The past seven days have reminded me of how lucky I am to have forged a career in the Bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrency industry. Cointelegraph sent a contingency of reporters to the Bitcoin conference in Miami, where we got to chop it up with billionaires, business leaders and hedge fund managers. I had the privilege of sitting down with Canadian businessman and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, who actually revealed most of his crypto portfolio. I also got to interview Bloomberg’s senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone, who shed light on crypto market volatility, as well as Mark Yusko of Morgan …

Crypto venture capital firms have been investing at unprecedented rates recently and Andreessen Horowitz is one of the industry’s leaders making huge returns on their investments. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) general partner Chris Dixon has topped the Forbes “Midas List” of the world’s best venture capital investors in 2022. Seldom does a crypto or Web3 funding round finalize without a16z being involved somehow. According to an April 12 report by the publication, Dixon turned the $350 million Crypto Fund I into realized and unrealized gains of $6 billion in 2021. That equates to an eye-watering 17.7x gain according to “sources with …

Nonfungible token (NFT) startup Genies has secured $150 million in Series C funding at a valuation of $1 billion, making it the latest crypto-focused platform to attain “unicorn” status. The funding round was led by California-based private equity firm Silver Lake, which manages $88 billion in assets as of 2021, with additional participation from existing investors Tamarack Global, BOND and NEA. Genies said the funding will go towards increasing internal capacity in its engineering department as well as investing in new technologies. Founded in 2017, Genies is an avatar technology company that first set out to target social media and …

Popular decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap has announced the formation of Uniswap Labs Ventures (ULV), a venture capital fund focused on investing in Web3 companies and projects. The firm will invest at any stage of development into various projects or technologies related to Web3, infrastructure, developer tools, and consumer-facing applications as areas of interest according to the announcement on Monday, April 11. The firm has already invested in 11 companies and Web3 protocols, including decentralized money market Aave, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) behind the DAI stablecoin, MakerDAO, and blockchain bridging protocol LayerZero. In the announcement, Uniswap expressed what it looked …

The institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies has been gaining momentum over the past couple of years due to venture capitalists and money managers looking to the crypto market as the next investment class that will offer the greatest return. The Boba Network (BOBA) is the most recent protocol to benefit from institutional interest and the long search for an Ethereum (ETH) layer-two scaling solution capable of low-cost transactions and fast processing times. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that BOBA has gained 50.71% over the past week and a half after climbing from a low of $1.24 on March …

Hybrid computing platform Boba Network has joined the “crypto unicorn” rankings after raising $45 million in Series A funding, underscoring the investment appeal of Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions. The funding round had participation from several crypto-focused venture funds including Infinite Capital, Hypersphere, 10X Capital, Hack VC, GBV, Sanctor Capital, Shima Capital, Kinetic Capital, IOST and ROK Capital. Contributions also came from the Will Smith-led Dreamers VC, Paris Hilton’s M13 and several crypto industry founders from projects such as Origin Protocol, The Graph, FEI Labs and exchange giants Crypto.com and Huobi. The Series A valued Boba Network at $1.5 billion, giving …

The rise of Web3 has paved the way for new business models that could shape the next phase of the internet. For instance, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) will play a large part in the open metaverse as the underlying assets people interact with. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are also coming to fruition to allow for community governance within virtual environments. The growth of Web3 has essentially allowed NFTs and DAOs to flourish. For example, recent data from DeepDAO — a DAO stats platform — shows that DAOs have experienced 130-times growth over the last year, reaching a market capitalization of $24.8 …

Venture capital (VC) firms focused on Web3 projects and crypto businesses are accumulating billions of dollars worth of assets under management as more capital is injected into the sector. The assets under management figure for Web3 and crypto investment firm Paradigm has recently been revealed. Filings show that the firm has $13.2 billion in assets, a growth of 343% compared to the $2.98 billion reported in a filing in December 2020. The filings were reviewed by business journalist Eric Newcomer. Writing for his newsletter, he looked at recent applications with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for some of …

Cryptocurrency exchange and financial services firm, Blockchain.com, has reportedly raised new funding at a valuation of $14 billion. According to Bloomberg, the financing round was led by global venture capital firm Lightspeed Ventures and Baillie Gifford & Co., an investment management firm renowned for its early involvement in growth stocks such as Tesla. The funding round — which is yet to be publicly confirmed by Blockchain.com or the investors — reportedly saw the firms’ valuation increase from $5.2 billions to $14 billion. The total amount of funding raised is yet to be announced. Founded in 2011, Blockchain.com is now one …

While crypto markets are still in a state of “fear,” as evidenced by Bitcoin’s Fear & Greed Index, the industry as a whole is giving us reasons to be bullish. Large venture funding rounds, growing adoption of decentralized governance models and new institutional-grade product offerings suggest that crypto is more than just daily chart patterns. This week’s Crypto Biz newsletter looks at a new Grayscale product that’s giving accredited investors more ways to bet on the so-called “Ethereum killers.” We also document two funding stories and draw your attention to the latest developments surrounding El Salvador’s Bitcoin (BTC) bond. Grayscale …

MINA, a utility token backed by a "lightweight" smart contracts platform of the same name, continued its upside move nine days after rebounding from $1.58, its lowest level to date. The coin rallied by about 75% to reach $2.75 as of March 24 as traders weighed a high-profile funding rounds involving the sale of $92 million worth of MINA tokens to Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, and other venture capitalists. An overall recovery sentiment across the crypto market also assisted in pushing MINA's price higher, since altcoins typically move in tandem with Bitcoin (BTC). Additionally, Coinbase's announcement on March 23 …

Former Polychain Capital general partner Tekin Salimi has launched a new blockchain-focused investment fund that will eventually be converted into a founder-owned decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), offering a novel way for startup leaders to be rewarded for their contributions. The $125 million fund, known simply as “dao5,” will invest in blockchain and cryptocurrency projects in their pre-seed and seed stages. In the startup world, a pre-seed round usually helps company founders get their operations running. The seed stage is the first official equity funding round. The fund will invest primarily in projects specializing in layer-1 blockchain infrastructure, privacy technology, decentralized …