Crypto Research

Infrastructure remained the hottest sector in crypto this week, with Helium’s $200 million raise as the stand-out. NFT/metaverse projects also remain of interest to investors broadly. The sub-category of DAO tooling is gaining more traction with RabbitHole’s $18 million raise. Like last week, DeFi was relatively inactive, with only a few deals closed focusing on derivatives and cross-chain liquidity. Active investors this week include Multicoin Capital, Tiger Global, Alameda Research, Polychain...

DEFI OVERVIEW & IRREFUTABLE GROWTH Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a vertical within the digital asset space that allows users to access financial services without centralized intermediaries. It became the first breakthrough application of smart contracts, having been in development since 20171. Leveraging smart contract functionality on different blockchains, DeFi strives to create a more accessible, efficient, and transparent financial system.  DeFi’s breakneck adoption is evidenced by metrics on all fronts....

GEOPOLITICAL NOISE After briefly eclipsing $45k and $3.2k, both bitcoin and ether tumbled on Friday afternoon following indications from the US government that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. On Tuesday, these fears were quelled when reports surfaced indicating that troops were being removed from the Ukrainian border and crypto rebounded alongside equities. At the time of writing, the global crypto market is slightly lower on the 7-day chart,...

Cryptocurrency rally looks to have temporarily stalled out after a sharp three-week rally.  Ethereum has stalled out in its relative performance vs Bitcoin, and for now, Bitcoin is an outperformer over Ethereum and should be favored. Weekly momentum remains negative and Cycle composites start to turn lower in early March into April/May, so given low retail interest and not many inflows, this could limit the larger rally continuing to all-time highs...

Venture capital went all-in on infrastructure projects this week, more than tripling investments into the crypto vertical at $942 million. The runner-up was NFT/metaverse projects, which raised $134.5 million over 7 projects that were mostly very early-stage funding rounds. CeFi and DeFi were relatively inactive, raising $40 million and $11 million, respectively. A mining infrastructure project raised $385 million in a mix of equity and debt, and three venture capital...