Samsung is betting on 15 potential use cases in the blockchain ecosystem, including blockchain services, development platforms, NFT, and social networks.
Blockdata recently evaluated the top 100 banks investing in blockchain/crypto (by assets under management, AUM) to identify the primary use cases they’re supporting and which new banks have entered the market in the previous ten months. We also investigated the blockchain investment activity of the top 100 public firms (by market value) to understand what’s changed, which blockchain sectors are top of mind, and which new entrants are investing today. Using CB Insights financing data, we delve into the blockchain investments made by these big businesses between September 2021 and mid-June 2022 in this short.
Samsung is the Most Active
During this time, forty corporations invested in blockchain/crypto firms. Samsung (NASDAQ:SSNLF) has been the most active, investing in 13 firms. UOB came in second with seven investments, followed by Citigroup (NYSE:C) with six and Goldman Sachs with five. We cannot identify how much money these firms have invested in most cases since they engage in financing rounds with several or many other investors. We may look at the overall financing amounts of the rounds they participated in as a proxy for this.
According to this, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) ($1,506M in 4 rounds), Blackrock (NYSE:BLK) ($1,171M in 3 rounds), Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) ($1,10M in 2 rounds), Samsung (NASDAQ:SSNLF) ($979M in 13 rounds), Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) ($698M in 5 rounds), BNY Mellon (NYSE:BK) ($690M in 3 rounds), and PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) ($650M in 4 rounds) are the investors active in the largest funding rounds. Between September 2021 and June 2022, the 40 firms invested nearly $6 billion in blockchain startups. Because some rounds contain several investors, it is difficult to determine how much each business spent on a project.
MasterCard (NYSE:MA) is still actively involved in inorganic technology integration and development, despite not being on the current list of prominent investors. Before September 2021, Mastercard was one of the top three active investors in terms of the number of transactions it engaged in. However, MasterCard has primarily run incubation and accelerator programs for four blockchain firms since then. It also purchased CipherTrace, a crypto intelligence startup, in September 2021 to improve its cybersecurity capabilities for staying on top of digital assets.
While Citigroup and Goldman Sachs retained their positions among the top investors, United Overseas Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, BNY Mellon, and Morgan Stanley made significant gains in joining them.
What Use Cases Are The Top Corporations Investing In?
Across 71 investment rounds, 61 blockchain/crypto firms got funding. These blockchain businesses operate in over 20 sectors and 65 use cases:
- Nineteen businesses provide non-fungible tokens (NFT) solutions and services. Many of them are from businesses like gaming, arts and entertainment, and distributed ledger technologies (DLT).
- Eleven corporations provide gaming services, while 12 are markets that allow the buying and selling of NFTs. There is a lot of connection and overlap between use cases for organizations that provide NFT solutions, markets, and gaming.
The adoption of NFTs may be viewed mainly as an opportunistic move by firms attempting to capitalize on trends to meet their consumers where they transact. Startups seeking funding facilitate commerce in decentralized worlds by creating platforms where users can purchase and trade NFTs like virtual land, apparel, and other branded things.
Other Prominent Use Cases
- Seven firms provide blockchain services. ConsenSys received one of the largest investment sums (a $450M transaction with Microsoft) during the period under consideration.
- Five firms specialize in infrastructure.
- Four firms specialize in blockchain development platforms, decentralized applications (dApps), smart contracts, asset management/tokenization, and scaling solutions.
- Three businesses provide custody solutions and have received high-value deals: Fireblocks ($550M agreement with Alphabet), Circle ($550M round with Blackrock participation), and Anchorage Digital ($350M deal with PayPal and Blackrock).
Different investment approaches by public companies
Samsung is betting on 15 potential use cases in the blockchain ecosystem, including blockchain services, development platforms, NFT, and social networks. On the other hand, Alphabet and Blackrock demonstrate a fundamentally different strategy by placing concentrated investments on a narrower selection of firms.
Organizations are looking into specialized use cases and portfolios to supplement their leading offers. HERE Technologies, for example, invested in UNL, a blockchain-based location and mapping technology business, to integrate blockchain-enabled security and transparency features in a location/mapping scenario.
Due to rising client demand, banks have begun to extend their exposure to crypto and blockchain services (some more than others). As a result, they have made investments in cryptocurrency custody, asset management, and trading.
Traditional firms (Samsung, Microsoft, etc.) already support the blockchain landscape, as seen by the recent financing trend. Finding new firms and portfolios that offer value to their core business development and consolidation is now the priority. Corporations, like banks, may wish to shift their attention away from single trends and toward areas that might offer them synergistic development.
Featured Image: Megapixl © 3DSculptor
