Binance Labs, the investment arm of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, today announced a new half-billion dollar fund. The $500 million will be invested in Web3 projects, the exchange said in a Wednesday statement.
The fund has big backers: Internet investment capital firm DST Global and global venture capital firm Breyer Capital are both involved.
Binance said that the money will be pumped into “projects that can extend the use cases of cryptocurrencies and drive the adoption of Web3 and blockchain technologies.”
“In a Web3 environment, the connection between values, people, and economies is essential," Binance’s founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao said. “If these three elements come together to build an ecosystem, that will accelerate the mass adoption of the blockchain technology and crypto.
“The goal of the newly closed investment fund is to discover and support projects and founders with the potential to build and to lead Web3 across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, Metaverse, social, and more,” he continued.
“Web3” refers to the next phase of the internet envisioned as more decentralized. Web3 apps already exist and tend to use blockchain networks. The communities behind Bitcoin and Ethereum, the networks that power the two biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap, claim their technologies will lead the next evolution of the web.
Binance Labs, which reinvests company capital into crypto-related projects, has invested in over 100 projects since it launched in 2018. It claims it “identifies, invests, and empowers viable blockchain entrepreneurs, startups, and communities.”