Binance announced the launch of a new $500 million investment fund on Wednesday.
With the new fund, the global prominent cryptocurrency exchange plans to invest in blockchain, web3, and “value-building technologies.”
Binance Labs, the exchange’s venture capital arm, raised the funds. DST Global Partners, Breyer Capital, and Whampoa Group are among the fund’s major supporters, with other investment firms serving as limited partners.
The fund will make investments in firms at various phases of development, including incubation, early-stage, and late-stage.
Binance is not new to investing in cryptocurrency companies. Axie Infinity, Polygon, Elrond, The Sandbox, and STEPN are among the key future crypto businesses in which the exchange’s venture capital arm has funded.
Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao, the CEO of Binance stated:
“The goal of the newly closed investment fund is to discover and support projects and founders with the potential to build and to lead Web3 across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, Metaverse, social, and more.”
However, this has worked against the firm at times. The corporation acquired almost 3 million LUNA tokens in exchange for their Terra investment and had $1.6 billion in LUNA at their highest price.
The tokens are now worth much less than the value they carried originally. The exchange has also come under fire for pushing UST on its platform seeing how the whole project turned out.
Binance’s funding also comes at a difficult moment for cryptocurrency markets, with a May slump sending values to their lowest point since the first months of 2021.
Nonetheless, Binance has recently expanded further than just cryptocurrency investments, as the exchange contributed $500 million in stock towards Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition.
Binance is not the only company soliciting capital during the market downturn. Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto venture capital firm, has created a $4.5 billion fund to capitalize on reduced valuations caused by the current crisis.
Dragonfly Capital launched its largest fund to date, valued at $650 million, in late April. This follows on the heels of many other significant companies raising crypto-focused companies earlier in 2022.