Crypto fundraising hits $30.3 bn in H1, outpacing all of 2021: Report

2022 H1 crypto fundraising has beaten last whole year's worth of fundraising

By Shashank Bhardwaj

Image: Shutterstock

The latest report published by Messari clears the funding data about Web3 and crypto fundraising. Around 1,199 rounds have managed to raise more funds in six months in 2022 than in the last year. The report shows that more than $30.3 billion has been raised in these rounds so far.

Funding was conducted for Web3, centralised finance, decentralised finance, infrastructure, and NFTs. According to this report, centralised finance (CeFi) has raised more than one-third of the funds by closing at around $10.2 billion in funding. Trailing behind is Web3, infrastructure, and NFTs. All of them have seen an almost similar amount of crypto fundraising. Decentralised finance is the last in this race as it managed to raise only $1.8 billion in these 1,199 rounds. These statistics suggest people do not have much faith in the DeFi segment currently.

More than half of the funding in centralised finance crossed more than $10 million each. Crypto exchanges led the way here and were responsible for most of the funding. Total funding in this segment neared about $3.2 billion, with crypto exchanges raising the most.

Payment gateways, marketplaces, etc., hold second place. The gaming sector in NFTs attracted most of the funds and thus made NFTs and Infrastructure raise more than $8.5 billion in funding. The funds raised by gaming-related NFTs were four times more than any other NFT vertical. Games like Axie Infinity, Gods Unchained, etc., attracted the most funding in this genre.

According to the latest reports, hedge funds have suddenly shown a lot of interest in crypto, and thus more than 38 per cent of them are investing in it. This is a sudden spike compared to the 21 per cent in June 2021. "It's the search for alpha. Everyone is always looking for an angle... so how are you going to beat out benchmarks? You have to try something different and new and unorthodox,” said the PWC global financial services leader John Garvey as he addressed the strategy of hedge fund managers to beat their competition.

Even with $30.2 billion being raised in more than 1,300 rounds, 2021 stats are already beaten with the ongoing crypto market slump. The reason behind 2021 funding getting outpaced is not yet clear.

Shashank is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist.

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