Brandy Betz
Brandy covers crypto-related venture capital deals for CoinDesk.
Crypto investment firm Arrington Capital, which has more than $1.6 billion in assets under management, has partnered with the Moonbeam Foundation for a new $100 million ecosystem fund for Polkadot’s EVM-compatible Moonbeam parachain.
The Arrington Moonbeam Growth Fund will finance new companies and protocols on the Moonbeam network, aiming at a wide range of verticals, including decentralized finance (DeFi), marketplaces, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and gaming. The fund has already deployed capital to two undisclosed projects.
Moonbeam launched in January and currently has 100 projects that are either live or preparing to launch. In the first five months, Moonbeam users completed over 6.5 million transactions and developers deployed over 5,000 smart contracts, according to the network.
As an Ethereum-compatible parachain, Moonbeam allows for secure cross-chain interoperability without the use of bridges. Developers can build native multichain decentralized applications (dapps) and easily port existing smart contracts across blockchains.
Arrington Capital participated in a $1.4 million funding round for Moonbeam in 2020 and a $6 million strategic capital raise last year.
“Moonbeam has gained significant momentum as a new Layer-1 protocol and provides a needed spark for the larger multi-chain movement, a trend which we are seeing across our portfolio,” Arrington Capital co-founder and partner Michael Arrington said in the press release.
The founder of TechCrunch and CrunchBase, Arrington, along with TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, founded Arrington Capital in 2017. The venture capital firm also offers the flagship Arrington XRP Capital fund and the $100 million Arrington Algorand Growth Fund.
Last month, the company scrubbed a new $100 million fund from its website that was tied to the Terra yield-generating protocol Anchor, which took major losses due to the crisis-stricken USD stablecoin. Arrington told CoinDesk the removal was due to decreased demand.
