According to a recent study, some prominent IT giants have made puzzling investments in blockchain startups, some of which are struggling following the recent meltdown.
Do you consider Google to be a “Web3” business? No? Based only on the investment rounds they participated in, it appears like they are at least somewhat invested in blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.
A new blog post from Blockdata, a company that does an analysis of the cryptocurrency market, was published on Tuesday. It lists the top investors in the space from September 2021 to June 2022. Researchers found that major IT corporations, such as Tencent, Microsoft, PayPal, Samsung, and Alphabet (Google), are heavily investing in startups and cryptocurrency businesses.
Some of these businesses, like PayPal, have long supported blockchain technology verbally (thanks in part to its co-founder Peter Thiel). Others have been considerably quieter, such as Google. Blockchain is “certainly being looked at,” CEO Sundar Pichai told investors earlier this year. It is “such an exciting and strong technology with many applications.” The Google CEO said that they aim to integrate NFTs and cryptocurrency payments into their different platforms and that they intend to permit blockchain-based companies to use cloud computing. Despite establishing a new blockchain group in January, we have yet to see any public blockchain initiatives this year.
What Google decides to invest in might provide insight into the direction blockchain technology should take or what it might wish to include in its own technological framework. The survey placed Alphabet, the parent company of Google, at the top of the list, indicating that it has participated in some of the largest investments in cryptocurrency companies during the previous year.
Google objected to the way the report was put together and said that the figures were wrong since they only indicated the total amount of each fundraising round and not Google’s participation in each round.
Therefore, Google is investing in Blockchain technology even though its total contributions are smaller than what the report wants to confuse. Dapper Labs, the business that created the NBA’s Top Shot and UFC Strike licensed video NFTs, received some of the corporation’s overall funding. The firm was also the creator of the NFT-based game CryptoKitties, which has seen its product prices plummet. According to Dapper, they are integrating their Google cloud infrastructure with their own Flow blockchain platforms.
The fact that two of Google’s investment entities are really participating in this fundraiser adds to its complexity. With $6 million in total investments at the beginning of 2022, GV (Google’s investing division formerly known as Google Ventures) helped fund Dapper Labs and another crypto infrastructure business Voltage. The business’s separate private equity firm, CapitalG, participated in the $550 million cryptocurrency custody company Fireblock raised through investments with Digital Currency Group and other venture capital firms.
Of course, all of this occurred before the most recent crypto meltdown, which resulted in the layoff of thousands of employees at several once-powerful crypto organizations. Numerous cryptocurrency exchanges turned out to be problematic because they prohibited consumers from withdrawing their money out of concern that they would lose all liquidity. According to Bloomberg, which cited unnamed persons familiar with the proceedings, the Digital Currency Group, another investment of Google’s, reportedly had a $1.2 billion claim against Three Arrows Capital. If you didn’t know, Three Arrows Capital failed and was forced to liquidate back in June, bringing down a number of troubled cryptocurrency businesses.
Despite the fact that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has a significant financial interest in blockchain startups, this is not the first time we have heard about them. The Block data report states that they have been investing in this technology since 2016. Previous rumors indicated that they had invested in cryptocurrencies like Ripple, which hasn’t fared so well since the recent crypto meltdown along with many other tiny altcoins. Prior to this, Google has invested in a far larger range of blockchain-based businesses.
This is the present, not back then. It is an effort to place concentrated bets on a select group of firms, according to Blockdata analysts, but even with the executives’ stated expectations for blockchain technology, it is difficult to imagine all of the investments succeeding.
Samsung was leading the charge in the number—and head-spinning variety—of crypto initiatives it was making it rain on during an astonishing 13 rounds of funding, but coming in fourth in terms of the magnitude of its donations. The likes of Dank Bank, an NFT platform that aims to monetize “memes and other memorable events in internet history,” received a total of $979.26 million. They gave Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTS, more of their financial support. Although they made their investment in March, followers of the group’s official Instagram and Discord accounts were defrauded of roughly $13.7 million worth of NFTs in April. However, founders claimed that several of BAYC’s odd efforts, such as the Bored Ape “Metaverse,” is still in full swing.
