This Week in DeFi – February 18

To the DeFi community,

This week, Castle Island Ventures announced a $250 million Web3 investment fund and the additon of Ria Bhutoria as general partner at the firm. The new fund will focus on blockchain-based financial services, monetary networks, and internet infrastructure that are expected to be major Web3 themes in years to come.

Congrats to @nic__carter & @MattWalshInBos of Castle Island Ventures for raising their Fund III.
They were early investors in @ZenLedgerIO and have been absolutely fantastic to work with.
The are making great investments and building a powerhouse.https://t.co/tmBBHTbB9Q

— Pat Larsen (@PatrickLarsen) February 16, 2022

Curve Finance enlarges its reach again by launching on Moonbeam, the EVM compatible Polkadot chain. Curve is one of the first cross-chain DeFi protocols to come to Moonbeam, and should provide a solid foundation for like-asset swaps on the network.

1/ @CurveFinance, the most popular exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum + LARGEST DeFi protocol by TVL, has arrived on Moonbeam!

Not only does this enable users to exchange stable coins, it opens up liquidity between any like-value assets.🔄

Try it out 👇https://t.co/GAqUvabKy4

— Moonbeam Network (@MoonbeamNetwork) February 14, 2022

NEAR-based multiproduct DeFi platform Ref Finance announced a strategic raise of $4.8 million to continue expanding their developer team and building out DeFi in the NEAR ecosystem. Ref currently offers AMM and stableswap platforms, with plans for additional AMM improvements and a lend and borrow protocol later on.

🎉 Big news for the collective: We raised $4.8M💪

All in the name of #DeFihttps://t.co/W5O7guy9EU 1/

— Ref Finance (Calling for Degens) (@finance_ref) February 17, 2022

And Gnosis decentralized governance voted to spin out SafeDAO and release the SAFE token via airdrop to users and distributions to core contributors, community treasuries, and the SAFE Foundation. Gnosis Safe contains more than $100 billion in funds across various Web3 projects, making the product a critical piece of public infrastructure that will now be managed by the SAFE holder community.

Tokens will be distributed fairly among core contributors, ecosystem participants, users, the Safe Foundation, and community treasuries. pic.twitter.com/Bbhnrl433R

— Gnosis Safe (@gnosisSafe) February 9, 2022

More than $100 billion held by various DeFi and Web3 projects is a remarkable sum. What’s more, that total represents only that actually raised and held by Ethereum-based projects as ‘dry powder’, indicating a huge amount of runway for the DeFi space that has historically run extremely lean – teams facilitating hundreds of billions in annual volume often consist of a few dozen or less developers, promoters, and coordinators. 

That total also doesn’t include the billions set aside just in the last year by venture capital firms of all varieties, from crypto-native to those just getting started investing in Web3. Investment in the space has skyrocketed over the past four years, with 2022 shaping up to be another notch higher as money continues to pour in.

VC investment in cryptocurrency and blockchain companies:

2021:   $30 billion
2020: $6.5 billion
2019:  $3.9 billion
2018:     $8 billion
2017:  $1.9 billion
2016:  $1.1 billion
2015:  $1.1 billion
2014: $900 million
2013: $300 million
2012: $100 million

source: Pitchbook

— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) January 20, 2022

The blockchain industry has always had its detractors, but the boosters, at least as measured by skin in the game, have apparently never been more confident that crypto infrastructure and products will be an integral part of everyday life in the not-too-distant future. It can feel like a slow process, but if you’ve made it this far, what’s a few more years? Keep on trucking!

Thanks to our partner:

Total Value Locked: $87.35B (down -14.78% since last week)

DeFi Market Cap: $110.24B (down -0.32%)

DEX Weekly Volume: $16.07B (down -4.12%)

DAI Supply: 9.78B (down -0.21%)

Total DeFi Users: 4,395,350 (up 0.72%)

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Alex is a Content Writer at Circle, with previous experience at tech startups, Fortune 500 corporations, and as a freelance writer and analyst. Interests include cutting-edge technologies in blockchain, energy, supply chains, transportation, urban living, and more and he has been in the crypto community since 2014.