Despite recession, crypto industry progresses fast
No, crypto industry hasn’t lost its mojo. Quite the contrary: millions of dollars are raised to fund new crypto ventures, more legacy financial institutions are taking the crypto turn and new NFT projects do not fail to attract users.
? Now that Celsius has officially filed for bankruptcy, joining 3AC and Voyager Digital, the CeFi death toll in this bear market may be close to completion. Time to concentrate on the new projects that will contribute to driving the industry’s next growth cycle.
? Lightspeed Venture Partners, a tech- and blockchain-oriented VC has recently raised over $7 billions for four new funds and created a special team dedicated to building blockchain infrastructure.
? Dunamu, a South Korean fintech firm with over $8 billion of AUM (also known for owning Upbit exchange), intends investing $380 million in the Korean web3 industry. The plan, which, according to the firm, would help create over 10k of new web3 jobs in the next 5 years, includes opening offices across the country and launching training programs. South Korea as a country does not linger neither: in the end of May the government shared its intentions to invest $177 million in the development of metaverse-related projects.
? PostFinance, the banking arm of the Swiss Post Office, announced this week its plans to build a crypto trading platform by 2024. PostFinance already provides its customers with access to crypto via Swissquote, another crypto bank, but the creation of its own platform would put it in control of all aspects of crypto trading.
? The general trend on crypto finance is positive. In a recent interview the CEO of Bitwise Asset Management, a crypto index fund and ETF provider, noted how fast the interest to crypto-exposed financial products is growing. Private banks and broker-dealers are ever more numerous to put crypto products on their platforms (those that have approved Bitwise products in the last year cumulatively manage over $2 trillion of assets). Moreover, the number of institutional advisors working with the firm is increasing too: from 6% of advisors interested in crypto in 2020 to 9% in 2021 to an estimated 16% in 2022…
? In the NFT space this week’s beta launch of GameStop NFT marketplace generated almost $3.5 million of trading volume in just two days. This is impressive, especially knowing that the company has not yet started selling gaming NFTs, supposed to become its speciality. In the meantime, Yuga Labs successfully conducted two load tests of the Otherside metaverse, allowing thousands of users to simultaneously interact on a blank map.
The fundamental value of the blockchain does not change when Bitcoin price plummets or a crypto hedge fund goes bankrupt. Rather, it only gets stronger with time, as both the adoption and the number of use cases grow. We are ever more numerous to understand that, even (especially?) in the bear market ?
