Payments Use Cases Lure Corporate Crypto Investors

Seven of the 10 most active blockchain investors among large public companies have stakes in at least one company that offers payment services.

That’s according to blockchain market intelligence firm Blockdata’s list of the “Most Active Investors in Blockchain Companies By the Top 100 Public Companies,” released earlier this month. It looked at the 10 months from September 2021 through June 2022.

While the firms that held venture funding rounds weren’t necessarily pure-play payments firms, their offerings included payments services. These are Fireblocks, Circle, FTX, Anchorage Digital, New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) and ConsenSys.

Investment firm Digital Currency Group gets an honorary nod for portfolio investments in Abra, Avanti Bank, AZA (formerly Bitpesa) and a fair number of other crypto payments companies under the remaining 25 letters.

The 10 investors that Blockdata said were the largest crypto investors are Alphabet, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Samsung, Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, PayPal, Microsoft, Commonwealth Bank and Prosus.

Now, there is a big asterisk next to this list, as Blockdata said quite plainly that it couldn’t get the actual dollar amounts of each company’s individual investments. As such, they took the size of the rounds as a proxy, on the theory that investors spend more on companies that raise more.

As for the firms offering payments:

Anchorage Digital is a digital asset custody firm that received the crypto industry’s first federal bank charter. Aside from that, it has a specific offering, giving merchants the ability to settle payments ranging from peer-to-peer to cross-border.

Circle is the issuer of the USD Coin stablecoin, the No. 2 stablecoin with a market capitalization of $52.5 billion. It also offers payments and treasury infrastructure for the internet.

ConsenSys is an Ethereum-focused incubator. Among its companies is CodeFi, a B2B digital currency solution for payments and finance.

Fireblocks in February acquired stablecoin and digital asset payments technology platform First Digital.

FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges, has its payments arm, FTX Pay.

NYDIG owns real-time bitcoin payments application Bottlepay.

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