The cryptocurrency market has failed to make significant headway in recent months, but that hasn’t stopped the industry’s builders from building. Nonfungible tokens (NFTs), crypto mortgages, blockchain-powered cellular networks and Web3 gaming have all piqued the interest of venture capitalists. These new and familiar investment themes headline the latest edition of VC Roundup, as venture funds continue to target blockchain’s most promising value plays. a16z execs back new NFT fund Andreessen Horowitz’s foray into the blockchain industry continued this month after a large segment of its investing team backed a new nonfungible token fund called Curated. The fund, which is …

Analyzing the labor market is a passion of mine. In my past life, I worked as a labor market analyst for a Canadian think tank specializing in the IT sector. Tech employees always enjoyed higher demand, higher pay and lower jobless rates than workers in the rest of the economy. Although blockchain and crypto were virtually nonexistent during my tenure, these emerging technologies are now leading exponential growth for an industry evolving from Web2 to Web3. This week’s Crypto Biz newsletter highlights the growing demand for crypto professionals in the traditional finance and payment industries. We also survey the latest …

Ripple, the enterprise payment technology company, plans to give out one billion XRP in grants for developers. The newly announced grant is an extension of the company’s XRPL Grants program launched in 2021. The developer grant would be focused on encouraging open-source projects on the XRP ledger, built for enterprise remittance assistance. Ripple has built a strong foothold in the Asia Pacific region through its XRPL based remittance technology called RippleNet Ripplenet offers a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange, and remittance network with the help of the XRP ledger. The remittance platform has partnered with hundreds of banks to …

Major software cryptocurrency wallet Exodus has gone public on the digital asset securities firm Securitize Markets following a $75 million crowdfund capital raise. Exodus’ shares started trading on Securitize on Wednesday, allowing investors from all across the United States and international investors from more than 40 countries to trade the Exodus Class A common stock. Trading under the ticker symbol EXOD, the Exodus Class A common stock is digitally represented on the Algorand blockchain via common stock tokens. Tokenized shares in @Exodus_io are now trading on Securitize Markets. Retail investors included! With 24-7 order placement, 8am-8pm ET trading hours, near-instant …

IoTeX, a blockchain platform focused on the Internet of Things (IoT), has announced the launch of a $100 million sustainable ecosystem fund. The new fund will back over 1,000 decentralized machine economy startups developing use cases for connecting more than 10 million smart devices to the MachineFi portal within the next three years. The decentralized machine economy is a developing economy in which machines, rather than people, are the driving force behind economic growth. This new economy is powered by blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI), and it has the potential to create a more efficient, secure and sustainable way …

Former Meta employees and key players behind the firm’s defunc stablecoin project Diem have raised $200 million to expand a new project dubbed “Aptos.” Aptos was cofounded by former Novi — Meta’s crypto unit — strategic partnerships lead Mo Shaikh and tech lead Avery Ching. The duo arenow serving as the CEO and CTO for the new firm. Both left the company in December, prior to Diem being sold to Silvergate Capital in February this year. The team is building a decentralized Layer 1 blockchain that is partly based on Move, the coding language initially developed for Diem. The company …

Crypto-focused financial modeling platform Gauntlet has achieved unicorn status after raising $23.8 million in Series B funding from some of blockchain’s biggest venture funds. The investment round was led by Ribbit Capital, a Palo Alto-based venture firm, with participation from existing investors Paradigm and Polychain Capital, Bloomberg reported Monday. Gauntlet said the funding will be used to hire additional workers and expand into new industry verticals, including gaming. Gauntlet was founded in 2018 by Tarun Chitra, a Wall Street executive who previously worked at multinational hedge fund D. E. Shaw. Gauntlet provides financial modeling and simulation tools to the cryptocurrency …

Stacks (STX) pared a considerable portion of the gains it made on March 10 as the euphoria surrounding its $165 million pledge to support Bitcoin (BTC) projects showed signs of fading. STX's price dropped by over 30% to reach a level as low as $1.33 on Friday when measured from its week-to-date high of $1.94. The selloff, in part, appeared technical as the $1.94-top fell in the same range that served as solid support between October 2021 and January 2022, only to flip later to become a resistance area. It also appears that traders spotted selling opportunities due to STX's …

Blockchain network Avalanche announced the launch of Avalanche Multiverse, an incentive program that will accelerate the adoption of subnets that are app-specific blockchain ecosystems. According to the Director of Avalanche Foundation Emin Gün Sirer, subnets are the next big thing in blockchain. Sirer said that subnets enable functions that are only possible with “network-level control and open experimentation.” He also mentioned that while smart contracts carried innovations within blockchain in the last five years, he believes subnets are next. The program will allocate up to 4 million Avalanche (AVAX), worth roughly $290 million, to fund blockchain gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), …

Despite extreme volatility in the price of crypto assets, venture funds continue to make strategic investments in the industry. In recent weeks, the focus has shifted to infrastructure developers in Web3, play-to-earn and GameFi — nascent industries that still have significant upside ahead. Cointelegraph’s latest VC Roundup provides a rundown of funding stories that didn’t get front-page coverage but still generated significant interest from the venture capital realm. Related: VC Roundup: Animoca leads NFT3 raise, Arca launches NFT fund and Alexis Ohanian broadens crypto exposure Pantera leads $32.9M Subspace Labs funding round Web3 infrastructure developer Subspace Labs concluded a $32.9 …

Peter Thiel-backed city-building startup Praxis has raised $15 million in Series A funding from a variety of crypto venture firms led by Paradigm Capital, Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research, and Three Arrows Capital. Dryden Brown of New York University, and Charlie Callinan of Boston College, co-founded Praxis, formerly Bluebook Cities in 2019, describing their goal as: “building the city-cryptostate to realize a more vital future,” according to the company website. Praxis wants to pivot away from “artificially scarce metaverses” to build a city-state that is organized around “shared values,” rather than the “labor market principles of the Industrial Age”. The cryptocurrency-run …

NFT infrastructure startup Rarify has raised $10 million in Series A funding from Pantera Capital at a valuation of $100 million. The backing from Pantera Capital appears significant as the company is one of the top venture capital firms in crypto. One of Rarify’s primary offerings is an NFT-commerce-focused application programming interface (APIs) that enables firms to launch and integrate user-friendly marketplaces in their platforms. The API also allows minting and porting NFTs between different blockchains. Speaking with Forbes on March 3, Rarify co-founder Revas Tsivtsivadze stated that the company aims to simplify NFT buying and selling similarly to “how …