Crypto Raised $138 Million Last Week – Over Half of It Went to Payments

Venture capital did not spread evenly across the crypto sector between March 2 and March 8. It concentrated, and the concentration tells a clear story about where institutional money thinks the next cycle is building.

The Top of the List

ARQ, formerly known as DolarApp, took the largest single raise at $70 million, backed by ParaFi Capital and Founders Fund. It operates in payments and neobanking, targeting markets where dollar access through traditional banking remains limited. The rebrand from DolarApp to ARQ suggests a broader positioning play beyond its original Latin American focus. At $70 million on an undisclosed round structure, the valuation implies serious institutional conviction in the thesis.

Crossover Markets Group raised $31 million in a Series B from Tradeweb, focused purely on payments infrastructure.

A Series B backed by Tradeweb, one of the largest electronic bond trading platforms in the world, is not a crypto-native bet. It is traditional financial infrastructure money moving into crypto payments rails deliberately.

Those two raises alone account for $101 million of the week’s $138 million total. Everything else split the remaining $37 million across six companies.

The Pattern Underneath the Numbers

Count the sectors. ARQ: payments and neobanking. Crossover: payments. Cyclops: payments. Utexo: privacy and payments. Four of eight raises touch payments directly. The sector captured the majority of capital, the largest individual raise, and the most recognizable institutional names on the cap table.

QFEX raised $9.5 million at seed stage for perpetuals infrastructure, backed by General Catalyst. Perpetuals, the dominant derivatives product in crypto, remain mostly offshore and mostly unregulated. A seed-stage perpetuals exchange backed by a top-tier traditional venture firm suggests General Catalyst sees regulatory clarity coming and wants early positioning before it arrives.

Akave raised $6.65 million for L1 cloud services, with Protocol Labs among its backers. That lineage connects directly to the Filecoin and IPFS ecosystem, suggesting decentralized storage infrastructure continues attracting serious capital even outside headline cycles.

MarsCat at $3 million for a privacy-focused social network drew Animoca Brands and CGV FoF. Small round, strategic backers, niche sector. The privacy social network category has attempted multiple launches across several cycles without producing a breakout product. Whether this attempt differs depends entirely on execution the funding round cannot guarantee.

What the Week Signals

Payments infrastructure raised more than any other category by a significant margin. The backers are not crypto-native funds chasing token upside. Founders Fund, Tradeweb, General Catalyst, and ParaFi represent a mix of long-duration venture capital and traditional finance infrastructure money. That combination tends to arrive before regulatory clarity lands rather than after, positioning for the moment compliance removes the final barrier to institutional adoption.

The total raise of $138 million is not a boom-cycle number. It is a measured, sector-specific deployment that reflects where conviction currently sits rather than broad-based speculation. Payments. Infrastructure. Regulated derivatives. Privacy.

The money is not chasing everything. It is choosing.

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