Crypto VC funding hits $191.3M as infrastructure and interoperability steal the spotlight
Between December 7 and 13, 2025, venture capital activity in the crypto sector reached a combined total of 191.3 million dollars spread across 17 projects. The bulk of the capital flowed into core infrastructure and interoperability solutions, confirming a clear investor preference for the “picks and shovels” of the next cycle rather than speculative tokens or purely consumer-facing apps.
At the top of the list, Real Finance and LI.FI each closed 29 million dollars in fresh funding, tying as the week’s largest raises. Their deals anchor a broader narrative: capital is concentrating in projects that aim to make crypto rails usable, scalable, and connectable for institutions and mainstream users.
Real Finance: building institutional rails for tokenized markets
Real Finance’s 29 million dollar round is explicitly aimed at building out institutional-grade infrastructure for the tokenized finance ecosystem. The company positions itself as a bridge between traditional financial institutions and on-chain assets, developing tools that make it easier for banks, asset managers, and other regulated players to move into tokenization without sacrificing compliance or security.
The new funding will be used to expand Real Finance’s product suite, which focuses on settlement rails, risk management tooling, and integrations with existing market infrastructure. The project’s roadmap suggests a heavy emphasis on enabling tokenized versions of real-world assets, such as bonds, funds, and structured products, in line with the wider 2025 trend toward asset tokenization.
Investor participation in this round is being framed as a direct vote of confidence in the thesis that institutions, not retail traders, will drive the next major wave of on-chain activity. Real Finance is betting that future capital markets will rely on blockchain rails, but will still demand the same level of oversight, reporting, and reliability that institutions are used to in the traditional system.
LI.FI: interoperability as the connective tissue of Web3
Matching Real Finance’s raise, interoperability protocol LI.FI also secured 29 million dollars. LI.FI operates in the critical layer that connects isolated blockchains and rollups into a unified transaction environment, allowing users and applications to move assets and data across networks in a secure and optimized way.
The funding will be channeled into expanding support for more chains and scaling up LI.FI’s routing and bridging infrastructure. The project aims to abstract away the complexity of navigating different networks, which remains one of the key friction points for both developers and end users. As more applications deploy on specialized chains and modular architectures proliferate, robust interoperability becomes not just useful, but indispensable.
The size of LI.FI’s round underscores how strongly investors now view cross-chain connectivity as core infrastructure rather than a peripheral convenience. It also reflects a maturing understanding that Web3 will be multi-chain by default, and that liquidity and users must be able to flow across that landscape without constantly dealing with manual bridges and complex UX.
TenX: expanding the protocol layer with a 22M dollar raise
TenX Protocol followed closely behind the top two with a 22 million dollar funding round. While details of the raise are more limited, TenX is focused on protocol-level innovation, likely in areas such as scaling, execution environments, or advanced DeFi primitives.
Capital at this scale suggests that investors see meaningful technical differentiation or a strong market niche for TenX’s solution. Whether it’s enabling more efficient trading, new yield mechanisms, or better security guarantees, TenX falls into the broader category of core protocols that aim to make decentralized finance more robust and scalable.
The combination of Real Finance, LI.FI, and TenX leading this week’s charts reveals how capital is clustering around foundational layers, rather than speculative tokens or short-lived narrative plays. Investors appear to be prioritizing projects with long runway and clear infrastructural value.
MetaComp: one of Singapore’s largest stablecoin payments rounds
Another notable raise came from MetaComp, which secured 22 million dollars in a pre-Series A round. Based in Singapore, MetaComp is building out stablecoin payment infrastructure and has recorded one of the country’s largest early-stage funding events in this niche for 2025.
The new capital will be used to scale its StableX Network, a system designed to bridge the familiarity of Web2 payments with the programmability and speed of Web3. MetaComp frames its approach as “Web2.5”: offering businesses and users a user experience that feels like traditional fintech, while settlement and asset management increasingly move on-chain.
By focusing on stablecoins, MetaComp is addressing one of the clearest real-world use cases for blockchain technology: fast, low-cost, and programmable digital payments that can integrate seamlessly into existing financial operations. This focus aligns with regulatory interest in stablecoins as a potential backbone for future digital money systems.
Helios: 15M dollars to bring on-chain ETFs to the masses
Helios secured a 15 million dollar investment commitment, aimed at expanding its ecosystem and distribution of on-chain exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The project’s ambition is straightforward but ambitious: democratize access to ETF-style products that exist natively on blockchain networks.
With this funding, Helios plans to grow its product range, integrate with more wallets and platforms, and refine the regulatory and compliance frameworks required to offer ETF-like exposure on-chain to a global user base. For investors who want diversified portfolios or exposure to indices, but also wish to retain on-chain custody and composability, on-chain ETFs are an appealing middle ground.
The Helios raise highlights how tokenization is shifting from early experiments to structured, regulated-style products that resemble familiar financial instruments but are settled and managed via smart contracts.
Cascade, Surf, and other sub-15M raises
Below the major headline rounds, several other projects each raised under 15 million dollars, adding breadth to the week’s 191.3 million dollar total. Among them are Cascade and Surf, along with a handful of other infrastructure, tooling, and application-layer teams.
While smaller in size, these rounds often target very specific pain points: developer tooling, security infrastructure, data availability, user experience improvements, or institutional-grade custody. Such focused bets show that investors are not only funding massive, all-encompassing platforms, but also specialized components that make the broader ecosystem safer and more usable.
Collectively, these sub-15M dollar deals contribute to a layered stack: from low-level networking and security to mid-layer protocols and end-user applications. This stacking effect is typical in maturing tech cycles, where success depends on the reliability of each component in the chain.
Why infrastructure and interoperability dominate VC interest now
The concentration of capital in infrastructure and interoperability this week is not accidental. After several years of speculative manias and sharp drawdowns, investors have become more conservative and thesis-driven. They increasingly favor:
– Projects that generate real, recurring usage rather than one-off hype.
– Teams that enable other builders and institutions, creating leverage on ecosystem growth.
– Business models aligned with transaction volume, custody, or enterprise services, rather than pure token appreciation.
Infrastructure projects like Real Finance or interoperability layers like LI.FI fit neatly into this updated playbook. They benefit from network effects: once integrated into multiple platforms or institutions, they become sticky and defensible. This dynamic helps justify larger checks and longer investment horizons.
Moreover, as tokenization of real-world assets accelerates and multi-chain architectures become the norm, missing infrastructure is now an obvious bottleneck. Funding is flowing to close those gaps before the next wave of adoption.
What this week’s numbers signal for the broader crypto market
A 191.3 million dollar week across 17 deals is a strong indicator that, despite market volatility, serious capital remains committed to the long-term crypto thesis. Several macro signals can be inferred:
1. Institutionalization is no longer a distant dream: Real Finance, MetaComp, and Helios all position themselves directly around institutional or regulated-style products, from tokenized assets to stablecoin payments to ETF-like structures.
2. Bridges and routing are a prerequisite for mainstream use: LI.FI’s raise confirms that users will not tolerate fragmented liquidity and complex cross-chain workflows. Capital is backing the idea of a more seamless multi-chain experience.
3. Product-market fit matters more than narrative: Many of these projects address concrete needs — payment rails, compliance-ready tokenization, capital markets tooling — instead of chasing the narrative cycle of the month.
4. Regional hubs are strengthening: MetaComp’s progress in Singapore illustrates how specific jurisdictions are becoming focal points for regulated crypto and stablecoin innovation, as policy clarity improves.
How founders can interpret this funding wave
For crypto entrepreneurs, this week’s funding snapshot provides practical guidance on where investor appetite is strongest:
– Solve infrastructure bottlenecks: Whether it’s compliance, settlement finality, cross-chain messaging, or asset tokenization rails, investors are looking for solutions that unlock new use cases for many other projects, not just a single app.
– Build for institutions, not just early adopters: Teams that understand regulatory, custody, and reporting requirements — and bake them into their products — are better positioned to raise larger rounds in the current environment.
– Emphasize security and reliability: With institutional users in focus, due diligence on security, audits, governance, and operational resilience is tighter than ever. These are now core selling points, not afterthoughts.
– Show real traction and integrations: Projects like LI.FI and Real Finance benefit from being deeply embedded into ecosystem workflows. Founders should prioritize integrations, partnerships, and measurable usage when pitching.
Implications for investors and market participants
For professional and retail investors, the composition of this week’s raises is a useful barometer of where sophisticated capital believes lasting value will be created:
– Tokenization and on-chain finance are no longer purely experimental; the volume of capital flowing into Real Finance and Helios reflects a belief that regulated, on-chain representations of traditional assets will become mainstream.
– Payments and stablecoins remain a top conviction area, with MetaComp’s round showcasing how payments infrastructure is evolving beyond simple transfer apps into full-stack networks that plug into both Web2 and Web3.
– Cross-chain liquidity and routing are being treated as systemic infrastructure, suggesting that protocols enabling frictionless movement of value will sit at the core of the future crypto stack.
Market participants can use these signals to reassess their own exposure. Rather than focusing solely on speculative tokens, they may want to pay more attention to the underlying infrastructure that institutions and developers are actually adopting.
The bigger arc: 2025 as the year of tokenization and structured crypto finance
This week’s funding data also fits a broader 2025 storyline: the shift from experimental DeFi and NFT hype toward structured, institutional-grade crypto finance. Tokenized funds, on-chain ETFs, real-world assets, and compliant stablecoin infrastructure are increasingly dominating product roadmaps and investment memos.
Instead of promising to replace the existing financial system overnight, many of the funded projects are weaving blockchain rails into it. They focus on interoperability not just between chains, but between regulatory frameworks, custodians, and traditional financial institutions.
If this trajectory continues, future funding rounds are likely to look less like bets on isolated protocols and more like investments into a deeply interconnected financial operating system. The week of December 7–13, with its 191.3 million dollars centered on infrastructure and interoperability, offers a clear snapshot of that transition in progress.
Outlook: what to watch in the coming quarters
Looking ahead, several developments will determine how impactful this week’s funded projects ultimately become:
– The pace at which Real Finance and similar players can onboard major institutions to tokenized products.
– Whether LI.FI and other interoperability protocols can maintain security while scaling to support more chains, rollups, and execution environments.
– How quickly MetaComp and other stablecoin payment networks can convert pilots and partnerships into real transaction volume.
– The regulatory stance on on-chain ETFs and tokenized securities, which will shape Helios’s ability to reach a truly global user base.
As these projects execute on their roadmaps, their progress will act as a practical measure of crypto’s evolution from a speculative asset class to a foundational layer of global finance. For now, the capital allocation of this week tells a consistent story: investors are backing the rails, bridges, and compliance layers that must exist before the next billion users and institutions can enter the space without ever needing to think about “blockchain” at all.