The company has found a strong niche in the DeFi sector, with projects like Aave and Compound among its biggest clients.
Crypto Biz: Goldman Sachs tip-toes into ETH, Mar. 4-10
The megabank is offering investors access to Galaxy Digital’s ETH fund, while a16z just splurged $70 million on an Ether staking protocol.
Cake DeFi launches $100M venture arm for Web3, gaming and fintech initiatives
Cake DeFi Ventures will fund crypto startups across Web3, the Metaverse, the NFT space, gaming, esports and fintech spaces that complement the company’s core business.
If the glass slipper doesn’t fit, smash it: Unraveling the myth of gender equality in crypto
The nature of crypto as a global and distributed industry must provide more opportunities for all possible diversified groups of people.
Bain Capital Ventures sets up half a billion-dollar fund for crypto projects
Venture capital investment in crypto projects topped $25 billion in 2021, more than the sum of the last ten years.
VC Roundup: Web3 infrastructure developers attract major investors
Venture capital from Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, ConsenSys and Crypto.com is making its way to Web3 projects.
City-building startup Praxis secures $15M in Series A Funding
“A more vital future” — Praxis is one step closer to building a crypto-powered city utopia, after a funding round from leading crypto VCs.
Andreessen Horowitz invests $70M in Ethereum staking protocol Lido
The venture capital firm said Lido’s liquid staking solution removes many “operational complexities” institutional investors have faced in staking ETH.
DCG leads $205M growth fund for The Graph
The Graph launched its mainnet in December 2020 and is already being used by leading DeFi protocols and EVM-centric chains.
Sequoia Capital launches crypto fund worth up to $600M
Venture capital firms allocated $25.2 billion towards blockchain and cryptocurrency projects in 2021, the highest on record.
VC Roundup: Animoca leads NFT3 raise, Arca launches NFT fund and Alexis Ohanian broadens crypto exposure
Hartmann Capital has also launched a new metaverse fund and Solana NFT marketplace aggregator Hyperspace raised $4.5 million.
Meet the top 5 busiest crypto funders of 2021, according to PwC
The average deal size of crypto mergers and acquisitions reached $180 million in 2021, surging from $53 million in 2020, PwC said.
Polygon raises $450M in Sequoia-led funding round
Blockchain venture funds are shifting their focus to Web3 development and are placing greater emphasis on scalability.
Blockchain startups grow as global VC funding generated $25.2B in 2021
A 713% increase in venture capital funding went to global blockchain startups last year, but will this trend continue?
Crypto Biz: The crypto industry is more bullish than the Bitcoin charts, Jan. 27-Feb. 2
Venture funds flush with cash are pouring millions of dollars into blockchain startups. And you’re worried about short-term price action?
Crypto-focused enterprise payment platform Tribal Credit raises $60M
Crypto-facilitated cross-border payments services are gaining traction in Latin America — a region that has become a hotbed for the cryptocurrency industry.
Solana ecosystem wallet Phantom raises $109M
Phantom, the cross-platform Solana wallet built for DeFi and NFTs, achieved unicorn status after attaining a $1.2 billion valuation.
Comments On Pantera Capital’s Predictions For The Crypto Market In 2022
One of Pantera Capital’s investors, Paul Veradittakit, was brave enough to make predictions for this year in the tumultuous world of crypto. Even though we applaud the courage, we’re going to poke holes in them. Because this is the Internet and that’s what we do here. To be clear, the author went through 2021 biggest trends and extrapolated them into the future. Which is a safe enough technique.
Related Reading | Sports NFT Marketplace Lympo Suffers An $18.7 Million Hack
Considering Pantera defines itself as the “first U.S. institutional asset manager focused exclusively on blockchain,” you know Veradittakit barely mentioned Bitcoin. The following is a purely crypto affair. It’s also worth noticing that the biggest criticism that Web3 gets is that it’s funded by venture capital and they’re the ones who will ultimately benefit from it. And, well, that’s just what Pantera is and does.
In any case, let’s explore Veradittakit’s ideas and predictions.
Pantera On L2s and Rollups
Surprisingly, the article starts by throwing Ethereum under the bus. According to Veradittakit, all the action will be on L2s. Those grew tremendously in 2021, and the Pantera investor considers them essential to Ethereum’s scalability.
“As mainstream adoption of crypto continues to grow, Ethereum’s network congestion will only become worse, exacerbating its problems with latency and fees. Rollups are critical to sustaining the growth of Ethereum by ensuring that compute infrastructure is highly scalable, allowing users to interact with dApps with similar or even better expectations around usability as with traditional web apps.”
Reading between the lines, this prediction also says that Ethereum is not going to release any of its network upgrades this year. Which sounds about right.
Pantera On Non-Ethereum/Bitcoin Chains
This prediction refers to the battle of the L1s, or the supposed Ethereum killers. The Pantera investor is obviously partial to one in particular:
“Recent activity in the Solana community, including the launches of massive funds for decentralized social media and gaming, suggests that the ecosystem will continue to grow immensely in the coming year.”
First of all, you can’t have “decentralized social media and gaming” in a centralized platform like Solana. Second, Veradittakit forgets to mention Solana’s constant technical problems and outages. Make of that what you will.
Another tendency the author mentions are bridges, “which enable interoperability between vastly different networks.” He considers those will “accelerate the growth of non-Ethereum ecosystems.” Or, to put it more bluntly:
“Overall, these advancements in cross-chain infrastructure will accelerate the speed at which alternative layer one chains gain traction, fostering the development of a truly robust, diverse multi-chain crypto ecosystem.”
What the Pantera investor really means is that all other L1s will keep leaching on Ethereum. Which sounds about right.
SOL price chart on FTX | Source: SOL/USD on TradingView.com
Veradittakit On Composability and Web3
This theme ties with the previous one. The Pantera investor gets into a very interesting topic, though:
“Decentralized identity projects, which allow users to maintain full, more precise control over personal data and reputation, enabling use cases around un-collateralized loans, know your customer (KYC) rules, and more. In 2022, we’ll see more projects expand the scope of on-chain ownership, allowing users to have full, functional control over their identity and holdings in the digital world.”
One thing’s for sure, the world needs “a single login across all services”. No one can handle the number of passwords we’re supposed to remember. This is a real problem. In the article, however, the author focuses on Ethereum-based solutions. We would like to mention that there’s an alternative that uses the Lightning Network. And, you know, that runs over a network that’s actually decentralized.
Pantera On Expansion of NFTs
This is his least controversial take. Veradittakit thinks “NFTs will continue to grow immensely in popularity through the coming year”. He elaborates:
“NFT projects in 2022 will show substantially more diversity in use cases and will reconfigure how we interact with and think about ownership of digital media more broadly.”
However, paraphrasing Vitalik, NFTs have to live through a bear market before they can be considered a success. Is there going to be a bear market in 2022? Probably not. So, Pantera’s prediction stands.
Veradittakit On Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
This prediction is also fairly uncontroversial:
“Given their heightened prominence, I expect to see DAOs become a mainstream vehicle for online organizing and collective action, helping individuals across the globe get actionably involved with causes they care about.”
And the Pantera investor follows it up with this one:
“As DAO operations grow in complexity, I expect to see even more projects building out DAO tooling and infrastructure in 2022.”
More DAOs and tools to manage them? That sounds about right.
Related Reading | Solana: A Quick Review And Look Ahead
Pantera On DeFi Security
This prediction starts with chilling stats:
“More than $610 million were stolen through DeFi exploits in 2021 (a staggering eightfold increase from $77 million in 2020), and an additional $704 million in funds were stolen and then later returned by white hat hackers, like those behind the $600 million PolyNetwork exploit.”
Considering 2021 was the year of DeFi, this should come as no surprise. Criminals follow success and attention. In any case, look at those numbers and extrapolate them to what they would be if DeFi achieves mainstream status.
“In 2022, I expect to see security become a tremendous focus for DeFi projects, and anticipate several more projects launch around better smart contract auditing, precise runtime monitoring, and consumer protections.”
The question here is, is that enough? Or are smart contracts a security risk by definition? Will anyone be able to build an unhackable DeFi protocol? Who will win this race?
Featured Image by JohannaIris in Pixabay | Charts by TradingView
Crypto Biz: Ripple takes the high road, Jan. 20–26
Ripple’s ongoing battle with the SEC isn’t stopping the blockchain payments company from carving out a stronger position in the market.
Crypto tax calculator CoinTracker valued at $1.3B following $100M raise
Crypto tax reporting was a contentious topic in the U.S. last year as Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.