Weekly increase
- AI-related crypto companies raised nearly $1.9 billion in 2025.
- The market is expected to swell to $1 trillion.
- Still, others are skeptical about the projects’ results so far.
The AI-powered crypto industry will skyrocket five times to $1 trillion in the next decade.
This is according to Maxim Legg, CEO of blockchain infrastructure company Pangea. He said DL News that the sector will gain momentum as legitimate projects come into play.
“AI will become the new interface for blockchains, which will open the blockchain infrastructure to non-technical users – instead of just developers and developers,” Legg said. “Once technical barriers are removed with AI, anyone can truly transact on-chain.”
Legg’s prediction underscores the stubbornness of those betting that the sector, which venture capital firm Archetype estimates to be worth around $20 billion, will revolutionize crypto trading.
And investors are putting their money where their mouth is. AI-related crypto startups have raised nearly $2 billion in 261 deals in 2025 alone, according to figures from PitchBook. to showfollowing just over $2.5 billion in 2024. Since 2020, the sector has attracted nearly $13 billion in total funding, according to PitchBook data.
ChallengeLlama data paints a similar picture. Startups innovating at the intersection of crypto and AI raised more than $550 million in the first nine months of the year, a 7% increase over the total amount raised in 2024, data shows.
Yet even as investors pour capital into projects that promise to be cutting-edge, others warn that, so far, these startups have produced very little.
Rise to $35 billion
On paper, AI has many advantages.
Companies in the sector, such as chipmaker Nvidia and software giant Microsoft, have driven stock market growth over the past two years as hype around AI has reached fever pitch.
To add to the buzz, OpenAI, the world’s leading generative AI company, announcement a multi-billion deal with Advanced Micro Devices earlier in October. The deal will see OpenAI purchase six gigawatts worth of AMD chips.
In crypto, such news pushed the total market value of AI-related tokens up 14% over the past 30 days to $35.5 billion. according to at CoinMarketCap. That’s about half of December’s record $70 billion.
Danny Sursock, partner at Archetype, is among those optimistic about AI’s ability to revolutionize crypto. His company has backed startups like Exo and Ritual, which are blending the worlds of crypto and AI.
He tells DL News that he is betting that the market will double in size and be worth up to $40 billion in 2026.
“We will see the emergence of some killer AI applications on-chain,” Sursock said. DL News. “Use cases will range from significantly improved front-ends, built with intuitive natural language interfaces, to protocols with agents operating semi-autonomously on behalf of humans to perform a wide variety of tasks. »
Many share this optimism. For example, researchers at asset manager Bitwise suggest that the marriage of crypto and AI will add $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
“The floodgates are about to open,” said Ron Tarter, CEO of stablecoin company MNEE. DL News.
“Lose it completely”
Despite this, the amount raised this year by crypto-based AI projects still only represents around 1% of total funding. flow in the overall AI sector, with the majority of money going to major players like OpenAI and Anthropic, according to PitchBook data.
Despite the optimism, even people like Sam AltmanOpenAI CEO and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg have warned that an AI bubble could form, which could cost investors dearly.
In the crypto space, skeptics are also throwing cold water on the uptrend.
Nick Emmos, co-founder and CEO of Allora Labs, a company building a decentralized AI network, said: DL News earlier in October, despite the optimism around AI agents, so far these autonomous solutions tend to go wrong.
“There are endless possibilities for capital management to go wrong,” Emmons said. “They could lose all this money. They could put it in the wrong assets. They could misinterpret digital data to make bad financial decisions, and all sorts of things.”
Others, like Sean Ren, a professor at the University of Southern California and CEO of Sahara Labs, said: DL News that crypto-AI projects are still “theoretical, lacking real-world applications or coherent infrastructure.”
Brian Huang, co-founder of portfolio automation software Glider, points out a fundamental flaw in the merger between AI and blockchain.
“The biggest problem with crypto-AI is “finality.” If your Ethereum is sent to the wrong place, there is no way to get it back,” Huang said. DL News. “This ‘finality’ problem is true even outside of crypto: you don’t ask Siri or ChatGPT to Venmo your friends.”
The other “obvious flaw” in the crypto-AI space is that centralized AI products, such as ChatGPT, provide a better user experience than decentralized versions, Huang said.
“This raises a more meta question: do users really care about decentralization? he added.
You’re reading the latest episode of The Weekly Raise, our column covering fundraising deals in the crypto and DeFi spaces, powered by ChallengeLlama.
Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ European markets correspondent. Do you have any advice? Email to [email protected].
