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Venture capitalists have plowed more than $27 billion worldwide into cryptocurrency-related start-ups this year as of 1 December, more than in the entire previous 10 years combined, according to data service Pitchbook.
Much of the funding has come from the investment arms of crypto companies themselves, whose success depends on the crypto ecosystem continuing to grow, The New York Times noted.
For example, crypto exchange FTX raised $1 billion earlier this year. Paradigm, a venture fund run by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, was a backer.
Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s founder, operates Alameda Research Ventures, which led an August funding round for Trust Token, a stablecoin start-up. The round included Andreesen Horowitz, an early backer of Coinbase.
In this year’s third quarter Coinbase Ventures, a division of the U.S.-based Coinbase Global, made more venture capital investments than any other VC firm, according to CB Insights.
The investment spree is part of a long game in which “return isn’t the primary metric by which we measure the success of Coinbase Ventures,” CEO Shan Aggarwal told the NYT.
Instead, Coinbase and other crypto businesses envision blockchain technology, which is the platform for most digital assets, creating a new version of the Internet and eventually dethroning today’s giant tech firms.
“We see a world where the best-start-ups of tomorrow are all built on Web3 blockchain infrastructure,” Aggarwal said, using the industry’s term for a decentralized Internet. “That’s the future we’re building.”