Bear market? VCs throw $1.1B at Bitcoin miners and NFT fantasy football
Bitcoin miners Genesis Digital Assets and NFT-powered fantasy football startup Sorare disclosed major VC funding rounds this week, together worth over $1.1 billion.
Venture capital giant SoftBank led Paris-based Sorare’s $680 million Series B, via its Vision Fund 2.
Sorare’s existing investors — Benchmark, Accel, and Headline — also participated. The deal bumped Sorare’s valuation to $4.3 billion.
Investment firm Paradigm led Genesis’ round, which raised $431 million. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX joined in, alongside New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) and London hedge fund Kingsway Capital.
This was Kingsway Capital’s second go at New York-based Genesis after it invested $125 million only two months ago. Genesis plans to use the cash to expand its mining operations.
VCs dish funds across the board
While funding rounds for startups are generally a dime a dozen, the size of these two raises underscores the growing appetite investors have for all things crypto.
As of August 2021, VC funds have reportedly infused some $17 billion into cryptocurrency and blockchain plays this year, according to data from PitchBook — a new record.
A sizeable chunk went to Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange-slash-investment firm FTX. In July, FTX raised $900 million to hit an $18 billion valuation.
Compare that to all of 2020, when just $3.7 billion was raised across the cryptocurrency space all year.
Not to mention, Sorare’s and Genesis’ raises come on the heels of a crypto slump in 2021’s third quarter.
Read more: [BitClout’s creator didn’t raise $200M for a ‘new’ blockchain — it’s the same old shit]
Crypto markets’ total value peaked in mid-May at a touch below $2.5 trillion. By June, that figure had almost halved.
Early September did see a considerable bounce back to $2.36 trillion, but markets have since slipped 20%, awarding crypto a total value of under $1.9 trillion.
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