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Crypto.com Adds $500 Million To Its Venture Arm To Fund Web3 Startups

Crypto.com expands venture arm

The popular cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com has raised $500 million for its venture arm as it looks to support a broader range of early-stage startups to help the nascent ecosystem grow, following moves by rivals Binance, Coinbase and FTX.

Crypto.com Capital, based in Singapore, unveils its $200 million maiden fund less than a year after launching it. But unlike its rivals, the fund has no limited partners.

The fund, whose individual checks are up to $10 million in size, has invested in about 20 startups so far, including YGG SEA, DeBank, Efinity, and Matter Labs, a scaling solution for Ethereum.

Crypto.com’s fund will finance startups building cross-chain solutions in gaming, financial decentralization, and decentralized finance.

As Tuesday’s announcement emphasizes, cryptocurrency exchanges are increasingly taking on the role of rainmakers – and beneficiaries – of the ecosystem encompassed by the industry in which they operate.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, owns Alameda Research, a venture firm with over 100 web3 startups under its belt. He has backed over 15 startups and just announced a $2 billion fund last week.

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, is another large investor in the web3 space, along with Coinbase Ventures, the investment arm of the only publicly traded crypto exchange.

There has never been such an influx of funding, even as many of the companies mentioned above co-invest in startups. The total investment in crypto/web3 startups in 2021 exceeded $33 billion, according to a recent report by Galaxy Digital, another prolific investor in the space.

It is not mandatory for startups that Crypto.com backs to list their tokens on Crypto.com rather than its competitors, or offer the exchange any other preferential treatment.

The cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com has aggressively expanded over the last year in an attempt to target more users. The Singapore-based company, which acquired the naming rights to the Staples Center in Los Angeles last year, has renamed the arena Crypto.com Arena. It will remain as the name of the downtown Los Angeles complex for the next 20 years.

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