invezz.com
Coinbase Ventures (or “Ventures”) has become one of the most active venture capital investors in crypto, averaging a new deal every two days in the third quarter of 2021. Their current portfolio size stands at over 200 companies and projects, Invezz learned from a Coinbase blog post.
Coinbase made 49 investments this quarter compared to 28 in Q2 and 24 in Q1. 90% of the capital they invested has been deployed this year. This reflects the accelerated pace of Coinbase Ventures in its fourth year of operation.
Types of investments
Are you looking for fast-news, hot-tips and market analysis? Sign-up for the Invezz newsletter, today.
Coinbase Ventures’ investments cover seed deals and multi-million dollar funding rounds alike. Their investments are in the following categories: DeFi, CeFi, protocols + web3 infrastructure, NFTs, platform and developer tools, and miscellaneous.
In their most active quarter so far, there was dynamic development across centralized finance (CeFi) in the US, web3 tooling, Layer-1/Layer-2, and cross-chain protocols.
Web2 companies expand crypto strategies
Stripe, Square, Tik Tok, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 companies expanded their crypto strategies this quarter. Twitter revealed future Bitcoin (BTC/USD) Lightning and NFT integrations and Square announced a Bitcoin based platform for financial services. Tik Tok and ImmutableX announced a partnership to launch a creator-led NFT collection.
Coinbase enables crypto integration on traditional platforms
Banks, fintechs, and brokers were able to continue integrating crypto into their product offerings thanks to services like Coinbase Prime and Coinbase Cloud.
After years of working on solutions to ease bottlenecks on Ethereum, a series of Layer-1 and Layer-2 ecosystems finally took off, providing much needed scalability. At the moment, most traction is on solutions leveraging EVM compatibility. This makes it possible for both users and developers to migrate to new environments with relatively low costs.
NFT 2.0 & crypto gaming take off
The third quarter saw great progress in the development of NFT creator tools. These create new social features while broadening the scope of NFT use cases.
Improved Web3 user experience
Examples of this are Spruce’s standardization of open authorization, which will allow users to securely share private files, digital data, and sensitive media via Web3 apps. XMTP is fronting a messaging standard across Web3 addresses, and Snapshot is making access to governance forums and decisions across Dapps easy and simple.