Global asset manager VanEck is launching the PurposeBuilt Fund in June 2025, a new private digital assets fund designed to invest in tokenized Web3 projects built on Avalanche. This is one of VanEck’s efforts to support real-world asset (RWA) applications in the desktop finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
The assets of the PurposeBuilt Fund will be exclusively available to accredited investors and will include secure liquidity tokens and venture investments in projects within Web3 gaming, financial services, payments and artificial intelligence. This fund has a distinctive feature: this strategy deploys idle capital into Avalanche based RWA products, including tokenised money market funds, to boost the on chain liquidity and utility.
The team behind VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha Fund (DAAF) which as of May 21 is managing more than $100 million in net assets, will manage the fund. “We are tilting the portfolio in the direction of real businesses in crypto rather than more infrastructure,” DAAF portfolio manager Pranav Kanade said.
The ecosystem of Avalanche has turned out to be one of the main RWA and institutional oriented crypto project hubs, due to the subnet architecture that allows running Ethereum style smart contracts within controlled environments. Avalanche currently, as of May 21 boasts of almost $1.5 billion TVL and is steadily growing in the DeFi (Decentralized finance) space.
The move is in line with a broader industrial trend of asset managers to get into digital economy. In recent months, VanEck has launched a series of thematic funds, including an actively managed exchange traded fund (ETF) on digital economy stocks and financial instruments and a passive index ETF for companies operating in the crypto space. Amidst this wave of ETF filings is a new wave of industry initiatives which are made possible by a more friendly regulatory environment under the current U.S. administration.
Ava Labs Chief Business Officer John Nahas said on the transformation the industry is undergoing, “We’re seeing a movement away from hype toward utility and sustainable token economies.” This is a growing theme of applied use cases and long term intrinsic value in the crypto sector.
In simple terms, PurposeBuilt Fund by VanEck is a strategic investment into the maturing of the crypto industry; building out the crypto industry and, in particular, the Avalanche ecosystem, one tangible, utility driven project at a time. Rather, VanEck intends to ride the next wave of growth in decentralized finance by directing resources into real world asset applications.
