Tag: Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners Launches 4 Crypto Funds with $7.1B

by Blockchain News

Venture Capital (VC) firm Lightspeed Ventures has announced it has secured the cumulative $7.1 billion to bankroll 4 new crypto funds.

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As announced by the VC, the four funds include Lightspeed Venture Partners XIV-A/B LP, Lightspeed Venture Partners Select V LP, Lightspeed Opportunity Fund II LP, and Lightspeed India Partners Fund IV, which will focus exclusively on Indian innovators.

Per the details shared, each of the funds notably closed with $1.98 billion, $2.26 billion, $2.36 billion, and $500 million, respectively. 

Besides the announcement of these funds, Lightspeed said it has also launched Lightspeed Faction, an independent team dedicated to building on Lightspeed’s nine-year history of backing exceptional founders in blockchain infrastructure. The Lightspeed Faction team will be led by investors Sam Harrison and Banafsheh Fathieh.

Lightspeed has one of the broadest allowances as a VC supporting the digital currency ecosystem. Its funds are injected into innovative projects irrespective of their stage or a particular geographical location. 

“We believe in investing at the earliest stages of innovation, partnering with generational entrepreneurs who have clarity of vision, an insatiable desire to build something enduring, and the conviction and courage to compete and win against all odds,” said Arif Janmohamed, Partner, Lightspeed. “We love to partner with and even incubate companies around core dislocations in the enterprise landscape and to build relationships with prospective entrepreneurs years before they are ready to start building.”

The latest capital accumulation by Lightspeed shows that investors are unbothered by the latest downturn in the crypto ecosystem.

Lightspeed Venture Partners is one of many VCs dedicating funds to support innovative projects in the emerging Web3.0 world. While the combined $7.1 billion capital from the four funds is the largest seen thus far, other outfits like Haun Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) have also previously floated $1.5 billion and $4.5 billion funds, respectively.

Image source: Shutterstock

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Solana Hits New All-Time High, Surpasses Cardano And Tether To Fourth Place

by NEWSBTC

The Solana (SOL) ecosystem continues to see huge growth in the market. SOL price touched another record high on Sunday, November 7, as it reached $260.06. Its price is up by almost 17,500% YTD – from $1.51. SOL surpassed Cardano (ADA) and Tether (USDT) to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $75.4 billion.

Related Reading | Is Cardano Fighting A Losing Battle Against Solana?

At the time of writing, it falls behind Binance Coin (BNB) $109 billion, Ether (ETH) $546 billion, and Bitcoin (BTC) $1.17 trillion. While it is creeping closer to Ethereum, there is still a huge gap between both coins.

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Meanwhile, ADA and USDT’s market capitalization came out to be $67.1 billion and $74.4 billion, respectively.

SOL Rises After $100 Million Investment Initiative

Solana’s rise to ATH comes just after its venture capital arm Solana Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and FTX spearheaded a new investment fund dedicated to Web 3 gaming, also known as GameFi. Web 3 gaming has skyrocketed in popularity.

Related Reading | Solana, FTX, Lightspeed Ventures To Launch $100M Web3 Gaming Fund

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The venture company intends to increase SOL adoption by attracting desktop and mobile video game developers to build their projects on its public blockchain. With SOL’s bullish run recently, many are comparing it to No. 2 crypto Ethereum.

“Solana is the leading Ethereum competitor,” Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, said to CNBC. “I wouldn’t put all my chips on it, but I’m a big fan.”

SOLUSD on TradingView.com

SOL trading at $248.7 | Source: SOLUSD on TradingView.com

One of the reasons for this comparison is that both ETH and SOL have smart contract capabilities. Smart contracts are simply programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. They are important in running decentralized finance applications and non-fungible tokens.

“A lot of the fastest-growing applications of crypto technology have been built on Ethereum and rely on the Ethereum blockchain to function,” Hougan says. “If you’re investing in Solana, you’re betting that its technical sophistication will help it leapfrog Ethereum.”

Solana And NFTs

NFT industry data aggregator CryptoSlam ranks Solana as the fourth-best NFT blockchain behind Ethereum, Ronin, and Wax by 24-hour sales volume. The data shows that Solana saw a record month for secondary NFT sales volume during September with a total of $189.4 million.

Related Reading | Why Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya Invested In The Solana Ecosystem

Secondary sales volume for Solana-based NFTs has reached almost $500 million since the start of August.

The biggest collection of NFTs on the blockchain is the Degen Ape Academy series of ape digital collectibles. So far, the Degenerate Ape Academy has sold ape NFTs worth about 986,300 SOL.

Mason Nystrom, a Messari research analyst, remarked that how quickly the blockchain has grown to be one of the top NFT blockchains in just a few months.

He also noted that as of November 1, Solana’s NFT secondary sales reached $500 million in just three months.

Featured image by CNBC, Chart from TradingView.com

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Lightspeed, Pantera Join $20M Raise for Crypto Market Maker Wintermute

by Coindesk

London-based Wintermute, an algorithmic liquidity provider for digital assets, closed a $20 million Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Pantera Capital. 

Other investors joining the round include Sino Global Capital, Kenetic Capital, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, Hack VC, DeFi Alliance and Avon Ventures, a venture capital fund affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments. 

Announced Wednesday, Wintermute plans to use the funding to open its first international office in Singapore in the first quarter of this year, spearheading a general push into Asia, the company said.

The company also plans to launch a derivatives business and offer RFQ or “request-for-quote” services for counterparties, typically used for trading illiquid markets. 

RFQ is basically an automated version of Wintermute’s over-the-counter trading business and something the firm was “literally pulled into” by its counterparties, according to Wintermute COO Marina Gurevich.

“We were doing a lot of OTC transactions with various institutional counterparties and many of them were asking us to offer RFQ so they could trade more with us,” Gurevich said via email. “With institutional demand for OTC growing in December, we’ve seen demand accelerate, so we were doing pilots and are launching Beta RFQ now.”

Founded in 2017, Wintermute provides liquidity on more than 500 spot trading pairs, on dYdX perpetual swaps and a handful of crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) from 21Shares. As well as centralized exchanges and OTC, Wintermute is focused on the burgeoning world of decentralized finance (DeFi).

Gurevich said Wintermute will look to provide liquidity to decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that the firm believes in, even if their volumes are low. 

“We work with many DeFi projects supporting liquidity of their tokens on CeFi exchanges. We don’t charge fees and we partner with the projects we believe can have an impact long-term,” Gurevich said. “We help projects start AMMs [automated market makers] and support liquidity there. We work with DEX aggregators to provide liquidity directly and this is what we believe will grow in future.”

Back in July 2020, Wintermute raised $2.8 million in funding from Lightspeed. Over the course of last year, the company said it has seen explosive trading volumes, growing at a 60% monthly rate and reaching $30 billion monthly trading volume by December.

As part of today’s announcement, Jeremy Liew, partner at Lightspeed, will join Wintermute’s board of directors.

“Wintermute has grown almost 25x since we led the Series A round just six months ago,” Liew said in a press statement. “That rarely happens.” 

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