Binance Labs’ $500M fund to catalyze crypto, Web3, blockchain adoption

Binance Labs, the investment arm of crypto giant Binance, launched a $500 million fund in partnership with global investors including DST Global Partners and Breyer Capital to drive innovation across the crypto, Web3 and blockchain landscape.

Binance Labs plans to allocate the latest $500 million fund to projects across various stages — incubation, early-stage and late-stage growth.

Sharing his take on accelerating the adoption of the crypto ecosystem, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, CEO of Binance, revealed the importance of a connection between values, people and economies:

“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.”

Binance Labs was established in 2018 and has since invested in and incubated more than 100 projects globally. Some of the prominent companies in its portfolio include 1inch, Axie Infinity, Dune Analytics, Elrond, Polygon and The Sandbox.

Fun fact, Binance Labs had also invested $3 million in Terra’s layer-0 blockchain back in 2018.

Related: Binance gets approval to operate in Italy, will open office in Milan

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Binance Labs’ executive director of investments and M&A Ken Li said that there are 14 projects that are participating in the Season 4 of the Incubation Program and they will receive the first funding from the new fund.

The eligible startups are Grindery, NuLink Network, FilSwan and Starton from the infrastructure sector; CODA and OpenLeverage from the DeFi sector; CoralApp, AlterVerse Inc, ChapterX and Gamic Guild from the gaming and metaverse sector; Qwestive and Reveel from the SocialFi sector; Playbux (MyCashBack) and Ambrosia Finance from the crypto fintech sector.

Several former Binance executives led funding rounds in helping multi-strategy blockchain investment fund Old Fashion Research (OFR) invest in over 50 blockchain projects in just one year.

As Cointelegraph recently reported, the fund was founded by Ling Zhang, the former vice president of mergers and acquisitions and investments at Binance and Wayne Fu, former Binace head of corporate development.