Crypto investor Dan Tapiero’s 1RoundTable Partners is raising $500 million for “abundant yet underfunded” growth equity opportunities, according to marketing materials for the new fund obtained by PitchBook.
This is a bold move amid a sluggish market for sizable digital assets deals.
The new vehicle, 50T, gets its name from the firm’s belief the overall crypto market will hit $50 trillion within a decade, according to the deck. That includes the projection that bitcoin’s market cap alone will grow tenfold to $20 trillion. The fund will make a combination of equity investments and purchases of native tokens that vest over time.
Tapiero—formerly a longtime hedge fund portfolio manager who worked at Tiger Management—declined to comment on fundraising.
He predicted that elevated trading and usage of crypto tokens, along with price appreciation, will result in an uptick in big private deals. He said he expects the Trump administration’s lax crypto stance to bolster M&A and IPOs.
Pitchbook’s latest Crypto VC Trends report supports this: The median valuation across all venture stages soared last year to $31.1 million, up 78% from $19 million in 2023. Deals remained flat, suggesting that investors are getting more selective.
50T is Tapiero’s fifth crypto fund. While it intends to invest at later stages, it may be limited in opportunities. He said crypto wallet Phantom‘s recent $150 million in Series C funding at a $3 billion valuation was an outlier.
There were 31 crypto PE deals last year, according to PitchBook data, totaling a mere $100 million. That’s down from 2023’s $2.8 billion.
1RoundTable is drilling into “special situations and operating opportunities,” per 50T’s marketing materials. It plans to earmark about a quarter of its dry powder to distressed plays, including issuing bridge loans and purchasing convertible notes.
Special situations strategies are common on Wall Street, but much less so in crypto, where there are fewer sizable opportunities for the capital-intensive strategy.
People are passing by a Bitcoin office in Istanbul, Turkey, on February 28, 2024. Bitcoin has increased by nearly fifty percent in the last 30 days, reaching the 64 thousand level. (Photo by Umit Turhan Coskun/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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