Published on January 14, 2026
Watch the video of this panel on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel:
Panel talk with Lamon Rutten (CEO at eXchange1), Anna Wroblewska (Chief Business Officer at Dinari), Shauli Rejwan (MasterKey VC), Charles Edwards (Founder at Capriole Investments), Hein Tibosch (Head of Product & OTC, Digital Assets at Flow Traders), Henson Orser (CEO at Soter Insure) and Anna Tutova (Founder at AI Crypto Minds)
Anna Tutova (Founder at AI Crypto Minds):
And I would like first to touch on the points of venture capital investing. If we check the data, we can see that in Q3 2025, $4.19 billion was invested into Web3 startups, and 56% of those deals were for later-stage financing for crypto startups. But we haven’t really seen the market for altcoins taking off. For later-stage companies, however, it has been really booming.
We also see a lot of M&A deals—over 100 M&A deals—and some super big ones: Ripple acquiring Hidden Roam for $1.25 billion, Stripe acquiring Bridge for over $1 billion, and so on. So we see a lot of traditional businesses, as well as large companies, acquiring other companies, the same as Coinbase acquiring Derby, and so on. Additionally, we see other huge rounds for private equity financing, like for Kraken.
They raised over $500 million. We saw the news about Tether planning to raise $500 million at a $20 billion valuation, and so on. So the industry at that stage is really booming.
But for early-stage investing, it’s a bit tricky and different. So I would like first to ask Saul. Basically, we haven’t really seen an altcoin season in this cycle.
So how are you changing your investing approach in the current institutionally focused environment?
Shauli Rejwan (MasterKey VC):
Thank you for the question. Actually, it’s pretty aligned with what we do at Masterkey. So we don’t usually do trading, and we don’t do alts.
What we do look for is real use cases. And what we actually see these days is the maturity of the ecosystem. It’s also important to understand a few different forces that are affecting general VC and TMT.
In the last few years, the main driver for VCs was AI. We’ve all been there. We’ve all seen that a lot of startups in different segments, just outside of crypto and Web3, didn’t survive.
There literally came out zero dry powder. They don’t get investment. They don’t get funding.
What we do see in our space are different forces at play, and M&As are just a side effect. Stablecoins—this is an unbelievable opportunity that started emerging in the space. It started with Tether in 2015, I think.
And what we’ve seen, based on the recent Horowitz report, is $45 trillion in settlements. Out of that, $9 trillion is for payments. So it’s not something we can think of as just a side thing.
Stablecoins are becoming a killer app, and financial or more fintech companies like Stripe, etc., have to take steps. We also saw it recently—I’m based in Israel—and what we’ve seen in the last two weeks is that Fortify was acquired by Paxos. It’s the third Israeli acquisition for custodial solutions.
When you’re looking at the territory of deep tech and MPC, Coinbase acquired Unbound Security. That is basically the MPC engine that secures the ETF and the custodian for Coinbase. PayPal acquired Curve.
Galaxy acquired GK8. And you’re most likely using Fireblocks if you’re institutional. These are all Israeli companies now. Fortify was acquired.
We also see that stocks on-chain are becoming a massive opportunity. And it’s not just because you can do 24/7 trading. It’s also because of DeFi applications that just did not exist for real retail users investing in stocks. Now they’re capable of doing it.
Beck.Finance was acquired by Kraken recently. So what we see is basically consolidation around real use cases for real market money makers, which is pretty aligned with our thesis.
It means that alts are not going to be there—don’t get me wrong. Alts will continue. Alts will shine. Alts will start trading at $5 billion valuations from day one—I’m not really sure.
When you see VCs pumping prices and taking tokens to the public, I’m not a fan of that model. I’m much more a fan of the models of Echo, which was also acquired by Coinbase, and Legion.
Those models basically bring the community in to take part from day one, from the get-go, and build the project together. And that’s the way early backers can also make a profit.
Anna Tutova:
Thank you. I would say it’s quite questionable with altcoins, because they have become quite speculative. But as you mentioned, a lot of traditional businesses with real business models are getting acquired currently.
And we also see a massive drop in the crypto market overall—not only for altcoins, but also for Bitcoin. And all these constant liquidations, especially after October 11, when over $19.3 billion was liquidated from the market.
We are currently also in extreme fear on the Fear and Greed Index, at 25. And Bitcoin has dropped as well by more than 30% from its all-time high.
