Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of June 28, 2021. Incorta Raised $120M Series D

Where Is the crypto and blockchain industry headed in 2021?

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of FTX (one of our Race's portfolio companies) talked about what's next for Bitcoin on Yahoo Finance. 

Here’s a brief summary of his interview + my thoughts on the current market:

• The People’s Bank of China has directed banks and payment platforms (Alipay, WeChat Pay) to crack down on crypto and cut-off RMB on and off-ramps. This will likely impact Chinese crypto exchanges like Huobi, OKex and Binance.
• China mining ban forces miners to relocate to the US and other countries.  China accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world as of May 2021. It is a good thing for the mining industry longer term as not one country would have a majority of the hash power.
• More and more traditional financial institutional money is flowing into crypto. Consumers can now trade crypto on Paypal, Square, Robinhood, SoFi, Venmo, etc. Square is launching its own hardware wallet. And Fidelity launched Sherlock (crypto analytics platform). 
• We are seeing a big drop off of speculative bets - dropping borrowing costs in crypto and dropping bitcoin futures.

Despite the recent crypto crash, I believe the future of DeFi is still very bright. Read this post on DeFi Infrastructure 101 — Overview & Market Landscape.

P.S. FoundersHK is calling all Hong Kong founders to apply for the 2021 Accelerate Program. Applications are open until July 12.  Check it out.

This week a total of 30 startups raised $1.0821B in funding, 2 M&As:

• $543.8M goes to 13 Enterprise startups
• $50M goes to 1 FinTech startup
• $48M goes to 1 Crypto startup
• $75M goes to 2 eCommerce startups
• $2.4M goes to 1 FoodTech startup
• $70M goes to 1 Food Delivery startup
• $9.5M goes to 1 Recruiting startup
• $21M goes to 1 Construction startup
• $70.7M goes to 3 Healthcare startups
• $145M goes to 3 BioTech startups
• $40M goes to 1 IoT startup
• $4M goes to 1 AgTech startup
• $2.7M goes to 1 Other startup