Despite the market volatility and the previous lack of clarity around regulation, corporations continue to invest in blockchain and crypto related companies. We dig into the investments made by the top corporations made from September 2021 to mid-June 2022.
Recently, we analyzed the top 100 banks investing in blockchain/crypto (by assets under management, AUM) to understand the key use cases receiving investment and what new banks have entered the space over the last 10 months.
We decided to revisit the blockchain investment activity of the top 100 public companies (by market capitalization) to understand what’s changed, which areas within blockchain are top of mind, and which new entrants are investing now following the market volatility.
In this brief, we analyze the blockchain investments these top corporations made from September 2021 to mid-June 2022.
Forty (40) corporations invested in blockchain and crypto companies in that period. Samsung is the most active, having invested in 13 companies. UOB came in next with 7 investments, followed by Citigroup with 6 investments, and Goldman Sachs with 5.
In most cases, we cannot determine how much money these corporations have invested, as they participate in funding rounds with multiple or many other investors.
As a proxy of this, we can look at the total funding amounts of the rounds they participated in.
Based on this, the investors active in the biggest funding rounds are Alphabet ($1,506M in 4 rounds), BlackRock ($1,171M in 3 rounds), Morgan Stanley ($1,10M in 2 rounds), Samsung ($979M in 13 rounds), Goldman Sachs ( $698M in 5 rounds, BNY Mellon ($690M in 3 rounds), and PayPal ($650M in 4 rounds).
The 40 companies invested approximately $6B into blockchain startups between September 2021 and June 2022. Because some rounds involve participation from multiple investors, it is unclear how much each company invested in a project.
Although it is not on the current list of leading investors, MasterCard is still actively participating in inorganic technology integration and development. Prior to September 2021, Mastercard was among the top 3 active investors based on the number of deals it participated in. However, since then, MasterCard has mainly conducted incubator and accelerator programs for 4 blockchain startups. In September 2021, it also acquired CipherTrace, a crypto intelligence company to bolster its cybersecurity solutions to stay on top of digital assets.
In the context of banks, while Citigroup and Goldman Sachs retained their spot among the leading investors, United Overseas Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, BNY Mellon, and Morgan Stanley made considerable jumps to find themselves on the list as well.
