redact aims to support its entertainment and gamified products through data protocols, which will provide users with a better, more targeted experience and provide greater business opportunities for web3 companies and Dapps.
NEXPACE is Nexon's blockchain department, empowering players, creators and developers through blockchain and Web3 technology, promoting interaction with game IP, while expanding player engagement, user base, and extending the IP life cycle.
World Liberty Financial is a DeFi project supported by the Donald Trump family. Its mission is to “make cryptocurrency and the United States great by driving the massive adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance.” World Liberty Financial will first launch as a marketplace for cryptocurrency lending with Aave infrastructure and launch its governance token WLFI and stablecoin USD1, which unlike other governance tokens such as UNI and MKR, does not provide economic rights.
Coinbase is one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, founded in June 2012 by former Airbnb engineer Brian Armstrong. As of July 2022, approximately 98 million verified users, 13,000 institutions and 230,000 ecosystem partners in more than 100 countries believe that Coinbase can easily and securely invest, consume, save, earn and use cryptocurrencies. Coinbase’s mission is to improve the world’s economic freedom.
Huma Finance is a PayFi network that powers global payment financing and instant liquidity is available anytime, anywhere.
SOON is a rollup stack designed to provide top-level performance for all layer 1 blockchains. SOON's vision is to implement Super Application Stack (SAS). SAS consists of four core products: SOON Mainnet, SOON Stack, InterSOON and Simpfor.fun. These components work together to provide high-performance, interoperable and scalable solutions. In addition, the integration of LiveTrade and simpfor.fun further strengthens SOON's vision to create a super gateway for Web2 users through the live broadcast platform. This strategic expansion ensures that users experience seamless chain interaction directly in familiar environments such as Twitch and SOOP.
Sophon is an entertainment-centric ecosystem built into a modular summary using zkSync's ZK Stack technology. As a ZK chain leveraging the ZK Stack, Sophon is designed to be tailored to any high-throughput application, such as artificial intelligence and gaming.
5. Project News
In May, RootData also recorded many main network online and recent airdrop events of many projects, helping users understand important project dynamics in the market and master earlier alpha opportunities.
New items worth noting this month include:
Long : A verifiable fair auction platform
AI-GOV: A Political and Media AI Agent Platform
The Trenches : Provides alpha and insight into leading cryptocurrency products and applications
easeflow : easeflow is a decentralized node layer used to create a powerful modular infrastructure
Jirasan : Jirasan is a collection of 10,000 NFTs that provide access to members of the PG Group and Redacted ecosystem.
revealcam.fun : revealcam.fun is a socialfi application on Base, aiming to enable more people to monetize their creativity on the chain.
Asula : Asula builds the next generation of products at the intersection of Bitcoin, blockchain infrastructure and finance.
Raiku: Solana Coordination Layer
Flame : Celestia's native decentralized transaction protocol
Loud!: A Kaito-based information tokenization protocol.
Due to space limitations and more complete and timely data information, please visit the official website of RootData ( https://www.rootdata.com/zh/ ) to view and learn about it.
jinse