Crypto VC Deals Hit 5-Year Low, Fairshake PAC Sweeps Primaries, Bitcoin Up 318% Since 2022

Crypto News

Monthly venture capital deal count across the crypto sector dropped to roughly 50 transactions in May, a level not observed since before the 2021 cycle when the industry was a fraction of its current scale. Compression is visible across nearly every category, with Infrastructure and Crypto Financial Services — historically the most active buckets — tracking near multi-year lows. Capital and mindshare have rotated structurally toward artificial intelligence, and the space has struggled to produce the volume of compelling early-stage opportunities that defined prior cycles. Yet dollar volume has held up: prediction market platform Kalshi's recent $1 billion round shows how concentration is reshaping the funding landscape into fewer deals with larger checks per winner.

Blockware has appointed Megan Brooks-Anderson as Chief Executive Officer following the board's removal of Mason Jappa, with the Houston-based platform spanning AI/HPC compute, Bitcoin mining, data center hosting, and marketplace liquidity. Brooks-Anderson previously served as Chief Strategy Officer and brings more than two decades of experience, including a tenure as COO at Riot Platforms where she helped scale one of North America's largest mining operations. She will lead alongside newly appointed President Sam Chwarzynski as the firm executes an aggressive pivot into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing infrastructure, with a formal expansion announcement scheduled for July. Core mining remains central to the long-term strategy.

Perplexity unveiled a hybrid agentic inference system at Computex 2026 in Taipei, automatically splitting AI workloads between a user's local device and cloud-based frontier models without manual configuration. Announced on stage by CEO Aravind Srinivas alongside Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, the feature ships in July on Perplexity Computer and was demoed on Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, initially exclusive to the Windows PC app. A compact local model acts as a traffic cop, keeping sensitive financial, health, and personal data on the device while routing capability-intensive tasks to the cloud. Srinivas framed the move around economics: the company's revenue grew fivefold to $500 million while headcount rose only 34%.

Political action committees backed by the cryptocurrency industry claimed sweeping primary victories on Tuesday, with 11 Democratic and Republican candidates advancing across California, New Jersey, and South Dakota after roughly $3.5 million in supportive media buys. Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs — both affiliated with the Fairshake super PAC funded largely by Coinbase and Ripple Labs — backed winners including Ted Lieu, Zoe Lofgren, Rob Menendez, and Senator Mike Rounds. Fairshake reported a $193 million war chest in January and is now turning its attention to Maryland's 5th Congressional district, where Protect Progress has already spent more than $3.1 million supporting Democratic candidate Adrian Boafo ahead of the June 23 primary.

A new hybrid political action committee, Defend Developers, has entered the campaign-funding arena with a narrower mandate: shielding builders of DeFi protocols from legal vulnerabilities by backing incumbent lawmakers who have already proven sympathetic to the cause. Founded by Gavin Zavatone, the policy lead at the DeFi Education Fund, the committee plans to raise and contribute over six figures across dozens of midterm races. Its board includes members from Uniswap Labs and the Solana Policy Institute. While the operation will not rival Fairshake's scale, it joins a widening field that includes the Tether-linked Fellowship PAC and the Winklevoss-tied Digital Freedom Fund.

Raoul Pal, the former Goldman Sachs hedge-fund sales head who founded Real Vision, rejected the narrative that capital is fleeing crypto for technology equities, pointing to performance data from the 2022 liquidity-cycle trough. Measured from the FTX-era low near $15,700 in November 2022, Bitcoin has gained roughly 318% to trade near $65,800, outpacing the Nasdaq 100's 187% advance over the same span. Pal frames the recent weakness as a mid-cycle correction within a broader liquidity-driven bull market. Bitcoin slipped about 2.7% over the past 24 hours and sits well below its all-time high of $126,080, though its market capitalization remains above $1.3 trillion.

Across these stories a single arc emerges: the industry is consolidating politically and economically even as on-chain fundamentals hold. Venture money is rotating into fewer, larger bets while operators like Blockware pivot toward AI infrastructure to diversify revenue beyond mining. Meanwhile, Fairshake's primary sweep and the launch of Defend Developers show that the sector is converting balance-sheet strength into durable policy leverage ahead of the midterms, with the CLARITY Act battle over stablecoin yield looming. Macro voices argue the blockchain sector's underperformance is cyclical rather than terminal — a thesis that hinges on whether liquidity expansion resumes in the second half of 2026.