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In recent weeks, (KR1 ) has unveiled a string of new investments forming part of the group’s efforts to further expand its portfolio in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space.
The digital asset investment firm made two new investments in March by participating in a series of seed funding rounds. KR1 put in $0.075m into the Blockchain project, LazyLedger Labs, as well as US$0.2m into blockchain technology startup, Automata Network.
KR1 took part in LazyLedger’s seed funding round last Wednesday alongside Cosmos’ Interchain Foundation, Binance, Dokia Capital, Maven 11 and other respected investors.
LazyLedger is developing a “pluggable consensus layer” for decentralised projects that need their own blockchains but can’t deploy their own smart contracts due to limitations. Its founders were also part of Chainspace, a blockchain project acquired by Facebook.
Commenting on this investment, Keld van Schreven, Managing Director and Co-Founder of KR1 said, “LazyLedger is a great project and an opportunity to bring better data availability to blockchains, which reduces bloat and increases performance. We believe that LazyLedger is going to play a big role in the next generation of scalable blockchain architectures.”
KR1 is also supporting projects advocating privacy services across decentralised platforms. The group told investors on Monday that it had participated in Automata Network’s seed funding round in exchange for a yet-to-be-determined amount of Automata (“ATA”) tokens.
Automata Network is a decentralised protocol that provides traceless privacy services for decentralised applications on multiple platforms, including Ethereum, Polkadot and Binance Smart Chain, to achieve privacy, high assurance and frictionless computation.
The project was started in 2019 with the relevant research having been published in top tier conferences like Usenix Security and RAID, it noted. Recently, Automata Network received a grant from the Web3 Foundation and successfully completed the ‘Web 3.0 Bootcamp’.
“Where Automata Network differs from the existing market is our wide-lens focus, not only on ensuring uncompromised privacy, but also in the purposeful design of our services to be seamlessly integrated onto existing platforms such as Ethereum and Polkadot.”
KR1, whose focus lies in DeFi, the Polkadot and Cosmos ecosystems and other key crypto areas, believes it is strongly positioned for the digital asset markets entering a new bull cycle.
In August 2020, the company told investors that it believed it would have a share of “the pick of the best seed-stage opportunities in the Ethereum space” after the group became a member of the MetaCartel Ventures (MCV) decentralised autonomous organisation.
“We expect the trend of strengthening balance sheets and diversification into Bitcoin to continue as the world’s monetary policies shift evermore towards unbridled money printing and higher inflation,” the company then outlined in its half-year results in September 2020.
It added, “The digital asset world will continue to disrupt and innovate in all directions, and although the disruption will be most keenly felt in finance first through DeFi, we will see this impact every industry over time.”
Since then, bitcoin has surged as investor demand continues to push its valuation upwards with the cryptocurrency reaching a two-week high of $54,807 (£39,375) on Tuesday.
The spike in cryptocurrency prices comes after Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk unveiled that he had bought $1.5bn worth of Bitcoin last month, stating that he would accept it as a form of payment. He publicly stated that he believes bitcoin is on the “verge of broad acceptance”.
Shares in KR1 have seen an over eight-fold increase since the start of 2021 as institutional and non-institutional investors continue to drive cryptocurrencies to record highs. KR1 believes it is now strongly positioned for the digital asset markets entering a new bull cycle.
Reasons to KR1
KR1 is Europe’s leading digital asset investment firm supporting early stage blockchain and DeFi projects. It is a first investor in many key blockchain and DeFi projects that will power the decentralised platforms and protocols that form the emerging Web3 infrastructure.
Generating Material Revenue
KR1 unveiled in August 2020 that it had started generating material revenue from staking activities on the Polkadot network, its largest investment and portfolio holding to date.
The company has been staking activities on Polkadot to generate revenue on an ongoing basis following its migration to a ‘Proof-of-Stake’ blockchain network back in June 2020.
To date, KR1 holds a total of Polkadot 3,558,490.89 DOT tokens, post-re-denomination. This differs from its original DOT allocation as a result of the bonus pool of unlisted digital tokens allocated pursuant to KR1’s 2017 bonus scheme, which included Polkadot as an asset.
George McDonaugh, Managing Director and KR1’s Co-founder, described the launch of Polkadot as “a momentous event” in the group’s history and one that shareholders have been waiting for since KR1 backed the project in an early funding round in 2017.
Commenting on the group’s largest investment activities, McDonaugh told investors: “We are pleased to have locked in some profit at good prices and we’re delighted that Polkadot is further expanding the Company’s staking activities as a yield-bearing asset.”
Positive Outlook for Blockchain and KR1
McDonaugh said KR1 is seeing huge interest flowing into numerous new projects building on Polkadot, many of which it has already supported, or currently in active discussions.
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