Huobi Ventures Launches with $100M for Early Stage DeFi Investments, Mergers and Acquisitions

LONDON, May 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Huobi Group, the world's leading blockchain company, announced today, 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 USD 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 USD 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 USD 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 will 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 products 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.

"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," said Zhang. "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."

In addition to its M&A and venture capital business units, Huobi Ventures is also establishing a dedicated $10 million USD 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.

Zhang added, "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."

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.

About Huobi Group

As a world-leading company in the blockchain industry, Huobi Group was founded in 2013 with a mission to make breakthroughs in core blockchain technology and the integration of blockchain technology to other industries. Huobi Group has expanded into public blockchains, digital assets trading, wallets, mining pool, proprietary investments, incubation, digital asset research, and more. Huobi Group has established a global digital economy industry ecosystem by investing in over 60 upstream and downstream companies in the blockchain industry, and has created holistic global digital economy ecology.

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SOURCE Huobi Ventures