Crypto companies are investing billions in other blockchain startups. Meet 6 executives from Binance, Coinbase, FTX, and more leading this venture effort.

Coinbase

As the largest US-based crypto exchange by spot volume, Coinbase was earlier than most digital assets startups in establishing a dedicated team to focus on private market venture investments. 

Coinbase Ventures launched in 2018, some six years after the company was founded.

"The thing that we realized in 2018 was that the crypto ecosystem was still extremely early and extremely nascent. While there would be a tremendous amount of innovation that would come within, at that point, the four walls of Coinbase, there was also going to be a tremendous amount of innovation that came outside of Coinbase," Aggarwal said. 

Coinbase's approach to venture investing has seen it place bets across a wide swathe of early-stage players in crypto. "The volume of deals and pace is really just a reflection of the acceleration in innovation in the industry. From 2018 to 2021, the rate at which we were investing increased pretty significantly," Aggarwal said. 

As one trend to watch, Aggarwal said he's particularly interested in the growth of "multi-chain ecosystems" as crypto developers increasingly work across different blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche.  

"You should have the ability to build your product and have transactions be published to the blockchain, on whichever blockchain is best fit for purpose for that application that you build," said Aggarwal.

One of Coinbase Venture's latest investments in March underscores Aggarwal's thesis. Coinbase participated in LayerZero Lab's $135 million fundraising round led by FTX, Sequoia, and Andreessen Horowitz. LayerZero is a startup working to develop applications across multiple blockchains. 

Circle

Circle manages crypto's second-largest stablecoin by market cap , USD Coin. The company also provides a range of digital currency business banking and treasury services for both crypto and non-crypto firms. 

Last November, Circle announced the launch of Circle Ventures, a venture fund focused on early-stage blockchain projects. The move marked a logical next step as Circle built out a network of partners and clients across crypto, the company's CFO, Jeremy Fox-Geen, told Insider.

"We touch the crypto ecosystem for our products and services in many, many different ways, and we thought it would be a natural extension of that to be able to bring some financial capital to bear, given that we are a robust and well-capitalized player in this ecosystem," said Fox-Geen.

According to Fox-Geen, Circle Ventures' performance can't be judged solely by measuring financial returns or the extent to which portfolio companies strategically map to Circle's own businesses. Instead, its investing thesis is more macro-oriented, predicated upon building a broader network of blockchain-enabled use cases and "rebuilding" traditional financial services.  

"If this happens, it's going to be good for us and our business, because our business fundamentally itself is both a driver and a beneficiary of that kind of global rebuild," he said. 

That being said, Circle Ventures hasn't shied away from participating in large venture rounds and, since launching, the company has invested in 10 crypto startups, according to Crunchbase. 

In March, Circle Ventures participated in blockchain protocol Mina's $92 million funding round led by FTX Ventures and hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. Circle also recently invested in Zebec Protocol's $15 million Series A. Built on Solana's blockchain, Zebec Pay allows for real-time sending and settlement of payroll transactions, including those in USD Coin. Circle Ventures was also an investor in Binance.US's $200 million seed round announced this April.

FTX

Founded in 2019, crypto exchange FTX has rapidly become one of the world's largest by volume. 

In January, FTX announced the launch of a $2 billion venture fund "with a broad investment mandate across social, gaming, fintech, software, and healthcare."

Amy Wu, FTX's head of ventures, M&A and gaming, heads up a team of eight working at the fund. Wu joined FTX in January from Lightspeed Ventures, itself an investor in company. 

"We are in front and know so many great founders and teams, and we were already getting pulled in and working with them on a strategic basis. It just made sense that we were then also lead investors in their rounds. It was really a natural evolution of our relationships with these teams and some founders," Wu told Insider. 

FTX Ventures differs from some others on this list in one unique way: Since launching, the investment arm has shown a propensity to put its $2 billion mandate to use by targeting large investments towards specific bets on a given area within crypto.

"The beauty of not having any external LPs is that we're so flexible," Wu said. "Naturally as an industry matures, you move towards higher specialization and higher conviction bets," she added. 

Since its January launch, FTX Ventures has invested in 11 startups, per Crunchbase. In March, the company announced a $100 million debt investment in the banking app Dave, through which FTX US will serve as Dave's exclusive crypto partner as it looks to offer digital assets payments to its customers. 

FTX Ventures also participated in Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Lab's mammoth $450 million seed round this March and in a $200 million venture round this February for Aptos, a new blockchain network created by former members of Meta's DIEM stablecoin project (Coinbase Ventures also invested).