Series funding rounds have bounced back, though they remain far below their peak of $4.5 billion in monthly deals during the last crypto market boom.
Venture capital (VC) funding rounds are rising as the crypto bull market returns in full swing.
On May 16, crypto venture firm Aquarius announced a $600 million multistrategy liquidity fund to support blockchain foundations and projects in boosting on-chain liquidity. Aquarius staff told Cointelegraph that the fund is backed by ”Bitrise Capital, leading miners, family offices, and influencers.”
The $600 million fund will also support blockchain infrastructure, decentralized finance, artificial intelligence, the Bitcoin ecosystem, modular architecture, and early-stage data layer projects. “As the first institutional fund of its kind, it systematically manages on-chain liquidity and assists blockchain projects in meeting their liquidity needs,” Aquarius wrote.
Aquarius was founded in 2018 by venture capitalist Lin Yang in Singapore, who has backed projects like Conflux and investments in emerging Web2 sectors such as new energy, advanced manufacturing, and finance. The firm moved its headquarters to New York on May 8.
Meanwhile, crypto projects are receiving significant funding as the bull market heats up.
On May 6, Cointelegraph reported that crypto VC funding surpassed $1 billion for the second month in a row this year. April saw $1.02 billion in funding across 161 investment rounds, compared to $1.09 billion in March, trends not seen since late 2022.
Earlier this month, digital securities platform Securitize raised $47 million in a new funding round led by BlackRock. Blockchain developer Aptos Labs, along with stablecoin issuers Paxos and Circle, also invested. BlackRock’s global head of strategic ecosystem partnerships, Joseph Chalom, will join Securitize’s board of directors, calling the investment ”another step in our digital assets strategy to meet future client needs.”
In April, Puffer Finance, a liquid staking project on Ethereum layer-2 solution EigenLayer, secured $18 million in a Series A funding round from Coinbase Ventures and Kraken Ventures for its mainnet launch. Puffer Finance’s technology allows Ethereum validators to reduce their initial capital requirement to just 1 Ether, down from the 32 ETH required for individual stakers. The protocol reached a total value locked of $1.4 billion shortly after its launch in February.
The market has changed significantly from a year ago.
In September 2023, Tony Cheng, a partner at Singaporean crypto investment firm Foresight Ventures, advised projects to do whatever it takes to survive. “If you lack capital and don’t have the runway to get through the next year, you should take as much capital as you can because that money might not be available in two or three months,” he said.
Since dropping below $16,000 after the sudden collapse of the FTX exchange in November 2022, Bitcoin has gained over 300%, driven by the approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds globally and the gradual repayment of creditors’ money stuck on the defunct exchange. Some VCs predict the current bull market will spark another initial coin offering boom, surpassing the previous highs of early 2018.
Featured image from: cointelegraph.com