Venture capital invested a record $30 billion in crypto in 2021, more than four times the previous record | Currency News | Financial and business news

• Venture capital invested a record $30 billion in crypto in 2021, Bloomberg said, citing PitchBook.
• That’s nearly four times the previous high of $8 billion in 2018, according to the report.
• Crypto firms Sky Mavis, DapperLabs, and MoonPay all recorded valuations in the billions this year.

Venture capital funds poured a record $30 billion — more than every two years combined — into crypto investments in 2021, Bloomberg reported.

The report, which cites data from PitchBook, says the sky-high number is nearly four times the 2018 all-time high of around $8 billion, thanks in part to investors funding “anything and everything” in crypto.

Much of that fundraising — about $7.2 billion — came from US venture capital, according to the report. PitchBook did not respond to Insider’s request for data.

Sky Mavis, owner of Axie Infinity, for example, raised $150 million at a $3 billion valuation in a funding round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Axie Infinity, an Ethereum-based play-t0-earn game, has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as gamers seek to make money in crypto video games.

DapperLabs, the non-fungible token platform behind CryptoKitties and NBA TopShot, raised $305 million in March for $2.6 billion with the help of basketball superstars Michael Jordan and Kevin Durant. In November, the so-called PayPal for crypto known as MoonPay marked a $3.4 billion valuation after raising over half a billion dollars with the help of Tiger Global Management and Coatue.

Crypto, an industry that is just over a decade old, has been gaining traction this year. Bitcoin and Ether, the two top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, hit record highs in 2021. The market for NFTs, blockchain-related digital art, is expected to hit a record high of $17.7 billion by the end of the year, according to a study by Cointelegraph. And the metaverse has been gaining momentum since Facebook’s parent company was renamed Meta, a sign of its push into the next phase of the internet.