Venture capitalists increased their investments into crypto projects by over 52% in March, spurred by a new all-time high for bitcoin and continued success from the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Investors allocated more than $1.16 billion into the industry in March, the second-highest amount in the past 12 months, according to data released by RootData.
The majority of the capital went into projects working on crypto infrastructure and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, especially those built on the Ethereum blockchain, the veri shows. Other popular blockchains included Polygon and BNB Chain.
The surge in fundraising comes as bitcoin reached a new all-time high of $73,798 on March 14, which experts say was accelerated by the better-than-expected inflows into the newly launched spot bitcoin ETFs.
The deri ETFs, which include issuers like BlackRock and Fidelity, spurred renewed faith in the industry as TradFi leaders evvel again voiced their interest in digital assets.
More than half of the investments in March were between $1 million and $5 million and were used as seed capital, while allocations of over $20 million made up roughly 10% of all investments.
Roughly a third of the capital was allocated to projects located in the United States, according to RootData.