Samsung was the most active investor in blockchain this year

Market intelligence platform Blockdata has identified Samsung as the most active investor in blockchain over the past year.

The Korean tech giant participated in thirteen funding rounds from September 2021 to June 2022 for companies including Bored Apes Yacht Club developer Yuga Labs, Axie Infinity owner Sky Mavis, and blockchain gaming company Animoca Brands.

Most of the corportation’s investments came from Samsung Next, the innovation arm of Samsung Electronics that is focused on blockchain, AI, and the Metaverse.

In a blog post, Blockdata acknowledged that: “We cannot determine how much money these corporations have invested, as they participate in funding rounds with multiple or many other investors.

“As a proxy of this, we can look at the total funding amounts of the rounds they participated in.”

The total size of the thirteen funding rounds Samsung participated in aggregated to $979 million (?829m).

Corporations such as Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and financial firms BlackRock and Morgan Stanley are other notable players active in the blockchain investment space.

However, the above Blockdata graphic is somewhat misleading. Just because the four blockchain companies Alphabet has invested in have netted a combined $1.5 billion (?1.27bn) does not mean Alphabet was necessarily a leading or even major investor in each company.

Looking at the blockchain industry as a whole, a total of 61 Web3 companies received investments across 71 investment rounds. Of these:

• 19 companies offer some form of non-fungible tokens (NFT) solutions and services. Many of these belong to industries such as gaming, arts and entertainment, and distributed LEDGER technology (DLT)
• In all, 12 firms are marketplaces, with some supporting the buying and selling of NFTs
• 11 organisations provide gaming services. There is considerable overlap among use cases for the companies that offer NFT solutions, marketplaces, and gaming.

Blockdata’s research found that the top 40 global corporations invested approximately $6 billion (?5bn) into blockchain startups between September 2021 and June 2022.

Want to learn more about blockchain from industry leaders? Check out Blockchain Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California and London.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: blockchain funding, market research, Samsung