Venture Trotter Weekly Review: Week Ending 11/11/22

Ruceto tracked over $190 million in institutional investments into crypto or web3 companies last week. Links to the target company website, investment announcement, and token info are provided via hyperlinks on the Target Name, $ Raised, and Token columns respectively.

Target Name $ Raised Lead Investors Description Token
Mubadala Capital, Korelya Capital
Non-custodial fiat to crypto infrastructure that makes it easy for users to jump on and off of Web3 from anywhere
Thoma Bravo
Preventing fraud and financial crime for digital currencies
Lightspeed Venture Partners
Institutional MPC wallet & security platform
Hashed, Race Capital
Embed notifications and cross-chain messaging into your decentralized applications
Hack VC, Pitango First
Integrating advanced, full-text search into your daap
Undisclosed
Crypto exchange
XCM
Supernode Global
Partner with the best sporting competitions, leagues, teams and athletes to create official NFTs that can be used in web3 games
Coming Soon
NFX
Gaming infrastructure startup

Coinmetro is an Estonian-based crypto exchange, and its most recent investment round values the company at $180 million. The exchange’s native token is XCM, which is integrated into every part of the exchange’s ecosystem. This token is a deflationary asset that Coinbase uses 100% of exchange fees to purchase on the market. Per the company, “by simply making use of our platform through trading, margin trading, copy trading, or by using our unique swap widget, you can earn XCM. Its deflationary aspect, by virtue of weekly burns, reduces its supply on a weekly basis and therefore increases its demand. The bigger our platform, the more people trade, the more XCM gets burned. This means, in theory, that the price of XCM will continue to rise as there are less tokens in circulation.”

Institutional Investors of Crypto

 

FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday, 11/11 It will take quite some time for us to see the full impact that this “Lehman moment for crypto” has on both institutional and retail investors, but the media will certainly be scouring through every bankruptcy filing for details. It’s unclear how much clients who have funds trapped in FTX will eventually recover, but the investors (partial list here) who put nearly $2 billion into FTX will likely lose all they invested. Sequoia said in a letter it sent to LPs that it marked its $213.5 million investments in FTX to zero.

 

Time will tell how far the contagion from FTX’s ~$10 billion balance sheet hole will go. The crypto lender BlockFi just announced via a Tweet that it is halting withdrawals and limiting activities. Multicoin Capital has 10% of its fund’s AUM stuck on FTX’s exchange. It also looks like the Solana ecosystem is getting hit especially hard.

 

LeadBlock Partners, a European VC investor in of the blockchain and digital assets ecosystem, announced the first close of their new fund with a target value of €150 million. This is their 2nd fund, with 1st first fund having an unannounced investment size and a vintage year of 2019. Their first fund’s portfolio includes Yuga Labs, BlockFI, and BitPanda. This fund will primarily invest in both tokens and equity of Seed and Series A stage companies that are in a pre-token generation or pre-listing phase.

 

What’s happening at Ruceto

 

The Venture Trotter will be taking a couple weeks off for paternity leave.

 

We provide institutional quality research on Web3 projects, and our deep dive report on Oasys is now available! Oasys is a new blockchain protocol for gaming with members of its founding team including executives from Bandai Namco Research, Sega Corporation, and Yield Guild Games. Check out https://ruceto.com/research/ to read it for free before the initial coin offering that’s planned for November!

 

Ruceto is democratizing Crypto and Web3 research by giving you the opportunity to earn cash bounties for writing reports. Join our Discord to learn about how you can get paid for your insight, or how you can join and follow a community of experts.

 

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Disclaimer: The content presented is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal, or professional advice. The content is provided ‘as is’ without any representations or warranties, express or implied.

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