The crypto venture capital world is buzzing again. On September 18th, Paradigm announced the completion of its third fundraise, reaching a scale of $8.5 billion, setting a new record for industry funding. How will this money be spent? Just listen to their plans.

Three billion dollars will be invested in zero-knowledge proofs and scalability technologies — these are the core of infrastructure and currently the focus of blockchain performance competition. Another twenty-five billion dollars will go into decentralized AI and DePIN projects, which are two hot sectors right now. The Bitcoin ecosystem is also not left out, with a dedicated budget of $1.5 billion. The remaining funds are more flexible, used for liquidity management and secondary market operations.

Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang revealed their approach: adopting a "focused betting" strategy, with each project receiving between $50 million and $300 million — in plain terms, they are investing real money into protocol-level projects that could define the next decade.

Interestingly, this fund has already received commitments from top university endowment funds such as Harvard and Yale. What does this mean? Traditional capital and academic institutions are increasingly recognizing the crypto market. Judging by the fundraising scale and investment focus, the entire ecosystem’s capital flow is pointing in one direction — infrastructure, AI applications, and the Bitcoin ecosystem are the main stages moving forward.