This Week in DeFi - February 18

This week, new Castle Island $250m fund, Curve on Moonbeam, Ref Finance raises $4.8m, and Gnosis Safe spins out into SafeDAO

Feb 18

To the DeFi community,

This week, Castle Island Ventures announced a $250 million Web3 investment fund and the additon of Ria Bhutoria as general partner at the firm. The new fund will focus on blockchain-based financial services, monetary networks, and internet infrastructure that are expected to be major Web3 themes in years to come.

Pat Larsen @PatrickLarsen

Congrats to @nic__carter & @MattWalshInBos of Castle Island Ventures for raising their Fund III. They were early investors in @ZenLedgerIO and have been absolutely fantastic to work with. The are making great investments and building a powerhouse.

Castle Island Ventures announces new $250 million fund for web3 investmentsThe firm also said it is set to grow its team significantly over the next year.theblockcrypto.com

Curve Finance enlarges its reach again by launching on Moonbeam, the EVM compatible Polkadot chain. Curve is one of the first cross-chain DeFi protocols to come to Moonbeam, and should provide a solid foundation for like-asset swaps on the network.

Moonbeam Network @MoonbeamNetwork

1/ @CurveFinance, the most popular exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum + LARGEST DeFi protocol by TVL, has arrived on Moonbeam! Not only does this enable users to exchange stable coins, it opens up liquidity between any like-value assets.🔄 Try it out 👇 moonbeam.curve.fi Curve.fiCurve is an exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum designed for: extremely efficient stablecoin trading, low risk, supplemental fee income for liquidity providers, without an opportunity cost.moonbeam.curve.fi

NEAR-based multiproduct DeFi platform Ref Finance announced a strategic raise of $4.8 million to continue expanding their developer team and building out DeFi in the NEAR ecosystem. Ref currently offers AMM and stableswap platforms, with plans for additional AMM improvements and a lend and borrow protocol later on.

Ref Finance (Calling for Degens) @finance_ref

🎉 Big news for the collective: We raised $4.8M💪 All in the name of #DeFi ref-finance.medium.com/ref-finance-ra… 1/

Ref Finance raises 4.8$ million in Strategic SaleJump Crypto, Dragonfly, Alameda, D1 Venture.ref-finance.medium.com

And Gnosis decentralized governance voted to spin out SafeDAO and release the SAFE token via airdrop to users and distributions to core contributors, community treasuries, and the SAFE Foundation. Gnosis Safe contains more than $100 billion in funds across various Web3 projects, making the product a critical piece of public infrastructure that will now be managed by the SAFE holder community.

Gnosis Safe @gnosisSafe

Tokens will be distributed fairly among core contributors, ecosystem participants, users, the Safe Foundation, and community treasuries.

More than $100 billion held by various DeFi and Web3 projects is a remarkable sum. What’s more, that total represents only that actually raised and held by Ethereum-based projects as ‘dry powder’, indicating a huge amount of runway for the DeFi space that has historically run extremely lean - teams facilitating hundreds of billions in annual volume often consist of a few dozen or less developers, promoters, and coordinators.

That total also doesn’t include the billions set aside just in the last year by venture capital firms of all varieties, from crypto-native to those just getting started investing in Web3. Investment in the space has skyrocketed over the past four years, with 2022 shaping up to be another notch higher as money continues to pour in.

Jon Erlichman @JonErlichman

VC investment in cryptocurrency and blockchain companies: 2021: $30 billion 2020: $6.5 billion 2019: $3.9 billion 2018: $8 billion 2017: $1.9 billion 2016: $1.1 billion 2015: $1.1 billion 2014: $900 million 2013: $300 million 2012: $100 million source: Pitchbook

The blockchain industry has always had its detractors, but the boosters, at least as measured by skin in the game, have apparently never been more confident that crypto infrastructure and products will be an integral part of everyday life in the not-too-distant future. It can feel like a slow process, but if you’ve made it this far, what’s a few more years? Keep on trucking!

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