Billions have been raised this week by crypto entities as the restricted capital raising market goes hot.
Gemini is the latest to raise $400 million at a valuation of $7.1 billion. The VC fundraising round was led by Morgan Creek Digital with participation from 10T, ParaFi, Newflow Partners, Marcy Venture Partners, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, among others, the US based crypto exchange said.
Coinbase’s co-founder Fred Ehrsam’s new investment entity, Paradigm, raised $2.5 billion for a new venture fund. They’ve previously invested in FTX, Coinbase, BlockFi, Maker, Uniswap and Sky Mavis.
Ethereum’s ConsenSys raised $200 million at a $3.2 billion valuation from investors that included Marshall Wace, Third Point, ParaFi Capital and Think Investments.
The prominent NFT marketplace OpenSea has received offers at a valuation of $10 billion. There’s speculation they’ll tokenize with the marketplace vulnerable to forking, but whether they’ll sell the public platform to VCs or to the public, remains to be seen.
While Crypto gaming startup Forte raised $725 million in Series B funding from investors that included Sea Capital, Kora Management, Animoca Brands, Solana Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global.
These are just some of the traditional investments that make this week stand out with the smart money betting bigly on the crypto market.
An estimated $7 billion has been invested in private crypto entities this year, excluding this week, as old startups become of size while new ones keep forming.
In this startups investment space, everything is a potential bitcoin in as far as they can do a 100x or 1000x, but you need circa $5 million to participate due to investment prohibitions, with no way for the public to get involved in capital formation as there isn’t even one startups ETF listed on the stock market.
Tokenization is changing that. Binance for example, instead of tapping into restricted capital provided by the very rich, issued their token to the crypto public in 2017 and uses some of the profits from running the exchange to buy back their BNB token. As did Crypto.com for their debit card, and others.
Gemini has clearly gone the other way, as did Coinbase which became available to the public only after the massive gains of a $100 billion market cap had been taken by VCs.
ConsenSys also appears to be hesitant to tap into the crypto market, with it unclear how relevant this entity continues to be now in 2021 after seeding the app like ethereum ecosystem.
The investment prohibitions obviously play a role in their choices, but the United States is now more and more being firewalled especially in the defi space as entrepreneurs and pioneers tap into Europe’s open and liberalized crypto investment markets.
