Where Leading Venture Capitalists See Cryptocurrency and AI Heading Next

Where Leading Venture Capitalists See Cryptocurrency and AI Heading in the Future

According to Tracxn, decentralized AI has raised $917 million in venture capital and private investment to date.

Author: Jamie Crowley | Edited by: Benjamin Schiller Updated: April 12, 2025, 7:06 PM Published: April 12, 2025, 6:53 PM

Key points:

• The fusion of AI and blockchain aims to decentralize data ownership, challenging tech giants like Alphabet and Amazon.
• Venture capitalists have invested $917 million in decentralized AI, highlighting its potential as a significant investment opportunity.
• A report from Theta Capital says decentralized AI could help solve problems like spam and data theft, as well as open up new horizons in the financial market.

The proliferation of key artificial intelligence (AI) tools in recent years has prompted the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector to seek decentralized alternatives to the products of big tech companies.

The synergy between AI and blockchain is built on eliminating the risk of centralized control and access to the data that powers AI. It is believed that decentralization can mitigate the situation where the entire AI economy depends on data owned by a few tech giants such as Alphabet (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Alibaba (9988), and Tencent (0700).

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At this point, it’s unclear whether this will become a serious problem or whether the blockchain industry can solve it. However, it’s clear that crypto venture capitalists are willing to invest millions of dollars to study the issue. According to startup platform Tracxn, decentralized AI has already attracted $917 million in venture capital and private equity.

The question remains whether the current trend of investing in blockchain-based artificial intelligence is just hype or has already become a reality.

Blockchain investment firm Theta Capital described the combination of AI and cryptocurrency as “the inevitable foundation of AI” in a recent report, “Satellite View,” which looked at the ideas and perspectives of leading investors in the field.

AI Agents

“No trend is more different than the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency,” the report says, citing examples of AI agents trading on blockchains and even creating tokens.

It may seem like a more complex form of speculation for gamblers, but Theta argues that it is a way to solve some of the AI problems that only cryptocurrency can solve.

“Crypto wallets enable autonomous agents to participate in financial markets,” the report says. “Decentralized token networks bootstrap the supply side of key AI infrastructure for compute, data, and energy.”

The report’s findings are far from hype and speculation; AI x crypto is the “new meta.” Meta is short for “metagame,” a term borrowed from the gaming industry that refers to the dominant way of playing a game, given characters, strategies, or moves, in a competitive environment.

Decentralized AI

Alex Pack, managing partner at blockchain venture capital firm Hack VC, identified Web3 AI as “the leading source of alpha in investing today” in a report for Satellite View.

According to the report, Hack VC allocated

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