Bitcoin and altcoin exchange Huobi Global Blockchain has launched a new venture capital arm aimed at investing in web3 and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. Here are the details…
Huobi will invest in this altcoin ecosystem
This investment arm of Huobi was called “Ivy Blocks”. The exchange said in a statement that it has over $1 billion in assets under management as part of its “treasury.” The first project supported by Ivy Blocks is Capricorn Finance, a decentralized exchange built on the Cube chain. Capricorn also offers automatic money market features to other DeFi protocols.
Despite an 80 percent drop in altcoins in the Defi space this year, Huobi sees the domain as one of the most “promising applications” of the decentralized internet . Ivy Blocks will provide support to DeFi platforms on three main fronts. The project will consist of an asset management platform, an early-stage Blockchain incubator, a crypto and web3 research center.
Beyond just providing funding, the project will provide technical guidance, mentoring programs and assist upcoming blockchains with token listings. Many promising projects tend to face liquidity constraints and lack of market entry support, which pose significant barriers to growth. Huobi believes that many of the upcoming DeFi projects have failed due to the lack of support it aims to provide.
Which are DeFi and web3 coins?
So, what are the most popular altcoins in the web3 and DeFi field that Huobi draws attention to? As the largest DeFi coins by market cap, Avalanche (AVAX), Chainlink (LINK), Uniswap (UNI), Tezos (XTZ), Theta Network (THETA), Aave (AAVE), Maker (MKR), The Graph (GRT) ) and THORChain (RUNE). Examples of Web3 coins are Filecoin (FIL), Stacks (STX), Arweave (AR), Livepeer (LPT), Siacoin (SC), Ontology (ONT), Hive (HIVE), Storj (STORJ).
Investment comes even as the DeFi space falls
Huobi’s move to DeFi comes after the decentralized space lost more than half of its value this year amid a wider crypto meltdown. Data from DeFi Llama shows that the total value locked into DeFi has dropped nearly 80 percent from $210 billion at the start of the year to $90.4 billion. Most of these losses also come from those on Terra, whose eruption destroyed about $40 billion in a month.
A wider crypto meltdown has also crashed DeFi valuations, as most major tokens used for trading in space have seen a massive drop in price. Ethereum, the largest DeFi Blockchain by value, suffered a loss in 2022 as the price of the ETH token dropped by 56 percent.
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