Evidence from 2022–2025 shows a shift in how VCs get token exposure, but not an end to venture investing in tradable tokens.

• VCs did not “largely stop” investing in tokens. By late 2022 there was a growing move away from pure SAFT/pure‑token rounds toward equity plus token warrant structures, where investors buy equity and receive contractual rights to future tokens, precisely to preserve token upside while adapting to regulation.

  • Industry lawyers and VCs described this hybrid equity+token‑warrant structure as having become “very much en vogue,” explicitly noting a trend away from pure token sales but not away from token exposure itself. (theblock.co)
  • Large post‑FTX financings were still explicitly structured around tokens. For example, Wormhole raised about $225M in November 2023 via token warrants for its W token at a $2.5B valuation, a round led and filled by major crypto VCs. (twitter.com)
  • Throughout 2023–2025, multiple projects (e.g., 0xVM, Enso, Neptune) completed sizable private “token rounds” or token‑warrant rounds with brand‑name crypto VCs, and ICO-style public token sales (such as pump.fun’s planned $600M token sale in 2025) remained a core capital‑raising mechanism. (icodrops.com)
  • Sector reports from Galaxy Digital show crypto/blockchain venture funding continuing in the billions of dollars per year across 2023–2025; while they note a focus on infrastructure and later‑stage companies, they make clear that crypto‑native projects (which typically have or plan tokens) still attract substantial VC capital rather than seeing token exposure disappear. (galaxy.com)
    Together this indicates VCs changed how they structure token exposure, but did not “end” or “largely stop” investing in tradable tokens.

• There was a meaningful shift toward equity—but as part of hybrids, not a clean switch away from tokens.

  • Regulatory concerns pushed many web3 deals to use equity (stock/SAFEs) as the primary fundraising instrument with token warrants attached; funds and SPVs are typically structured so ≥80% of capital is in equity and ≤20% in token rights to preserve VC regulatory exemptions. (sydecar.io)
  • This is qualitatively different from VCs abandoning token upside: in most high‑profile protocol deals, future token allocation remains a central part of the return profile, just packaged alongside equity in companies.

• Tokens did face significantly heavier regulation and enforcement, but “super regulated” is only partially accurate.

  • In the EU, the MiCA framework—adopted in 2023 and fully applicable from late 2024—creates a comprehensive regime for crypto‑assets, regulating public token offerings, trading, and service providers across the bloc. (europarl.europa.eu)
  • In the U.S., the SEC brought major cases against exchanges like Coinbase and Binance that explicitly alleged numerous prominent tokens (e.g., SOL, ADA, MATIC and others) are unregistered securities, signaling much harsher scrutiny of token offerings than pre‑FTX. (cnbc.com)
  • However, by 2024–2025 the U.S. regulatory stance became more uneven, with some enforcement easing and no fully harmonized statutory framework comparable to MiCA; globally, many jurisdictions still have relatively light or fragmented token rules. (guidehouse.com)
    So while regulation and enforcement pressure on tokens clearly intensified versus the pre‑FTX era, it is not accurate to say that “any of the tokens are going to be super regulated” across the board.

Because VC token investing demonstrably did not end—it continued at scale through hybrid and token‑warrant structures—and token regulation, though tougher, is not universally “super” stringent, the prediction overall is best scored as wrong, albeit with a partially correct insight about a shift toward more equity-weighted and regulation-aware deal structures.