Venture capital firms are capitalizing on the current bull market by making strategic moves to expand their market share. In March, Web3-native investment company Borderless Capital acquired quantitative trading firm CFT Capital, adding artificial intelligence and proprietary trading products to its portfolio. The move is aimed at increasing efficiency in capital deployment across Web3 verticals. Borderless Capital currently manages $600 million in assets and is an early investor in Algorand, Blockdaemon, and Securitize. The acquisition will also enable Borderless Capital to establish a presence in Latin America, with plans to expand into Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico.
Looking ahead to 2024, Borderless Capital expects cross-chain standardization to be the next major development in the cryptocurrency space. The company anticipates the emergence of new blockchain layers, such as L1s, L2s, and even L3s, as well as the need for an aggregation layer that can interoperate across any chain for mainstream adoption of Web3. Another key focus for Borderless Capital is decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN), which the company believes will revolutionize industries such as communication, distributed computation, mapping, and transportation.
In other news, several startups successfully raised capital in the last weeks of March. Morph, a layer-2 Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain, secured $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, raised $6 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed Faction and Tagus Capital. The company aims to decentralize AI agent training and end user data collection through its Federated Learning-powered Training Platform. Keyring Network, a platform leveraging zero-knowledge technology for asset compliance, raised $6 million in seed funding. Rails, a self-custodial perpetuals exchange, raised $6.2 million to develop its platform using smart contracts powered by zero-knowledge proofs. Hybrid layer-2 solution BOB raised $10 million to launch the first Bitcoin layer-2 with Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility. RACE, a tokenization platform, raised $5 million to support its recently released testnet.
Overall, these investments and developments reflect the growing interest and innovation in the Web3 and cryptocurrency space, with a focus on decentralized technologies, AI, and asset tokenization.