*Crypto hedge fund Pantera on track to raise $175 million despite bitcoin’s price slump *
📍The firm is attracting long-term investors who see the latest dip in crypto as a buying opportunity.
📍Pantera has raised $100 million of the $175 million goal for its most recent VC-style fund.
📍The Menlo Park-based hedge fund recently made its first investment from that fund in a start-up called Bakkt, which is backed by Starbucks, Intercontinental Exchange and Microsoft.

Silicon Valley is still finding plenty of reasons, and money, to pour into the cryptocurrency industry.

Despite bitcoin slumping by half this year, crypto hedge fund Pantera Capital is well on its way to hitting a $175 million target for its third and largest fund yet. According to a SEC disclosure filed this week, the firm has raised at least $71 million. Pantera executives said the total is now closer to $100 million.

Investors appear to be drawn to the focus of the newest Pantera fund. It's more broadly about blockchain, which some pundits have called as transformative as the internet, instead of just cryptocurrency, which Warren Buffett famously called rat poison.

In the newest fund, which has 140 investors so far and a 10-year investment period, buyers get equity in a blockchain company instead of just investing in a "coin."

Initial coin offerings, or ICOs, often promise investors a piece of that company down the road or access to a product that might not even exist yet.