Coinbase Ventures, the investment arm of Coinbase, has gained a reputation for ‘anticipating opportunities’ with projects such as Compound, OpenSea, Synthetix and Uniswap, of which it is one of its early investors. New reports suggest that the company has been tracking innovative crypto protocols like zkLink and Dolomite lately.
Coinbase Ventures added these 4 crypto projects to its portfolio in May
Coinbase’s investment arm, Coinbase Ventures, has invested in several crypto projects from different fields over the course of May, according to details revealed in the June 4 Altcoin Daily video.
The first project to stand out, zkLink, recently completed a $10 million strategic funding round. ZkLink is a unified multi-chain infrastructure that aims to connect various Layer-1 (L1) and Layer-2 (L2) chains. The project offers a ZK-supported, decentralized infrastructure that facilitates cross-chain transfers.
zkLink mathematically proves the validity of off-chain transactions to save time and fees. However, it is built around zero-knowledge roll-ups, which is an Ethereum scaling approach. This cryptographically secure method of scaling Ethereum is much cheaper and faster.
The crypto project also connects the L1 and L2 protocols. Developers can use their APIs to build a wide range of products, including decentralized exchanges and NFT markets.
dolomite
The second project, Dolomite, recently completed a $2.5 million funding round. Dolomite is built on Arbitrum, an Ethereum scaling solution. The project specifically aims to offer malleable margin trading and lending.
Launched in November 2022, the protocol aims to maximize capital efficiency by allowing assets to be used in several ways simultaneously. Assets invested in Dolomite earn interest by default via margin credit. However, the same assets can be invested in a Dolomite liquidity pool to earn margin loan interest and liquidity pool fees at the same time. This innovative approach makes Dolomite potentially a major competitor to Compound and Aave.
hourglass
Coinbase’s third investment, Hourglass, recently raised $4.2 million in an initial round. The protocol builds a marketplace for trading time-bound tokens (TBT), which are staked assets in DeFi protocols. This concept aims to give users more flexibility with the coins they stake.
The idea behind the project is to allow users to trade their next place in exchange for their locked assets. In this way, a user can transfer the ownership of an asset that he has locked in a protocol to another buyer. This innovative approach could potentially revolutionize the way users interact with staking assets in DeFi protocols.
PYOR
The final project, PYOR, was part of a $4 million startup round. As a data aggregator, PYOR aims to deliver enterprise-grade asset data and analytics. Cryptocurrency is not included in this project. However, the high-quality cryptocurrency data and analytics provided by PYOR are invaluable to institutions and individual investors.
You can take a look at the crypto projects that you follow on Kriptokoin.com, which entered the dangerous zone with the Binance-SEC case on June 5th.
About Coinbase Ventures
Coinbase Ventures was founded in 2018 by Brian Armstrong’s Coinbase. The investment arm has invested in more than 400 projects, some of the most popular being Uniswap, OpenSea and Synthetix. The company’s investments are divided into the following areas in general terms:
- Protocols and Web3 infrastructure
- Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
- Central Finance, Platform
- Developer Tools
- NFT/Metaverse/Gaming