Dec 9, 2021
Sequoia Capital’s investment history in the crypto space: the intensity of investment in the past six months has been increasing
Author: Buer, ChainCatcher
Sequoia China invested in Huobi in 2014, but missed Binance.
Yesterday, Sequoia Capital, a well-known venture capital firm, changed its official Twitter profile to “We help the daring buildl legendary DAOS from idea to token airdrops. LFG.” In the eyes of the outside world, this is Sequoia Capital’s focus on investing in DAO organizations, etc., as an important symbol of the transfer of the encryption industry, which have also caused extensive discussions between the encryption industry and the venture capital industry. Today, Sequoia Capital revised its Twitter profile again, deleting the word “DAO” and turning it into “We help the daring build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond.”
A few days ago, Sequoia Capital also decided to auction the 2005 YouTube Investment Memorandum as an NFT, and finally sold it for 200 ETH (approximately $860,000). Earlier in October, Sequoia also stated in an announcement that it would increase its investment in encrypted assets by reshaping its investment structure.
In fact, Sequoia Capital has been investing in the crypto industry for a long time, but in the early days, it was not invested by the main body of Sequoia Capital, but more by Sequoia China.
Back in March 2014, Sequoia China invested millions of dollars in Huobi at the beginning of the company’s establishment. And in the information disclosed by Huobi in FY18, Sequoia China’s equity share in Huobi was 23.3%, which was the second-largest shareholder besides LI Lin.
Since then, Sequoia China has invested in Bitmain, Distribution Technology, Nervos Network, Conflux and other projects, and this year invested in Babel finance, a crypto-financial services company, and Animoca Brands, a blockchain game developer, respectively.
In January, Sequoia China became a strategic partner of Dragonfly, a well-known crypto investment fund, and completed its investment in Dragonfly Fund.
However, Sequoia China once had the opportunity to acquire about 10% of Binance shares at a valuation of $80 million in August 2017, but this investment didn’t complete due to Binance unilateral reasons, and Sequoia Capital sued Binance afterwards. Today, the valuation of Binance has reached $200 billion.
Sequoia India also has many investment cases, having invested in Band Protocol, a decentralized prophecy oracle project, in February 2019, but no other public crypto investment records in the following 2 years. This year’s investment projects include Coinshift, a crypto asset management platform (September), Clearpool, a decentralized derivatives project (September), and Beta Finance, a Defi platform (November). Most of them are early-stage crypto projects, and a recent rumour said that Sequoia India is about to invest in Polygon.
As for Sequoia Capital main body, it also invested in Veil, a decentralized prediction marketplace project in January 2019, with the participation of Paradigm (the founder is a former Sequoia Capital partner) and 1confirmation, which is now a well-known crypto venture capital firm, but the project ended up in failure six months later.
In the following 2 years, Sequoia Capital had no other public crypto investment records. Until April this year, BitClout, a decentralized social network, disclosed its list of investors and Sequoia Capital was among them, after which Sequoia Capital once again accelerated its investment in the crypto industry.
According to incomplete statistics, Sequoia Capital’s crypto investment projects since then include crypto custodian Fireblocks (July), crypto trading platform FTX (October), Polkadot Eco Defi project Parallel Finance (November), Ethereum Layer 2 developer StarkWare (November), NFT social platform Pulsr (November). Among them, FTX is the largest project with Sequoia Capital’s participation in financing, raising $420 million at a valuation of $25 billion.
It is foreseeable that the mainstream VC institutions represented by Sequoia Capital will further increase their investment in the crypto industry, and also bring more funds and resources to crypto projects to boost the further development and maturity of the crypto industry.
