One River Digital, a cryptocurrency-focused hedge fund offering exposure to Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), has closed its first funding round after launching last year. One River Digital president Sebastian Bea confirmed Wednesday that the company had raised $41 million in a Series A financing round from investors, including Goldman Sachs and Coinbase Ventures. Other investors included American diversified global insurer Liberty Mutual Insurance and an alternative investment management firm, Infinity Investment Partners, as One River Digital announced on Tuesday. According to the One River Digital president, the fresh capital will help the company to increase its investment opportunities to …

With venture capital funding seemingly prioritizing emerging technology, the blockchain industry experiences a significant influx of capital from corporate backers. According to the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2021 published on Wednesday, blockchain-based businesses account for 10% of startups worldwide. The figure is part of a more significant trend that has seen emerging technology become a fast-growing sub-sector in terms of early-stage funding. The report divides startups into growing, matured and declining sub-sectors. Unsurprisingly, blockchain technology is in the first group, where the average growth rate is 107%, along with agriculture technology (agtech) and new food, advanced manufacturing and robotics, artificial …

Major Bitcoin (BTC) mining company Genesis Digital Assets has secured $431 million in funding to expand its industrial-scale mining operations in the United States and Nordics. The new funding round was led by Paradigm, one of the biggest cryptocurrency investment companies backing major industry players like Coinbase and FTX. Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang has also joined Genesis Digital’s board of directors, the firm announced on Tuesday. Other investors include the $11 billion asset manager Stone Ridge and its Bitcoin subsidiary NYDIG, and several venture capital firms and investment management firms like Ribbit, Electric Capital, Skybridge and Kingsway Capital, and FTX …

Blockchain intelligence platform Metrika has concluded a $14 million Series A fundraiser to bootstrap the next phase of its growth strategy, further underscoring the venture capital demand for budding blockchain startups. Metrika announced Tuesday that the funding will be used to further develop its blockchain intelligence platform, which provides monitoring and analytics for decentralized networks, as well as to expand its user base. The investment round was led by Neotribe Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Samsung NEXT, Nyca Partners and others. Combined with its $3.7 million seed round, Metrika has successfully raised $17.7 million to date. Although Metrika has …

Sorare, a marketplace for nonfungible token (NFT) trading cards, has raised $680 million in a Series B funding round led by Japanese fintech giant SoftBank, resulting in a revised valuation of $4.3 billion for the platform. According to the company, the latest funding will help expand Sorare’s portfolio of football player NFTs by partnering with more football leagues and associations. In early September, the French NFT-based trading platform secured its first soccer league partnership with La Liga in addition to having NFT collaborations with Paris Saint-Germain, Liverpool and other top-tier soccer teams. Sorare also plans to diversify its NFT-based portfolio …

Something is brewing, and those with finely tuned noses can smell it. As traders have come to expect, Bitcoin (BTC) is doing “Bitcoin things” by bouncing around between the usual “key” support and resistance levels, and to be honest, it’s all starting to feel a bit boomerish. Bitcoin’s long-awaited “moon” depended on institutional investor buy-in, breaking the previous all-time high at $19,000 and a set of other firmly held beliefs. Well, all that happened, and the run to $64,900 exceeded many investors’ wildest dreams. But despite this, the entire BTC situation just feels predictable and boring if you are of …

On Thursday Avalanche’s (AVAX) price hit a new all-time high at $68.89, and over the last few months, the project has risen to challenge the Ethereum network’s dominance among smart contract platforms. According to the project’s website, the layer-one protocol is capable of surpassing 4,500 transactions per second (TPS) with a time to finality of less than 2 seconds. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that since hitting a low of $32.10 on Sept. 7, the price of AVAX has rallied 111% to establish a new all-time high on S as its 24-hour trading volume spiked 200% to …

Altcoins continue to book notable gains on Sept. 16 as a slew of celebrity endorsements, major investments and the growing popularity of cross-chain bridges catch investors' attention. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the biggest gainers over the past 24 hours were Audius (AUDIO), Avalanche (AVAX) and Celer Network (CELR). Superstars invest in Audius The Audius platform is a decentralized music-sharing and streaming protocol that aims to cut out the middleman from the music industry and allow fans, subscribers and creators to interact with each other directly. According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro, market conditions for …

Cryptocurrency trading platform Abra has raised $55 million in funding to bootstrap the next phase of its growth strategy, bringing several high-profile investors on board from both inside and outside the blockchain industry. Abra will use funds from the Series C investment to grow its product offerings in wealth management, trading and payments, as well as expand its in-house capacity, the company announced Wednesday. Amex Ventures, a venture capital arm of American Express, was among the contributors alongside Blockchain Capital, Ignia, Kingsway Capital and Stellar Development Foundation. Abra has now raised over $85 million since its inception. Bill Barhydt, Abra's …

PrimeDAO, a project seeking to facilitate greater coordination and cooperation among decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, has secured $2 million in seed funding. According to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, the round featured participation from notable DeFi investment funds, including Signum Capital, LD Capital and Stacker Ventures. The funds will be used to develop the “DAO2DAO” (D2D) product suite for PrimeDAO, with the platform set to feature a “Negotiation Interface” designed to enable coordination among DAOs. The platform will allow the creation and ratification of agreements among DAOs featuring on-chain conditions. The D2D will also …

Bitcoin billionaires Tim Draper and the Winklevoss twins have backed a startup dubbed “Colossal” that is aiming to resurrect woolly mammoths as part of the effort to fight climate change. The “de-extinction”-focused bioscience firm closed a $15-million funding round on Monday that was led by Legendary Pictures founder Thomas Tull. The round also included participation from Peter Diamandis of Bold Capital, Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital, and Tony Robbins, a famous “self-help guru” with a net worth of around $500 million. Colossal was founded by Harvard genetics professor George Church and entrepreneur Ben Lamm. The firm’s landmark de-extinction project will …

Immutable, a layer-two nonfungible token (NFT) protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain, has announced a $60 million Series B funding raise from a multitude of corporate venture firms, including Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research and Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerFund. The funding round was co-led by gaming investment platform Bitkraft Ventures and venture firm King River Capital. The new capital will be allocated to supporting Immutable’s growing ambitions, including expanding its global engineering and sales departments, fostering industry partnerships and scaling the network’s native NFT gaming projects. Through its scaling solution, Immutable X, the protocol provides a foundational infrastructure for the global business …