Anchorage Digital taps into early-stage protocols with new venture unit

Anchorage Digital is leveraging its deep institutional expertise to become a foundational partner. Its venture arm aims to co-build the next generation of on-chain infrastructure, ensuring it meets Wall Street’s rigorous standards.

Summary

• Anchorage Digital has launched Anchorage Digital Ventures to back early-stage protocol teams with both capital and hands-on institutional expertise.
• The venture arm aims to co-build core infrastructure, Bitcoin DeFi, and real-world asset protocols, aligning with Wall Street standards.
• The move comes amid a 55% drop in crypto VC funding, as investors shift toward selective, high-quality bets in seed and early-stage rounds.

On August 25, crypto custody firm Anchorage Digital announced the launch of Anchorage Digital Ventures, a new strategic investment arm purpose-built to back early-stage protocol teams. The move signals a significant evolution for the company, known primarily as a vault for institutional crypto assets.

Rather than just providing capital, the program offers hands-on support from the company’s product, engineering, and go-to-market teams, effectively embedding its institutional operational knowledge directly into nascent projects. Anchorage Digital said a select group of applicants will also be invited to pitch at a private demo day during the Token2049 conference in Singapore this October.

Betting on the builders in a bearish VC climate

According to the firm’s announcement, Anchorage Digital Ventures was created because even the most visionary teams often “stall out transforming breakthrough ideas into scalable reality.”

The unit aims to fix this by providing more than capital; it offers what the company terms “the seasoned support of the team that scaled the leading crypto platform trusted by the world’s top institutions.”

This includes direct, one-on-one guidance on technical architecture, institutional readiness, and, crucially, liquidity and market-maker strategy, which could potentially alleviate operational hurdles that have doomed countless promising protocols.

Current VC climate

The move is particularly notable given the current venture capital landscape. According to PitchBook’s Q2 2025 Crypto VC Trends report, overall venture funding for crypto startups has fallen to a multi-year low, with total investment plunging 55% quarter-over-quarter.

This contraction creates a paradox where, despite a rallying public market and record stablecoin circulation, the innovators building the base layer are facing a capital drought. Yet, the same PitchBook report reveals a telling nuance: median deal sizes and valuations for seed and early-stage rounds actually reached new highs.

The report suggests flight to quality, where investors are concentrating larger sums on fewer, premium bets. Anchorage Digital Ventures appears to be on this trend. The company is not casting a wide net but rather making concentrated, strategic bets on teams building foundational technology, Bitcoin DeFi, real-world assets, and core infrastructure; the very primitives believed to drive the next cycle of adoption.