The fund will primarily focus on allocating capital to the Solana ecosystem and other high-potential projects that leverage the RockawayX expertise in liquidity provision and crypto-native infrastructure.
24 April 2025 – RockawayX, a global $2bn aum digital asset investment firm, today announced the launch of its second early-stage venture capital fund, closed in Q125 at $125 million, following an oversubscribed fundraising period.
RockawayX credits its fundraise to its successful return of cash to investors, with its VCI (2021) achieving 2.1x DPI and, currently, 5.4x MOIC, as well as notching a roster of winners, including Solana, Wintermute, and Morpho Labs. Indeed, the fundraise stands in contrast to what Bloomberg has called a “standstill” environment for crypto VC, citing the widespread failure of funds from the last market cycle to deliver meaningful DPI to investors.
“We closed this raise because our 2021 fund has delivered cash returns to LPs, while retaining long-term upside in key positions. We still had to earn investors’ trust that the performance is repeatable; ultimately, our LPs believe our engineering-first approach will continue to yield the best founders and projects,” said Founder and CEO, Viktor Fischer.
The firm also attributes the raise to its focus on areas where it has an edge in pursuing opportunities and supporting founders. Namely, it prioritizes allocating capital in the Solana ecosystem, where it was a seed backer, and has already partnered with 15+ top projects, including Kamino Finance, Squads, Fragmetric, Switchboard, and DoubleZero. RockawayX believes those longstanding ties and unique programs, like its imminent launch of the Solana City accelerator hub in Dubai, alongside Solana Foundation and Helius Labs, give it an advantage in identifying the ecosystem’s highest-potential projects and then helping them to succeed.
Fischer stated, “We've been focused on the Solana ecosystem since meeting Anatoly and Raj (Solana co-founders) at the 500 Startups incubator in San Francisco in early 2018. Rather than investing in more L1s, we focused on building applications on Solana and being the first user for our founders: from providing liquidity, to running solvers and operating hardware services.”
The second venture focus area for the firm is DeFi and infrastructure protocols, where its yield investing arm acts as a primary liquidity provider. Securing initial liquidity (TVL) is all-important for web3 projects, and it has been harder to come by in the current environment. In addition to its credit fund, out of which it has been one of the largest on-chain liquidity providers for 3+ years, RockawayX runs a dedicated “solver” (on-chain market making) division that powers leading intent-based applications, including Wormhole, 1inch, Mayan, and DeBridge.
“We designed our firm based on what is most critical for crypto projects’ success: ground-up scalable infrastructure and liquidity. In the process, we power each level of the on-chain stack: we are engineers running blockchains, we deploy on-chain trading strategies to support efficient markets, we bootstrap protocols’ capital formation, and we build middleware and apps to experiment with new use cases,” said Samantha Bohbot, Partner & Chief Growth Officer.
The RockawayX team includes 45+ investment personnel, researchers, and engineers, many of whom work within its infrastructure division, running blockchain systems on bare metal servers out of data centers it wholly operates in Europe. Accordingly, the firm’s third venture investing focus area is decentralized networks, where it serves as a launch partner or specialized hardware contributor.
A recent example is DoubleZero, the Solana-focused project that raised $28m to build a “new internet” for blockchains. Acting as its European core contributor, RockawayX will run cable lines that will connect 10+ prime European locations (high-use data centers) to the network. That work is well underway, with the physical installation of the first line, from Frankfurt to Prague, completed.
Bohbot commented, “Delivering top investment performance across cycles takes discipline and a different approach. For us, it’s that we’re engineers first, and we back products where we’re excited to be the first power user.”
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About RockawayX
RockawayX is a global digital asset investment firm with approximately $2bn in assets under management across divisions. Since 2020, the firm has backed 100+ early-stage crypto projects. RockawayX’s yield strategy is an active liquidity provider across DeFi protocols. RockawayX Infrastructure runs validators out of data centres the firm owns and operates in Europe, and develops protocol-ready hardware solutions (i.e., optimised GPUs). RockawayX Labs incubates web3 projects and open-source products. For more information about RockawayX, please visit rockawayx.com