Venture Capital Bet Big on Crypto Infrastructure. Now It Has to Explain What That Money Is Actually Worth

NEW YORK, NY, November 04, 2026 /24-7PressRelease/ — Venture capital has always operated on a kind of trust exercise.

A firm raises capital, deploys it into companies that mostly do not have public markets pricing them, and reports back to its own investors with valuations that are, by construction, estimates rather than observable facts. That arrangement has worked reasonably well for decades because traditional venture markets eventually produce liquidity events, IPOs and acquisitions, that validate or correct those earlier estimates.

Crypto has complicated that arrangement considerably. Digital asset investments can generate liquidity far faster than traditional venture bets, through token listings and public market access that traditional startups never had available. They can also remain illiquid for years, tied up in private company structures, locked tokens, or infrastructure investments with no clear exit timeline at all. That combination makes crypto-focused venture portfolios unusually difficult to value with any real confidence, at exactly the moment when institutional investors are demanding more confidence than ever.

Haun Built a Firm Specifically for This Problem

Kathryn Haun left a career in federal law enforcement, where she specialized in cases involving cryptocurrency and financial crime, to become one of venture capital’s most prominent crypto-focused investors, eventually founding Haun Ventures with a specific thesis: crypto infrastructure investing requires domain expertise that generalist venture firms mostly lack.

That background gives Haun an unusual credibility on a subject that matters directly to portfolio valuation. Having spent years investigating crypto-related fraud before becoming an investor in the same industry, she has been notably direct in public commentary about distinguishing between legitimate infrastructure investment and speculative or fraudulent schemes dressed up in similar language. That distinction is not simply a talking point. It is functionally the core skill her firm is selling to its own limited partners: the ability to separate genuine long-term value from crypto’s persistent undercurrent of scams and unsustainable financial engineering.

Haun Ventures has built its portfolio around infrastructure theses, including significant early positions in companies building blockchain scaling technology and crypto-native financial infrastructure. Those positions, like most venture investments, carry valuations that are largely theoretical until a liquidity event actually occurs.

Silbert’s Portfolio Reflects the Same Problem at Greater Scale

Barry Silbert’s experience through Digital Currency Group illustrates the same valuation problem, extended across a considerably larger and more diversified base of investments.

DCG’s portfolio spans more than 250 early-stage companies across more than 40 countries, alongside operating businesses in custody, mining and computing infrastructure, and asset management. That scale creates a specific challenge: aggregating the estimated value of hundreds of illiquid positions, each with its own valuation methodology, financing history, and market conditions, into any single meaningful figure.

Search results and financial commentary occasionally attempt exactly that kind of aggregation, producing net worth estimates for Silbert that treat DCG’s private portfolio value as though it were a precisely knowable number. It is not. Private company valuations depend heavily on the terms of the most recent financing round, which itself may have occurred years earlier under entirely different market conditions. A company last valued during a bull market retains that valuation on paper long after the broader market environment has changed, unless a new financing event forces a repricing.

That mechanical lag between paper valuation and current market reality is one of venture capital’s oldest, least discussed problems, and crypto’s volatility has made the lag considerably more consequential than it tends to be in traditional venture markets.

Mark-to-Market Is Nearly Impossible for Illiquid Crypto Bets

Traditional public equities get repriced continuously by markets that are, whatever their flaws, at least transparent and liquid. Private company stakes get repriced only when new financing events occur, meaning the gap between two valuation events can span years.

Crypto-focused venture portfolios face an additional complication traditional venture firms do not: some portfolio holdings may include tokens that do trade on public markets, creating a mixed portfolio where some assets are priced continuously and transparently while others remain frozen at whatever valuation existed at the last private financing round. Aggregating those two categories into a single portfolio value, let alone a single personal net worth estimate for a firm’s founder, requires assumptions that can shift the resulting number dramatically depending on methodology.

That imprecision is not evidence of dishonesty. It is simply an accurate description of how difficult venture portfolio valuation becomes once meaningful amounts of the underlying assets are structurally illiquid, whether by design or by market conditions.

The Difference Between Genuine Skepticism and Baseless Dismissal

Crypto’s venture ecosystem has legitimate reasons to invite scrutiny. The industry’s history includes genuine cases of fraud, businesses built on unsustainable token economics, and investment theses that collapsed once market enthusiasm faded.

That history has also produced a reflexive skepticism that sometimes extends well beyond legitimate concern into broader dismissal of the entire category, regardless of the specific merits of a given firm or investment thesis. Distinguishing between substantiated criticism and baseless generalization matters considerably for anyone actually trying to evaluate crypto venture portfolios rather than simply reacting to the industry’s reputation.

Haun’s public commentary has repeatedly tried to draw exactly this distinction, arguing that crypto’s association with past scams should not be treated as evidence that all infrastructure investment in the space is similarly suspect. That argument requires actual scrutiny of individual portfolios and theses rather than category-wide dismissal, which is a considerably harder analytical standard than simply extrapolating from crypto’s worst historical examples.

Why LPs Are Asking Harder Questions Now

Institutional limited partners investing in crypto-focused venture funds have become considerably more sophisticated about interrogating portfolio valuations than they were during earlier market cycles.

That sophistication reflects hard-earned experience. Previous cycles included cases where venture portfolios carried inflated valuations for token-based investments that later proved to have far less liquidity or actual market support than earlier marks suggested. LPs who experienced that gap between reported and realized value have become understandably more demanding about valuation methodology, mark-to-market discipline, and transparency around how illiquid crypto positions get priced between financing events.

Both Haun Ventures and DCG operate within that more demanding environment now, one that increasingly rewards firms willing to be conservative and transparent about valuation uncertainty rather than firms that present portfolio estimates with more confidence than the underlying assets actually support.

What Actually Determines Long-Term Value

The honest answer to how much a crypto venture portfolio, or a founder’s personal stake in one, is actually worth is that nobody knows with real precision until a genuine liquidity event forces the market to decide.

Until that point, valuations remain estimates, built on assumptions about future financing rounds, potential token launches, or eventual acquisitions that may or may not materialize on the timeline or at the price current marks assume. That uncertainty is not unique to crypto venture investing, but crypto’s volatility and the structural illiquidity of many infrastructure investments make the uncertainty considerably more pronounced than in traditional venture markets.

Haun and Silbert have each built their respective firms around a bet that genuine infrastructure value, correctly identified early, eventually gets recognized by the market regardless of how difficult that value is to estimate in the interim. That bet has support in venture capital’s broader history. It also requires patience that not every investor, and not every limited partner demanding quarterly reporting, necessarily has.

The Takeaway

Crypto venture capital has produced genuine infrastructure value alongside genuine cautionary tales, and distinguishing between the two requires more analytical work than any single portfolio valuation, or any founder’s estimated net worth, can actually provide.

Kathryn Haun and Barry Silbert represent two versions of the same underlying challenge: building substantial portfolios of illiquid, infrastructure-focused crypto investments whose true value will not be fully known until markets, financing events, or eventual exits force a real answer. The industry’s history of scams and baseless hype has made that uncertainty harder to communicate honestly, because any admission of valuation difficulty risks being read as evidence of exactly the kind of problem skeptics assume is hiding underneath. The more useful response is not louder confidence about uncertain numbers. It is more transparency about exactly how uncertain those numbers actually are.

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