As the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, Binance is known for hiring the best. A group of former executives recently launched a $100 million venture fund.
This venture fund is called Old Fashion Research (OFR). It focuses on the Metaverse and was created to bring more Crypto adoption to regions with emerging markets.
These regions include Africa and Latin America. The cocktail named Crypto fund was formed by Ling Zhang and Wayne Fu in late 2021.
Zhang is Binance’s former vice president of M&A and investments, while Fu is the former head of corporate development.
Zhang initiated and oversaw many of Binance’s most important acquisitions and investments, including FTX, Sipe.io, Multicoin Capital, WazirX, and CertiK.
The fund’s purpose is to accelerate crypto adoption by investing in Blockchain projects.
OFR is supported by traditional venture capital funds, limited partners, family offices, and angel investors. But the main investor is the global gaming platform, WEMIX.
Although it has only just begun, OFR has achieved a milestone of over 50 investments.
Some of the blockchain projects that received funding from OFR include deep liquidity trading platform WOO Network, blockchain analytics platform Nansen, move-to-earn NFT game Genopets, and Metaverse Magna, the largest gaming community in Africa.
Another Binance executive working on the OFR project is Wei Zhou. He was the CFO at Binance and is the current CEO of Coin.ph.
Zhou will serve as ORF’s strategic advisor and investor. Jiang “JX” Xin is responsible for its venture arm.
During his time at Binance, Xin led Binance Labs’ and Launchpad’s main investment deals. These deals include Axie Infinity, Moonbeam, and Alpha Finance.
In the teams’ discussion with TechCrunch, Xin said, “The market conditions have cooled down a bit since the beginning of the year, and we’re thinking it is more of an opportunity than a challenge for OFR.”
He added, “Since [the fund] is newly started, we can find cheaper and more reasonable valuations during the market downturn, and a lot of bubbles will be coming out.”
Even with the recent market downturn, several crypto-focused mega-funds have been created. Venture capitalists are taking advantage of the downturn and investing in crypto.
When asked about the current state of the market, Zhang said that it’s the best period for the company to identify the Crypto space long-term believers, make more investments, and incubate extra projects.
As stated, the $100M Crypto fund is aimed to spur Crypto adoption in Latin America and African markets.
Photo by Vadim Artyukhin on Unsplash