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Social Trading Company eToro Establishes $20m NFT fund

Cryptocurrency trading platform eToro has established a $20 million Non-fungible token (NFT) fund to buy NFTs and support creators and brands in the industry, according to CNBC.

The launch of fund is part of eToro art’s plans and implies that eToro will create more services for investors and take a big step toward the NFT market.

NFT is a special type of encrypted token that represents unique collectables. An NFT is used in specific applications that require unique digital items, such as encrypted art, digital collectables, and online games.

Guy Hirsch, U.S. managing director of eToro, said that before NFTs, only big traditional financial tycoons such as Goldman Sachs could step into the cryptocurrency space; however, “NFTs are essentially making any and every potential brand a participant in this market.”

Founded in 2007, eToro has been a leader in the global Fintech revolution, empowering people to invest by giving them access to international markets. From cryptos to stocks and commodities, eToro has made trading easy and social, creating a solid community of over 12 million traders worldwide.

In the past few months alone, well-known brands in various industries, including Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, etc., have joined the NFT track,

Hirsch added that：

“Any brand can hone in on this and create some sort of an NFT that represents an ownership stake in part of the brand,”

As part of the eToro.art program, the trading platform showcases renowned digital art collections, including Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, and World of Women.

eToro said it would also commit $10 million to support emerging creators and brands, bringing their new NFT projects to market.

Investcorp Rolls out First Institutional Blockchain Fund in the Gulf

Investcorp, a global manager of alternative investment products, has launched the first institutional blockchain fund in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) aimed at propelling a blockchain-powered digital evolution.

Dubbed Lydian Lion, the blockchain fund also has a global investment mandate. It will be mainly rolled out to early-stage companies within the blockchain ecosystem in areas like data analytics, decentralized finance, platforms and exchanges, and blockchain infrastructure.

Gilbert Kamieniecky, the head of Investcorp’s technology private equity business, noted that the fund would be a stepping stone towards more innovations in the blockchain space as the digital economy continues to gear up. He acknowledged:

“We believe that blockchain technology and the ecosystem around it, will transform every facet of our economy much like the internet did in the 2000s.”

Kamieniecky added:

“We have already seen the potential of blockchain to disrupt existing markets and create new ones, such as the meteoric rise of the non-fungible tokens market that in just a few years has grown from under a billion to more than $40 billion.”

As a fast-growing technology area, Hazem Ben-Gacem believes blockchain technology should be accorded more global reach and institutional expertise.

The Co-CEO at Investcorp added:

“Offering our clients innovative and bold investment ideas, backed by our disciplined and proven approach, has been a key element of our success over the last four decades.”

The GCC is a political and economic alliance of six Middle East nations: the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar.

Meanwhile, a recent survey by Goldman Sachs, a leading global investment bank, noted that institutional interest in cryptocurrencies was witnessing strong growth because crypto exposure rose from 40% in 2021 to 51% in 2022.

Furthermore, inflows into crypto investment products reached $193 million, a scenario that was last seen in mid-December 2021, according to digital asset management firm Coinshares.

Republic Capital to Raise $700m for Two Crypto-focused Funds

Investment platform Republic is raising $700 million for two cryptocurrency-focused funds, as reported by online media outlet Axios.

The funds include a $200 million flagship venture fund and a $500 million dedicated crypto fund respectively.

The venture fund will invest 20% of its capital in cryptocurrencies, while the other 80% will be invested in equity investments in web3, fintech, and deep tech.

The crypto fund in this round would focus on supporting late-stage protocols.

Currently, Republic Capital has invested in more than 100 companies since its inception in January 2019. Republic Capital led a $50 million round in Flipside Crypto, which provides blockchain analytics and business intelligence to Crypto companies, boosting its valuation tenfold to $350 million.

Republic also recently participated in a $135 million fundraising for CoinDCX, India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange

According to the company, their team has been working on raising funds for outstanding crypto projects, including DeFi protocol Ratio Finance and Solana-based money management solution Zebec.

Republic capital is also supported by companies such as Galaxy Digital, The Motley Fool, Binance, Naspers, AngelList, and has global teams in six countries.

Republic has raised a total of $214 million in 12 funding rounds. Their latest funding round was on November 12, 2021, with a Series B round led by Valor Equity Partners.

The company has also raised more than $20 million through the sale of crypto tokens. Republic has received more than $500 million in investments from more than 1 million global community members.

a16z Announces $4.5bn Fund for Crypto and Web3.0 Startups

California-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has launched its fourth crypto fund, the Crypto Fund IV, as it prepares to invest fully into blockchain and Web3.0 startups.

While the current climate in the digital currency ecosystem is one that does not encourage investments, especially with the discouraging outlook of the LUNA and UST crash, a16z is doubling its bet on space.

General Partner, Arianna Simpson believed the periods are the best to make crypto investments as it is a time when people are able to focus on the technology behind digital currencies and the web3.0 ecosystem as a whole.

“Bear markets are often when the best opportunities come about when people are actually able to focus on building technology rather than getting distracted by short-term price activity,” she said in a phone interview with CNBC.

Andreessen Horowitz has been backing cryptocurrencies since 2013, and it floated its first major crypto fund about 4 years ago this latest fund was teased earlier in January. Thus far, Coinbase Global Inc, OpenSea, Avalanche, Yuga Labs, Solana, and Dapper Labs are amongst the companies under the firm’s portfolio.

Simpson said there is no need to worry about the companies it will be investing in as the selection team always does due diligence.

“The technical diligence and the other kinds of diligence that we do are a key part of making sure that projects meet our bar,” she said. “While our pace of investment has been high, we continue to invest really in only the top echelon of founders.”

Another of the company’s General Partner, Chris Dixon, also detailed the company’s plans to invest $1.5 billion of the earmarked funds for startups in the Seed stage. The remaining $3 billion will serve as its venture capital reserve.

Lattice Capital Injects $60M Venture Fund II for Crypto Projects

Crypto-asset venture capital firm Lattice Capital is launching a $60 million second fund.

Lattice Capital is an early-stage crypto fund that helps founders build defensible moats.

The company said the Lattice Capital II fund will invest $500,000-$1.5 million in early-stage blockchain projects or companies in this funding round, adding that it plans to invest in backing 40 to 50 companies with potential market influence in the future mature projects.

Lattice general partner Mike Zajko revealed that its second fund raised three times as much as its first fund, launched last August.

The fund has invested in more than 9 companies so far. The currently publicly supported project is Optic, an NFT-certified company using AI technology.

NFT certification company Optic announced on July 21 that it had completed an $11 million seed round led by early-stage venture capital funds Kleiner Perkins and Pantera Capital.

Mike Zajko said: “We continue to be impressed by the talent entering the crypto space and welcome a bear market as an advantageous time for committed investors like us to partner with promising new projects that are as excited to build in bears as a bull.”

The fund was disclosed in a February regulatory filing issued by Lattice Capital.

Invesco Unveils Metaverse Fund to Tap into £1.4 Trillion Opportunity

Invesco, a US investment management firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with additional branch offices in 20 countries, announced on Monday that it has launched a new fund dedicated to metaverse-related equities.

The investment company said with the launch. It focuses on tapping into a “£1.4 trillion revenue opportunity in the metaverse landscape.

The Invesco Metaverse fund will invest in large, medium, and small-cap firms across the US, Asia, and Europe.

Invesco said the fund would pump cash into firms helping to facilitate, create, or benefit from the growth of immersive virtual worlds.

Tony Roberts, who will oversee the fund, stated that the company would look to capitalize on a swelling area of the metaverse economy.

“While the Metaverse’s applications to entertainment are increasingly well-understood, the interconnectivity that it enables will likely have a transformative impact across industries as diverse as healthcare, logistics, education and sport. We will seek to capitalize on these opportunities through a highly selective, valuation-conscious approach,” Roberts elaborated.

According to Invesco, the new fund will back projects across seven major thematic areas, including next-generation operating and computer systems, networks for hyperconnectivity, hardware and devices that provide access to the Metaverse, immersive platforms developed with artificial intelligence, Blockchain, the interchange tools necessary to bring about interoperability, and services and assets that will facilitate the digitization of the real economy.

Invesco believes that businesses have exciting opportunities in all seven subsegments beyond the well-known Metaverse platforms.

Businesses Navigating Metaverse

Metaverse has presented numerous opportunities to brands and consumers alike. Whether it’s large tech players like Microsoft or small startups working to develop metaverse business landscapes, the opportunities presented by interactive, digital worlds are limitless.

The Metaverse is poised to infiltrate every sector in some way in the future, with the market opportunity estimated at over $1 trillion in annual revenues.

As a result, firms of all shapes and sizes are seen entering the Metaverse in different ways, including the likes of Walmart, Nike, Gap, Verizon, Hulu, PWC, Adidas, Atari and others.

In September last year, Facebook launched a $50 million fund that would help it develop the Metaverse more responsibly.

In April, the HBAR Foundation launched a $250 million Metaverse Fund to integrate Hedera Hashgraph’s Web3 metaverse world for consumer brands.

Valkyrie Funds Introduces Crypto SMAs for Fund Managers & Advisors

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Valkyrie Funds, an alternative asset management firm based in the US, announced on Tuesday the launch of a new Valkyrie Risk Managed Separately Managed Account (VSMA) platform that aims to enable financial advisors, fund managers, and other financial services providers to offer digital asset investments to their clients.

Valkyrie SMA is targeting financial advisors, family offices, and other financial institutions in hopes that it will help these financial pros manage digital assets on behalf of clients or pitch these products to their customers.

Valkyrie SMAs will initially support three active strategies such as a strategy focused on Bitcoin (BTC) alone, another strategy dedicated to investing in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), and another strategy focused on a more diversified option (Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), and Polkadot (DOT).

Valkyrie Funds Managing Director John Key commented about the development: “The SMAs will rely on Valkyrie’s research to rebalance positions for downside protection and upside exposure.”

SMA is a form of financial wrapper that allows pools of assets to be structured and sold as a single security. In this case, cryptocurrencies are wrapped into an SMA.

Unlike exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds, where investors own shares of the fund instead of the underlying securities, the securities in an SMA are owned directly by the investor. SMAs offer customization not available with ETFs and mutual funds and thus can more closely reflect an investor’s risk tolerance, objectives, and other needs. Crypto assets held in an SMA are placed with a qualified custodian.

In Valkyrie’s case, while its SMAs’ Bitcoin and BTC/ETH accounts seek to maintain at least 50% of the portfolio in those assets, the diversified SMA aims for a minimum position of 40% in digital assets, with the remaining assets parked in cash. The three accounts each have minimum investments of $25,000 and carry a management fee of 150 basis points. Gemini is the custodian for the SMAs.

The Valkyrie SMAs will allow these financial providers to design and administer personalized crypto trading strategies for clients and manage them from a single platform.

Valkyrie is now the latest asset management firm to announce crypto SMA plans after, likes Coinbase, Ark Invest, Bitwise, and Franklin Templeton, launched their separately managed account offerings this year.

In a recent survey, almost half of all financial advisors (45%) revealed that they intend to offer crypto assets in response to client demand. Besides that, 80% of advisors disclosed being asked about digital assets by clients of all ages, but only 14% are using or recommending digital assets.

Dogecoin Foundation Launches Core Developer Fund

As part of the Dogecoin Foundation’s plans to broaden the scope of the Dogecoin ecosystem over the course of the next 12 months, a brand-new fund that will be exclusively used to provide financial assistance to developers working on the Dogecoin Core software has been introduced.The foundation made the announcement on December 31 that it will give 5 million Dogecoin, which was around $360,000 in value at the time this article was published and would be contributed to a new fund that will foster the expansion of the Dogecoin platform.According to the Dogecoin foundation, the money will be kept in a brand-new multisignature wallet, which will be administered by the members of the Dogecoin foundation. In addition, the fund necessitates the signatures of three out of the five developers working on the Dogecoin Core software. These particular developers are chromatic, Marshall Hayner, Michi Lumin, Patrick Lodder, and Ross Nicoll.These custodians will not have any rights to the money, other than the obligation of supervising the release of it.Dogecoin Core software developers will get a reward of 500,000 DOGE each time a new version of the software is released. This reward will be distributed proportionally according to the amount of labor each developer contributed to the release.In the goal of preserving transparency, the group has disclosed to the general public the address of the digital wallet that stores the monies.

In the meanwhile, developers working on the Dogecoin network have recently put an end to rumors that the network is going to transition to a consensus method known as proof-of-stake. Speculations had suggested that the network might move to proof-of-stake soon (PoS).The developers have made it quite obvious that their primary objective is to publish a proposal about the situation, and this intention has been made known.The 16th of September saw Dogecoin pass Litecoin to become the second largest proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency. It did this by increasing its hashing power. After Ethereum’s network completed its migration to a PoS consensus, the update was made available to users.

Abu Dhabi-based Venom Foundation creates $1B Web3 and blockchain fund.

Venom Foundation, which operates as a blockchain platform and is based in Abu Dhabi, and Iceberg Capital, which operates as an investment management firm and is based in New York, recently made the announcement that they would work together to provide Web3 and blockchain companies with funding in the amount of one billion dollars.

The Venom Ventures Fund plans to make investments in protocols and decentralized applications (DApps) for the Web3 platform that focus on payment processing, asset management, decentralized finance (DeFi), and gaming finance (GameFi) products and services.

Iceberg Capital, an investment management company that is active on the Abu Dhabi Global Market, and Venom Foundation, a blockchain technology that operates at the layer-1 level, have worked together to create the fund as a consequence of their partnership (ADGM).

In addition to marketing, exchange listing, and assistance in the areas of technical, legal, and regulatory compliance, this latter business will strive to leverage its existing network in order to offer incubation programs and industry relationships.

Iceberg Capital, which will also be in charge of making investments in firms and projects throughout their pre-seed and Series A fundraising rounds, will be in charge of managing the fund that will be created.

The firms who are members of the alliance want to move as quickly as possible to provide products and services that are compatible with blockchain, DeFi, and Web3.

The investment fund will make an effort to recruit enterprises and technological organizations who have an interest in making use of Venom’s proof-of-stake scalable blockchain solution.

Knez is likewise of the view that the platform is able to power a broad range of use cases, highlighting the prospect of micropayment solutions driving Web3 business models and helping to financial inclusion. He thinks that this platform has the capabilities.

Abu Dhabi is making steady progress toward its goal of becoming a cryptocurrency and blockchain powerhouse in the Middle East, and it is taking the required measures to achieve this goal.

In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), there are over 1,500 Web3 businesses and organizations operating, and Abu Dhabi has continued to give licenses to cryptocurrency exchanges far into 2022. Binance and Kraken are two examples of these exchanges.

Mantle Core Proposes $200M Fund for Web3 Startups

Mantle Core, a subsidiary of BitDAO, has recently proposed the creation of a $200 million fund dedicated to early-stage Web3 startups. The proposal aims to accelerate the adoption of Mantle, an Ethereum layer-2 network, among developers and Dapps. The Mantle EcoFund will be deployed within the Mantle ecosystem over the next three years, with BitDAO’s treasury providing $100 million in USD Coin (USDC), and another $100 million coming from external matching capital from strategic venture partners.

Several funds have expressed interest in participating in the Mantle EcoFund, including Dragonfly Capital, Pantera, Folius Ventures, Play Ventures Future Fund, Spartan, Lemniscap, Selini Capital, Cadenza Ventures, and QCP Capital, according to Mantle’s proposal. If approved, the EcoFund and venture partners will participate in projects with a 1:1 co-investment ratio. The ecosystem fund will target Web3 startups raising pre-seed, seed, and series A rounds.

The Mantle spokesperson has stated that “the fund targets to invest in more than 100 projects deployed on Mantle and have a multiple on invested capital (MOIC) of 1.5x of cumulative performance through the fund’s lifecycle.” Management fees for the EcoFund team, including sourcing, due diligence, legal, portfolio support, and fund administration, will be “industry standard,” with a 2% fee to support operational expenses.

The proposed Mantle EcoFund is part of a broader trend across the crypto industry, with similar initiatives seeking to drive adoption and innovation. For instance, in 2021, Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution, launched a $100 million fund aimed at improving access to decentralized finance, onboarding users, and accelerating adoption.

In summary, the proposed Mantle EcoFund has the potential to significantly boost the development and adoption of Web3 startups by providing early-stage funding for promising projects. With the backing of BitDAO’s treasury and external venture partners, the Mantle EcoFund could become a significant player in the Web3 ecosystem, fueling innovation and growth in the years to come.