Welcome back to The Quantum Frontier! Your insider dispatch from the edge of the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) universe and beyond.
October arrives with stories that make it clear this ecosystem is maturing fast.
We’ve got institutional capital tightening but still flowing, founders mastering hybrid deal structures, and ICP’s developer community proving what “Web3 without friction” actually looks like.
From Theta’s $200M bet to Zerohash’s unicorn leap, to AI models literally running on-chain, this issue captures the shift from noise to nuance.
So grab your coffee (or your Caffeine AI, if you prefer) and let’s decode what the future’s writing for itself.
Table of Contents
- September in Reverse! – 4 min
- Why Everyone’s Talking About SAFE + Token Warrants – 3 min
- The Market Catches Its Breath – 2 min
- The Pulse of ICP – A Season of Confidence – 6 min
- Web3 Wisdom – Running AI Models as Smart Contracts on ICP – 3 min
September in Reverse! From Close-Outs Back to Kick-Offs
The crypto venture scene in September 2025 looked like a paradox in motion.
RootData’s numbers showed fewer deals but much bigger checks. In fact, contextually there were only 62 funding rounds, a 25% drop from August and down 37% year-over-year. And…yet total capital raised jumped to $5.12 billion, i.e, 739% higher than the same time last year.
We can infer this as – institutional investors are leaning into fewer, larger, and higher-conviction bets.
- Amsterdam’s Theta Capital announced a $200 million target for its fifth fund-of-funds.
Theta already manages $1.2 billion in assets and across its previous funds, it delivered an impressive 32.7% net IRR between 2018 and 2024.
This time, it’s targeting a 25% net IRR by allocating capital to 10–15 of the best-performing crypto-native funds, including names like Pantera Capital, Polychain, CoinFund, and Dragonfly.
Why is this newsworthy for the world of crypto VC, you ask? Well, venture activity in crypto-focused funds fell to $1.7 billion across 21 funds in Q2 2025. Yet Theta is doubling down and arguing that specialized managers still outperform generalists when the market tightens.
- Zerohash Hits Unicorn Air
API shop Zerohash locked a $104 million Series D-2 and that ultimately elevated the firm to a $1 B valuation.
What’s amazing is the lineup of lead investor. They were Interactive Brokers, Morgan Stanley, SoFi, Apollo, Jump Crypto, Northwestern Mutual. Makes us wonder if this is the ultimate sign of digital asset infrastructure going mainstream?!
- Titan Splashes on Solana
On the trading side, Titan Exchange raised $7 million in seed funding, led by Galaxy Ventures. Well it basically was the appeal and merit. Because Titan processed $1.5 billion in trading volume during its private beta, with its proprietary algorithm Argos outperforming competitors 70–75% of the time.
Galaxy’s Will Nuelle called the team “the most advanced gateway to internet capital markets on Solana.”
So we can sum up that across the board, institutions are consolidating their focus.
Here’s how September’s capital spread out, according to RootData
CeFi – 21%
• Forward Industries raised $1.65B in a private placement to build a Solana-based treasury strategy.
L1 / L2 Infrastructure – 12.9%
• Figure Technology’s $787M IPO valued the company above $5B.
AI × Crypto – 12.9%
• Helius Medical Technologies secured a $500M PIPE, led by Pantera and Summer Capital.
Messari’s Investor Screener showed us a sharp picture of how crypto venture capital has evolved in 2025.
The headline for us was YZi Labs, which recently rebranded from Binance Labs, remains the most active investor in crypto venture capital, leading 65 rounds year-to-date.
Why Everyone’s Talking About SAFE + Token Warrants
Crypto founders used to face a cruel binary. Either, raise equity and risk missing the token upside, or raise via a SAFT and lose flexibility if the token timeline slips.
The SAFE + Token Warrant (TW) structure has quietly become the elegant middle ground. Because it offers both equity exposure and token participation, without forcing a premature token launch.
Here’s how to get it right!
- A SAFE + TW setup gives investors equity exposure if the token never materializes…..while still granting token rights when it does.
- SAFE + TW is ideal when token design is fluid. It funds operations today while leaving room for the token model to evolve later.
- When tokenomics and launch timing are locked, a SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) still makes sense.
- Negotiate TW models wisely:
- Ratio for clarity and founder-friendly terms
- Company Reserve with ranges to avoid investor veto
- Avoid Fixed Percentage—it locks in high investor share
Read for further information here.
The Market Catches Its Breath
After a hot summer of heavy dealmaking in June and July, August and September cooled off
In August, funding volumes dropped by half to about $2.05 billion, even though roughly 115 deals still closed.
Not to mention, investors tightened terms, picked safer bets, and waited to see who could deliver beyond the hype.
In September, things steadied but didn’t fully rebound. We can observe that about 100 rounds raised $2.2 billion.
Coinbase Ventures led the activity, with Pantera, Paradigm and Borderless Capital following closely. The deals that did close leaned heavily on CeFi and infrastructure as we call, the “plumbing” of crypto and DeFi interest sagged.
The Pulse of ICP — A Season of Confidence
- The Internet Learns to Write Itself with Caffeine AI Promptathon
At DFINITY’s Zurich HQ, 40 developers spent 5 hours doing what used to take entire teams and months of code. They created dApps through (drumrolls, please) conversation.
The Caffeine AI Promptathon showcased how users could speak applications into existence using Caffeine’s full-stack platform. It wasn’t just low-code but also no-code with intention. It was self-writing internet in action.
- Web3, Finally Without the Friction Presented for You by Internet Identity 2.0
The latest version of Internet Identity brought with it login simplicity. Because users can now sign in with Google, unlock with biometrics, and store credentials through passkeys, all without a single password.
During the walkthrough, André showed how the process now takes less than a minute from start to finish.
By the way, older Internet Identity numbers still work. Enter the old ID, verify with the original passkey, name a new one and the upgrade completes seamlessly.
Get started with Internet Identity –
- World Computer Hacker League 2025
After four months of regional battles, 30 finalist teams from over 20 countries are heading into the World Computer Hacker League (WCHL) 2025 finale. Save the date: October 30th.
Judges from Animoca Brands, DoraHacks, ABCDE, and DFINITY will evaluate the next wave of open-internet innovations. By the way, it is going to be livestreamed across four time zones and amplified by 30+ ICP Hubs worldwide.
- When Web3 Starts Feeling Like Web2
Beyond products and hackathons, ICP is expanding its institutional footprint.
- Quantum Leap Labs, North America’s first ICP-focused incubator, has now supported 15+ startups since its March 2025 launch.
- 12 new SNS DAOs have gone live on-chain that means real decentralization beyond the whitepaper.
- ICP Ninja Upgrade
The ICP Ninja team showed us the highlight for ICP Ninja which was a new “Publish to Mainnet” feature that automates deployment in one click. Basically it cut setup steps from seven to two.
The platform also expanded its sample repository from 10 to 25 templates, spanning backend canisters, front-end scaffolds, and DeFi primitives.
So yes, for you developers reading out there ICP Ninja just made the path to mainnet as short as clicking “publish.”
- Founders × VCs Mixer at SF Tech Week
Quantum Leap Labs will take ICP off the screen and into real conversation during the Founders × VCs Mixer at San Francisco Tech Week on October 12.
The event will be held at 387 Tehama Street and the guests will experience “Flow State” networking sessions, 15-minute chair massages, and curated introductions to 30 venture firms, including several ICP ecosystem backers.
It is going to be part networking, part therapy, you know it is a must-reminder that great ideas grow faster when founders and investors talk like people, not just profiles.
- ICP Extends Its Lead in Real Throughput
September’s performance metrics confirmed what developers have been hinting at for months and that is the Internet Computer is fast in production.
ICP processed 1,076 transactions per second (TPS) in September 2025. Contextually speaking, that is higher than Solana’s 908.7 TPS and Fantom’s 362.9 TPS.
It means ICP can support the kind of high-frequency applications like social networks, real-time gaming, data-heavy AI integrations, that have kept most blockchains theoretical.
Web3 Wisdom
Running AI Models as Smart Contracts on ICP
The Internet Computer has begun closing the final gap between blockchain and AI. Its canisters which are full-stack smart contracts that hold both code and state can now run AI models directly on-chain.
In fact, it transitions ICP from a decentralized network into a computational platform capable of hosting neural networks with verifiable integrity.
ICP’s architecture gives each canister hundreds of GB of memory and CPU-grade compute. That level of performance allows AI inference tasks such as image classification and facial recognition to execute natively inside the blockchain environment.
Here’s why it matters
Traditional blockchains still depend on external APIs and cloud servers to deliver AI responses. ICP removes that dependency.
Once deployed, the model weights and inference logic are immutable and publicly auditable. That basically creates a tamperproof AI pipeline where results can be trusted as much as transactions.
Dominic Williams, founder of DFINITY, describes this as the beginning of a “self-writing internet.”
Users describe what they want; AI canisters interpret, generate, and update applications on their own. So….no centralized infrastructure in sight.
For you developers,
Building AI canisters already feels familiar. Teams can write in Rust, Motoko, or Python, deploy through a single “Publish to Mainnet” flow, and roll out updates automatically.
Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay curious. Stay decentralized.
We’ll see you in the next edition of The Quantum Frontier.
Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for real-time updates on crypto VC, Web3 infrastructure, AI innovation, and the Internet Computer.
Thanks for reading and keep building!
