Crypto funding: Pantera Capital plans $1.25 billion fund; Microsoft leads $20m raise for Space and Time

Coinhead Rob Badman
Pantera crypto funding

"Screw you, bear market! Hahaha! Annnnd… it's gone." (Getty Images)

While crypto continues to deal with the less-enjoyable side of the boom-and-bust equation this year, there are still signs of life in the VC funding realm. Pantera Capital, for instance, has news. Microsoft and Space and Time, too.

 

Pantera Capital plans another mammoth crypto fund

Menlo Park/Silicon Valley-based Pantera Capital is one of the largest crypto hedge funds with roughly US$4.5 billion assets under management, so when its quote-machine founder Dan Morehead speaks, people tend to take notice. Stockhead did yesterday, in fact.

Morehead’s been appearing at conferences and on mainstream media channels a fair bit just lately, delivering some pretty decent crypto headlines. And he’s at it again.

(Note: Morehead once mooted the idea of a US$356k Bitcoin for roughly some time in 2022, which is a reminder of just how fraught an activity crypto price guessing can be.)

According to a September 28 Bloomberg report, Morehead reportedly revealed that the prominent hedge fund is now planning to raise a whopping US$1.25 billion for its second blockchain fund.

The aim is to close the raise by May 2023 with the fund reportedly investing in both digital tokens and equity, targeting institutional investor appeal.

“We want to provide liquidity for people that are kind of giving up, because we’re still very bullish for the next 10 or 20 years,” the Pantera CEO was quoted as saying at the Token2049 event in Singapore.

The firm’s second blockchain-focused fund would sit in tandem with the one it began raising for back in May 2021. As reported by Cointelegraph, that fund had an initial target of US$600 million, but in April this year was closing with at least US$1.3 billion raised.

 

Microsoft leads $20m round for Space and Time

Decentralised, blockchain-stored, data-analytics platform Space and Time has secured US$20 million in funding from several investors including, notably, Microsoft’s venture capital arm M12. The Californian company now has a valuation of US$300 million.

Other investors participating in the funding round include Framework Ventures, HashKey, Foresight Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Polygon, Blizzard the Avalanche Fund, Stratos, Hash Capital, Coin DCX and various angel investors.

The Chainlink-partnered company previously raised $10 million in a seed round led by Framework Ventures and intends to use this new funding to hire more engineers, said co-founder Nate Holiday in an announcement.

“We are committed to automating the business logic of the world by directly connecting smart contracts to Space and Time’s data warehouse in order to enable new and advanced use cases in Web 3.0,” added Holiday.

 

More crypto funding news

• Bitcoin mining company Bitdeer, which is backed by Chinese crypto billionaire Jihan Wu, is reportedly setting up a US$250 million fund to buy “distressed assets” from Bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin/crypto miners have been struggling to stay afloat during the ongoing crypto bear market. But Bitdeer’s CEO Matt Kong sees opportunities ahead, according to statements he made to Bloomberg this week.

“There are opportunities in every cycle,” noted Kong. “If you can time the market and enter at the bottom, come out at the top, then you will make money. It works especially well for mining.”

• Bitcoin Lightning Network facilitator Strike has raised US$80 million in a funding round to “revolutionise payments for merchants and consumers globally”, according to a press release.

The Series B round was led by Ten31 and joined by Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Wyoming, among several others.

• Coral, a Solana-based developer, has completed a strategic funding round with US$20 million being allocated for building an NFT-focused wallet called “Backpack”, according to reports.

 

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