The blockchain beyond all records, even better than cryptocurrencies

According to data from analyst firm CB Insights, companies in the sector raised a record $ 4.38 billion, marking an increase of more than 50% over the previous quarter and nearly nine times over the same period of last year. The largest funding round involving a blockchain company in the second quarter of the year was $ 440 million on the digital currency and payment company Circle. Following this, Ledger, which develops hardware wallets to allow people to store their digital currencies, produced a € 380 million round of funding. All this shows how venture investors are not troubled by the drop in cryptocurrency prices and believe deeply in the technology that supports them: the value of bitcoin has roughly halved since it reached an all-time high of almost $ 65,000 and also Ethereum, the latter. largest digital currency in the world, it has dropped by more than 50% since it hit a record high of over $ 4,000 in May. At the current pace, blockchain funding will break the previous year-end record, tripling the total raised in 2018. Funding for fintech companies as a whole also hit a new record. According to CB Insights, fintech startups raised $ 30.8 billion in the second quarter, marking a 30% increase over the previous quarter and nearly three times the amount raised by fintechs in the second quarter of 2020. the European fintech sector that attracted 50% of venture capital deals in the quarter: the German stock trading app Trade Republic raised the largest round in Europe, grossing $ 900 million. Mollie, a Dutch rival of the payment companies Square, Stripe and Adyen, grossed $ 800 million. Not to mention the Swedish buy-now-pay-after company Klarna which secured a market value of nearly $ 46 billion in June. The average size of fintech deals grew 28% in the second quarter, also according to CB Insights.At the same time, open banking has also been gaining great momentum lately, with Visa recently acquiring Tink, a Swedish start-up. open banking, for 2.1 billion dollars. While UK money transfer firm Wise went public in London with a valuation of $ 11 billion earlier this month.