Huobi Group launches Huobi Ventures with $100m for early stage DeFi investments, mergers and acquisitions

Blockchain company Huobi Group announced the launch of Huobi Ventures, a wholly-owned subsidiary focused on growing Huobi's venture investment portfolio and supporting innovative blockchain projects through long-term investment strategies. The new venture arm will deploy $100 million into early-stage blockchain and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects over a three-year period, make strategic acquisitions to diversify and expand Huobi's offerings, and establish a dedicated $10 million non-fungible token (NFT) fund.

Led by Huobi Group CFO Lily Zhang, Huobi Ventures consolidates several existing investment vehicles including Huobi Eco Fund, Huobi Capital, and Huobi DeFi Labs into a single entity that will drive Huobi's investment strategy. To date, Huobi has invested $69.42 million dollars across hundreds of projects in blockchain, media, public blockchains, stablecoins, and more. The return and balance on hand  has reached approximately $215 million.

Notable past investments include Ampleforth (AMPL), the world's first rebasing currency, which is ideal for use in the smart contracts of DeFi protocols; Terra, a programmable money for the internet that makes spending more seamless, which also recently passed the $2 billion market cap; Oasis Network, a privacy-enabled blockchain platform for open finance and a responsible data economy; and Optimism, a startup which recently soft launched its solution to Ethereum's transaction problem, the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM).

The launch of Huobi Ventures builds on this momentum and expands Huobi's investment focus into two key areas: corporate mergers & acquisitions (M&As) and venture capital. Under the M&A unit, Huobi Ventures aims to identify strategic opportunities across different blockchain verticals to complement and expand Huobi's product offerings. Acquisitions will be integrated into Huobi's growing suite of blockchain-enabled applications and services to expand the business into new markets. The venture capital unit will make long-term investments in emerging blockchain use cases and DeFi projects.

Lily Zhang, CFO, Huobi Group: "While we've made significant progress in our investments already, the formation of Huobi Ventures is a more concerted effort to accelerate our growth at a pivotal point for Huobi. We have had separate teams focus on different investment strategies, but by bringing everyone together under a single entity, we can create a more cohesive strategy and continue to invest in and support the most innovative projects that are shaping the blockchain and DeFi spaces. NFTs are the future of art and collectibles, but they're also giving creators like musicians and artists a new way to engage with fans and introducing blockchain to the mainstream audience. While NFTs have already become a growing part of the internet culture, what we'll see in the market today is only a fraction of what's actually possible with NFTs. As an immutable way to prove authenticity and ownership of digital files, we'll see a use casn increased usage across gaming, media, enterprise, and more in the near future."

In addition to its M&A and venture capital business units, Huobi Ventures is also establishing a dedicated $10 million NFT fund. As the NFT space continues to grow with the rise of platforms like NBA Top Shot, Rarible, or OpenSea, the new NFT fund will invest in both NFT collectibles and emerging NFT projects such as marketplaces, mining, or crypto gamification.

Huobi Ventures is the latest initiative by Huobi aimed at expanding its reach and influence into new market verticals as part of its global expansion. Huobi Ventures will seek to make early stage investments that set industry trends and strategic acquisitions that can be merged into the greater Huobi ecosystem, which includes digital asset trading platforms such as Huobi Global and Huobi Futures, public blockchains like the HECO Chain, mining pools like Huobi Pool, and much more.

www.huobi.com