揭晓半年112亿美元融资流向：加密行业最值钱的资产，正在从代码变成牌照

Original author: Xiaobing

Dubai crypto lawyer Irina Heaver and her team at NeosLegal did something simple but powerful: they went through every publicly disclosed crypto industry funding round in the first half of 2026, a total of 377 deals worth approximately $11.2 billion.

The conclusion is one sentence: Every single funding round with a disclosed amount went to a business that requires regulatory licenses to operate.

The top three sectors were: payments and stablecoins at $3.7 billion, prediction markets at $2 billion, and exchanges and trading platforms at $1.7 billion. These three areas share a common characteristic—in any major jurisdiction, legal operation requires a license.

Institutional capital's valuation logic for the crypto industry has shifted from "what can code do" to "do you have a license."

Who Is Writing the Checks

Let's first look at who's paying.

Kalshi completed a $1 billion funding round in May, with investors including Sequoia, Morgan Stanley, Ark Invest, and a16z. Polymarket raised $600 million, led by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. In just the prediction market sector alone, 34 funding rounds were completed within six months.

Within the $3.7 billion in payments and stablecoins, the names BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Persian Gulf sovereign wealth funds appear repeatedly.

Vineet Budki, managing partner at Sigma Capital, put it bluntly: Regulatory licenses have gone from a compliance footnote to a core valuation metric.

There's cold arithmetic behind this judgment. A MiCA license or a Dubai VARA permit typically takes 18 to 24 months to obtain and costs millions of dollars. Code can be forked over a weekend; a license cannot. When VCs evaluate two projects with similar functionality, the one with a license naturally has a moat that competitors cannot quickly replicate.

Licenses Are the New Moat

Let's put this phenomenon on a longer timeline.

In 2020-2021, the dominant theme of crypto funding was protocols and infrastructure. Public chains, DeFi protocols, and NFT platforms took away most VC money. The investment logic was technological barriers and network effects—whoever had the highest TVL and the most active developer ecosystem was worth the most.

In 2022-2023, the bear market washed out a batch of pure narrative projects, and funding began to tilt toward businesses with actual revenue. The share of funding going to exchanges, wallets, and infrastructure companies rose.

The data from the first half of 2026 shows this trend has reached its logical endpoint: Capital is no longer paying for technological innovation itself, but for "the ability to operate technological innovation within a compliance framework." Simply put, code is a necessary condition, but a license is the sufficient condition.

This is highly consistent with the evolution path of traditional finance. Fintech companies raised money on technological disruption in the early 2010s, and by the late 2010s they were raising money on licenses and compliance capabilities. Stripe is worth a hundred billion dollars, with its core moat being its ability to operate compliantly in more than 40 countries—far surpassing the technical gap in its payment API itself.

The crypto industry is walking the same path, just faster.

Funding Flows and User Activity Are Splitting

But there's an important blind spot in this data: it only counts funding, not users.

On-chain data shows that in the first half of 2026, DeFi protocol TVL, DEX trading volume, and active addresses all grew. The daily active users and trading volumes of permissionless protocols like Uniswap, Aave, and Jupiter have not shrunk just because VC money is no longer flowing to them. Retail users are still trading, lending, and providing liquidity on-chain.

What this means is a more subtle divergence is taking place, not a "death of permissionless protocols": Institutional capital is flowing to compliant, licensed centralized businesses, while retail user activity remains distributed across permissionless on-chain markets. Money and people are heading in two different directions.

This split is most visible in prediction markets. Both Kalshi and Polymarket do prediction markets, but Kalshi is a CFTC-registered exchange, while Polymarket has no license in the U.S. Kalshi got $1 billion in funding with Morgan Stanley's backing, and Polymarket got $600 million with ICE's backing. Both are moving toward compliance, but their user bases and product experiences still differ significantly.

A Redefinition of "What Is Valuable"

Heaver used a precise phrase in her interview: capital is no longer chasing the permissionless, but chasing regulated businesses.

The deeper meaning of this shift is that "what counts as a valuable asset" in the crypto industry is being redefined. In 2021, the most valuable asset was a smart contract protocol that was widely forked. In 2026, the most valuable asset might be a MiCA e-money license covering all 27 EU member states, or an entity with a financial services license in Abu Dhabi's ADGM.

Code still matters. But code solves the question of "can it be done," while a license solves the question of "is it allowed to be done." When $11.2 billion in institutional capital votes with its feet to tell you the latter is scarcer and more valuable, the center of gravity in this industry has already moved.

For developers, this isn't necessarily bad news. Permissionless protocols don't need VC money to run—they have token incentives, communities, and on-chain revenue. But for founders, the funding reality of 2026 is already clear: If you want institutional money, get a license first.