Corporate Blockchain Investors Target Payments
Seven of the 10 most active blockchain investors among large public companies have stakes in at least one company that offers payment services.
That’s according to blockchain market intelligence firm Blockdata’s list of the “most active investors in blockchain companies of the top 100 public companies,” released earlier this month. It looked at the 10 months from September 2021 to June 2022.
Although the firms holding venture funding rounds were not necessarily pure payments firms, their offerings included payment services. These are Fireblocks, Circle, FTX, Anchorage Digital, New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) and ConsenSys.
Investment company Digital Currency Group gets an honorable mention for portfolio investments in Abra, Avanti Bank, AZA (formerly Bitpesa) and a good number of other crypto payment companies among the remaining 25 letters.
The 10 investors that Blockdata said were the biggest crypto investors are Alphabet, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Samsung, Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, PayPal, Microsoft, Commonwealth Bank and Prosus.
Now, there’s a big asterisk next to this list, as Blockdata said quite clearly that it couldn’t get the actual dollar amounts for each company’s individual investments. As such, they took the size of the rounds as a proxy, on the theory that investors spend more on companies that raise more.
Regarding the companies that offer payments:
Anchorage Digital is a digital asset custodian that received the crypto industry’s first federal bank charter. Apart from that, it has a specific offering that allows merchants to settle payments from peer-to-peer to cross-border.
Circle is the issuer of the USD Coin stablecoin, the No. 2 stablecoin with a market cap of $52.5 billion. It also provides payments and treasury infrastructure for the internet.
ConsenSys is an Ethereum-focused incubator. Among their companies is CodeFi, a B2B digital currency solution for payments and finance.
In February, Fireblocks acquired stablecoin and the technology platform First Digital for digital asset payment.
FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges, has its payment arm, FTX Pay.
NYDIG owns real-time bitcoin payment application Bottlepay.
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