While the crypto industry has certainly been dampened due to the decline, it did not deter venture company Variant that had a new announcement to make on Thursday.

According to Variant, it has managed to raise about $450 million for two funds that would target startups in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 space.

Funding round

Veterans of Andreessen Horowitz founded the crypto-focused early-stage investment fund named Variant, which has backed a number of renowned projects in crypto and Web3.

These include Uniswap, the decentralized crypto exchange, Polygon, the Ethereum scaling project, Magic Eden, the decentralized non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace and more.

Jesse Walden, Spencer Noon, and Li Jin, the partners at Variant, said that the funds would be part of Variant Fund III and they would use them for investing in companies behind the user-owned web.

The raised funds will be divided into two categories. The first would be about $150 million, which would be used for making investments in startups.

The remaining $300 million would be used for projects that are part of the portfolio at Variant and have already shown their value.

The partners said that the last few years had shown them that as compared to traditional centralized networks, user-owned ones tend to grow a lot faster and become bigger and offer better economic terms.

The partners stated that ownership can offer different experiences because it is a massive design space, which can vary from governance to financial exposure to community participation.

Projects

It should be noted that the raised funds would be used by Variant for targeting projects in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, consumer-oriented Web3 projects, those in blockchain computing as well as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Web3 is the moniker that has been given to a new version of the World Wide Web, also called the decentralized web.

This uses blockchain technology for allowing peer-to-peer financial transactions. Smart contracts are used to govern these transactions, which can execute trades without requiring centralized institutions or middlemen.

Hence, developers are able to come up with software that can be used by communities for maintaining control of their own resources.

DeFi

This is the basic principle behind the entire world of decentralized finance, or DeFi, which has created crypto-token economies with the use of blockchain technology.

These economies have been utilized for reproducing the traditional finance industry’s decentralized versions, such as interest generation, securities trading exchange, lending and others, all using crypto assets.

Web3 has also paved the way for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which provide people the chance to get virtual ownership of their digital assets.

Jin stated that Variant is also focusing on these NFTs. While most of them are focused on artwork and digital collectibles, they can also be used for representing items in video, music, video games, concert tickets, documents, and other virtual items.

Variant had conducted two funding rounds before as well in which the fund had managed to raise about $22.5 million and then $110 million.