Cryptocurrency Fund Birth Rate Continues Explosion

We could see more cryptocurrency investment funds being born in 2018 than we did in 2017, which was itself a boom year, according to some new research.

The research was conducted and published by Crypto Fund Research, a California-based company that conducts cryptocurrency-centred research studies. Information published by this company has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist.

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Previous studies include an investigation into which US cities are best to find blockchain-related jobs (San Francisco won) and which have the most blockchain startups (San Francisco and New York drew).

The latest report says that so far 61 cryptocurrency funds have been launched this year. If a constant rate of proliferation is extrapolated from this figure, 2018 will see slightly more funds created than 2017 did (140/130 respectively).

Just under half of the funds were launched in the US (29) – no other country broke double figures. The next most prominent countries are the UK and Australia which both saw four new launches. Overall, 20 countries have registered such activity this year.

The study found that just under one third of the new funds are of the venture capital variety, while the rest are hedge funds. It adds that most of them are “still quite small”.

Several major companies have launched blockchain-focused investment funds recently. Examples include the Coinbase Index Fund from the American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, HB10, a cryptocurrency-based ETF from Huobi of Singapore, and OK06ETT from Hong Kong-based giant cryptocurrency exchange OKEx this week. The Wall Street Journal reported only yesterday that a partner of Sequoia Capital is leaving to launch a new cryptocurrency investment fund alongside Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam.

It should be noted that some hedge funds have closed this year too – Bloomberg reported in April that nine funds had closed up shop at that point after seeing their returns drop by an average of 23 percent as cryptocurrency prices tanked at the beginning of the year.

130 new funds were created in 2017, and only 25 in 2016. In total, there are 366 cryptocurrency funds at large in the world at the moment, of which 212 are hedge funds and the rest venture capital.