Crypto VC funding up for the first time since nearly 2022, PitchBook says
The crypto venture funding market finished 2023 with a positive dynamic, as investors have seemingly started returning to crypto.
The last quarter of 2023 saw $1.9 billion in venture capital (VC) funding for crypto-related companies, representing a 2.5% increase from Q3 2023, CNBC has learned, citing data provided by PitchBook. This figure marks the first uptick in VC investments in crypto startups since March 2022.
Robert Le, a crypto analyst at PitchBook, highlighted a significant correlation between investments in private markets and the performance of public markets, adding that there are “a lot of publicly-traded crypto companies that are up in the last year, and we’re starting to see on the private side that trend as well.”
Le also noted that the number of deals declined 2.4% in Q4 2023, explaining the decline as a concentration of capital “going into fewer companies in the crypto space.” In the last quarter of 2023, the most notable crypto ventures receiving funding focused on finance tokenization and decentralized computing infrastructure.
The quarter’s largest deal was a $225 million investment in Wormhole, a decentralized protocol for cross-chain swaps, backed by Coinbase Ventures, Jump Trading, and ParaFi Capital, which recently announced an airdrop for its users. The other two big crypto players, Swan Bitcoin and Blockchain.com, followed Wormhole in terms of funding, which raised $165 million and $100 million, respectively, according to PitchBook.
