Lightspeed Venture Partners, headquartered in California, has put together a USD 1.8 billion fund to invest in startups across Southeast Asia. These will focus on cryptocurrency, biotechnology, cosmetics, and TV streaming services. It joins a growing list of institutional firms that are investing large sums of money into the crypto space.
Jeremy Liew, who is a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, foresees that Bitcoin will hit USD 300,000 per coin by 2030. He says, “Fundamentally, when a citizen doesn’t have faith in the currency of their country, then they are looking for alternatives, and a digital alternative like Bitcoin becomes much more compelling in those circumstances… If you’re going to be an investor in anything, you want to be where the most trading volume is happening, and right now that’s happening in Bitcoin.”
Lightspeed Ventures has seen exceptional profits of USD 2.7 billion for investors since the start of 2017, which is where it sourced the money for this new fund. Most venture capital firms have to wait a long time to see profits from their investments, but Lightspeed Ventures is an exception. Seventeen of the companies it invested in have held initial public offerings (IPOs) in the last five years, which is when a company’s shares become public, allowing Lightspeed Ventures to sell its shares for cash. Its most profitable investment was Snapchat, an extremely popular photo messaging app.
Although it is unknown how much money from the total fund amount of USD 1.8 billion will be invested into crypto, this news is yet another sign that institutional investors are moving into the crypto space. Andreessen Horowitz announced that it was investing USD 300 million into crypto companies, Galaxy Digital said it would be investing hundreds of millions of dollars into crypto firms with a focus on EOS, and Benson Oak said it would be investing USD 100 million into blockchain startups.
If these investments are successful, it could prompt a massive wave of crypto and blockchain investments from major financial institutions, possibly leading to a cryptocurrency rally bigger than any other in history.
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