Venture capital firms are capitalizing on the current bull market to expand their market share. In March, Web3-native investment company Borderless Capital acquired CFT Capital, a quantitative trading firm, in a move to enhance its capital deployment efficiency across Web3 verticals. The acquisition also enables Borderless to enter the Latin American market, with plans to expand its presence in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Borderless, with $600 million in assets under management, is already an early investor in Algorand, Blockchdaemon, and Securitize, which recently partnered with BlackRock in a tokenized digital fund.
Looking ahead to 2024, Borderless expects cross-chain standardization to be the next phase in the crypto space’s evolution. Co-founder and managing partner David Garcia believes that modularity in blockchains will continue to be a long-term trend, leading to the emergence of new L1s, L2s, and even L3s. Garcia also emphasizes the importance of a Web3 aggregation layer that can interoperate across any chain for mainstream adoption.
In addition to its focus on cross-chain standardization, Borderless is also investing in decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN). Garcia sees DePIN as a new paradigm for coordination and innovation across various industries, including communication, distributed computation, mapping, and transportation.
In other news, several startups secured funding in late March. Morph, a decentralized Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) layer-2 platform, raised $20 million in angel and seed funding. The funds will be used for talent acquisition, developer incentives, and marketing efforts. FLock.io, a London-based Web3 decentralized AI startup, announced a $6 million seed round to decentralize AI training and end user data collection. Keyring Network, a platform leveraging zero-knowledge technology for regulatory compliance and market liquidity, raised $6 million in seed funding. Crypto perpetual exchange Rails raised $6.2 million to support the development of its self-custodial perpetuals exchange. Finally, hybrid layer-2 solution BOB raised $10 million to launch the first Bitcoin layer-2 with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility, while tokenization platform RACE disclosed a $5 million funding raise for its recently released testnet.
In the crypto world, the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance is working to create “good” AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that prioritizes safety and ethical considerations. The alliance aims to foster collaboration and research to ensure the safe development of AGI technologies.