Blockchain Capital Raises $700 Million For Seventh Seed Venture Fund And Second Growth Fund

Blockchain Capital is raising $700 million for two new funds, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, with closing expected within the next five to six months.

“a16z-backed crypto firm rebrands, shifts focus to solving AI’s global copyright headache The startup formerly known as Story Protocol raised $140 million to secure internet rights and is now building an audit layer for data consent, licensing, and provenance for tech firms”

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The San Francisco-based firm is raising funds for its seventh seed venture fund and its second growth fund, and it did not respond to CoinDesk's request for comment.

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Blockchain Capital, led by co-founders and managing partners Bart Stephens and Brad Stephens, has previously raised about $1 billion for cryptocurrency investments and already manages $2 billion of fee-generating assets.

CoinDesk also tied the fundraising backdrop to market activity, saying that in May combined exchange volumes fell 3.45% to $4.41T, the lowest since September 2024, while RWA perpetual futures volumes rose 10.4% against the trend to a new all-time high.

The article framed the move as part of Blockchain Capital’s ongoing fundraising cycle, noting its last major round occurred in 2023 when it raised $580 million for its sixth seed venture fund and a late-stage fund.

Entropy, backed by a16z, is shutting down and returning funds to investors, citing scalability issues and difficulties finding product-market fit.

Entropy’s founder and CEO, Tux Pacific, posted on X on Saturday that the crypto automation platform had no viable path forward after years of operation.

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Pacific said that after four years, several pivots, and two rounds of layoffs, he had decided to close Entropy and return the capital to investors.

The startup launched in late 2021 as a decentralized self-custody solution, with Andreessen Horowitz backing it alongside Coinbase Ventures as part of a $25 million initial funding round in June 2022.

The closure came alongside other a16z-backed retrenchment, with the article noting that Farcaster said on Thursday it would return $180 million in capital to investors amid an acquisition by infrastructure provider Neynar.

A16z-backed Story Protocol is rebranding as DATA Foundation and shifting focus to solving AI’s global copyright headache by building blockchain-based infrastructure for verifying AI training data.

“Entropy, backed by a16z, will close and refund investors”

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In an email interview on Thursday, DATA Foundation chief data officer Avi Patel told CoinDesk that the startup’s pivot is to an onchain registry designed to verify the origins, licensing and consent history of datasets used to train artificial intelligence models.

The article said the Trace platform aims to provide cryptographic receipts that document provenance, licensing, consent terms and payment history of datasets without exposing the underlying data, and Patel said, "Trace publishes the audit record, not the data."

CoinDesk reported that DATA Foundation is integrating with Kled AI’s human data marketplace and that the integration registers 1.1 billion user-contributed records on the new network.

It also described how the rebranding follows Story Protocol’s $140 million in cumulative venture funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto, and quoted Patel saying, "Labs won't license data they can't verify," as the company targets fraud-detection tools to confirm data is real, human and original.