“We’ve gone beyond digital gold. We’ve also got art financial services games as sub-categories to NFTs web 3.0, social media that is decentralized Play-to-earn. All of it caused investors to consider “we don’t have enough exposure,” said Spencer Bogart, general partner at Blockchain Capital LLC in San Francisco. Blockchain Capital LLC is one of the biggest investors in the field, having financed more than 120 businesses since its beginning in 2013.
Established companies like Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, and Polychain Capital gamble on the next big cryptocurrency trend, and all kinds of innovative ventures — such as a social networking application that turns famous people into tokens pay-to-play non-fungible token game based on Chess — have been sprouting up.
“Investors are funding anything and everything,” PitchBook analyst Rob Le said.
Crypto Exchange: NBB
According to Bogart, the rapid growth of once-fringe sectors such as NFTs has shown investors what they missed. Bogart said that the once-obscure market for non-fungible tokens, OpenSea, is now drawing comparisons with e-commerce website Etsy.
The $30 billion figure also includes financing rounds of companies in the financial technology industry that generate revenue, like Robinhood Markets Inc. and Revolut Ltd., which are also involved in cryptocurrency. According to PitchBook statistics, US venture capital transactions this year totaled $7.2 billion, that’s more than four times the record reached in 2018. In July, the crypto derivatives exchange FTX obtained a 1 billion Series B round of investment, bringing its value to an estimated $18 billion. Custodian New York Digital Investment Group has raised $1 billion since the middle of December, valuing the business at over $7 billion.
On November 1, Forte, a company that provides solutions to integrate blockchain into game businesses, announced the $725 million capital round. In March, the company announced that Dapper Labs. This NFT platform powers CryptoKitties to secure $350 million from investors, including basketball legend Michael Jordan, bringing the business’s value to $2.5 billion.
MoonPay is a cryptocurrency-based payments infrastructure firm that raised $555 million in the last week of November, raising its value at $3.4 billion. In October, Sky Mavis, the creator of Axie Infinity, raised more than $150 million to fund the online game based on cryptocurrency for $3 billion.
