Samsung was the most active investor in blockchain this year

by Arthur · August 22, 2022

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

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

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

The total size of the thirteen funding rounds Samsung participated in totaled $979 million (£829 million).

Companies 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 Blockdata graphic above is somewhat misleading. Just because the four blockchain companies Alphabet has invested in have raised $1.5bn (£1.27bn) doesn’t mean Alphabet was necessarily a lead or even major investor in each company.

Looking at the blockchain industry as a whole, a total of 61 Web3 companies received investment over 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, art and entertainment, and distributed ledger technology (DLT)
In total, 12 firms are marketplaces, some of which support the buying and selling of NFTs
11 organizations provide gaming services. There is considerable overlap between use cases for the companies that offer NFT solutions, marketplaces and games.

Blockdata’s research found that the top 40 global companies invested approximately $6 billion (£5 billion) in blockchain startups between September 2021 and June 2022.