Stacked, which provides investment tools for retail crypto investors, raises a $35M Series A co-led by Alameda Research and Mirana Ventures
Stacked, a web-based platform that provides passive investment tools for retail investors interested in crypto, just announced it raised …
Context & Ripple Effects
Stacked's $35M Series A lands at the peak of the 2021–22 retail-crypto tooling wave, when infrastructure bets were still drawing nine-figure checks — Trust Machines' $150M raise to build DeFi apps, DAOs, and NFTs on Stacks followed just two months later. What makes this round worth revisiting is the co-lead: Alameda Research, the trading firm whose own later testimony revealed it had borrowed $13B from FTX users by June 2022.
The name adds noise rather than signal — Stacked shares branding territory with London-based no-code startup Stacker and Amsterdam accounting-automation company Stacks, neither of which is connected to this round.
First-order effects
- Stacked gains $35M to scale its passive investment tools for retail crypto investors, with Alameda Research and Mirana Ventures taking co-lead positions on the cap table.
Second-order effects
- Given Caroline Ellison's testimony that Alameda concealed roughly $4.5B in loans to affiliated executives and funded operations with customer deposits, any portfolio position Alameda took becomes retroactively tainted — Stacked and other Alameda-backed startups inherit provenance questions about their lead investor's capital.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, exchange-affiliated trading firms acting as both market makers and venture leads blur the line between venue, prop desk, and asset manager — precisely the commingling structure that the FTX/Alameda testimony put under regulatory scrutiny.
The trend: Crypto venture rounds increasingly routed through exchange-affiliated trading firms like Alameda Research, whose later-documented reliance on customer funds converts their portfolio stakes into provenance risk for the startups they backed.