Bruised but not broken, the cryptocurrency market has taken more than a few blows as the prices of leading digital assets – from Bitcoin to Ethereum – have declined significantly in recent months. This may have taken some of the steam out of many cryptocurrency ventures. But there is no sign that interest in cryptocurrencies has been lost in any critical way. Here are three headlines from this week’s news that remind us that, despite its recent fortunes, crypto remains a key part of innovation in fintech.
Leading digital asset exchange Binance announced the closure of a $500 million venture fund for investing in Web3 and blockchain-based technologies this week. The fund will be led by the company’s venture capital arm Binance and features the support of a number of global investors including DST Global Partners and Breyer Capital.
“In a Web3 environment, the connection between values, people, and economies, is essential, and if these three elements come together to build an ecosystem, that will accelerate the mass adoption of blockchain technology and crypto,” Binance CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao said.
Binance Labs has supported and incubated more than 100 firms from more than 25 countries since its inception in 2018. With an openness to projects ranging from incubation to early stage venture to late-stage growth, the fund anticipates supporting initiatives “with the potential to build and to lead Web3 across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, Metaverse, social, and more,” Zhao said.
Liminal, a digital asset wallet infrastructure company, announced receiving $4.7 million in seed funding this week. The round was led by Elevation Capital, and featured participation from a sizable number of investors. Among the company’s backers in this round were traditional investors like LD Capital and Nexux Ventures, crypto-based investors like CoinDCX and Hashed, and individual investors including Andreas Antonopoulos and Balaji Srinivasan. Liminal plans to use the capital to support both hiring and product development.
Founded in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Mahin Gupta, Liminal is the first digital wallet architecture to provide the multi-party computation (MPC) and multisignature (MultiSig) that help secure digital assets across different blockchains. A plug-and-play platform, Liminal has processed transactions over $2.5 billion and automated transactions valued at $400 million. The company currently secures approximately $50 million in assets.
“With Liminal, we solve the very real problem of securing and scaling digital assets where users have to use different wallets and infrastructure for different protocols,” Gupta said. “Our three layers provide key management, operational automation, and compliance for enterprises.”
Speaking of seed funding, digital asset startup Cloudwall Capital secured $6.3 million in seed funding this week. The company specializes in risk management in the cryptocurrency space.
The round was led by LocalGlobe and Illuminate Financial. Cloudwall will use the funding to increase the size of its team to 15 members by year’s end. The company will also leverage the new capital to support further development of its digital asset portfolio management platform, Serenity. Cloudwall anticipates being able to launch an early access program by this summer.
“Digital assets underwent explosive growth between 2020 and 2021, with almost five years of growth taking place overnight,” Cloudwall Capital co-founder and CEO Kyle Downey said. “Recent market gyrations have only increased the case for a digital asset platform to manage risk so that institutional investors have the tools and platforms to help manage their portfolios and risks.”
Serenity will combine risk management with research to provide investors with an overview of their assets and potential for volatility. A cloud-based platform, Serenity will enable them to review their portfolio holdings and examine historical data – including blockchain data and data from centralized exchanges. Investors will be able to use Serenity’s statistical and machine learning algorithms to run simulations and stress tests on their portfolios to see how they will react to different market conditions.
“It’s becoming clearer to institutional investors that they should invest in digital assets if they aren’t already, but they don’t have the tools to help them embrace this new market in a way they are used to,” Cloudwall Capital co-founder and COO Jia Yng Wee said. “We’re building Serenity to provide this solution and (to support) the careful growth of this industry.”
Cloudwall Capital was founded in 2021. The company is headquartered in New York City.