Cherry Ventures – a venture capital based in Berlin that is famous for the early bets thereof on mobility startups Cazoo and Auto 1 – intends to trade cars in return for crypto, allocating a unique fund of $34M. Apart from one pre-seed round of 2018 that was specified for Unlock Protocol (an NFT startup), the fund Cherry Crypto I will turn into the initial major foray of the company into the world of digital assets after it launched a generalist fund of $340M.
A Cherry Ventures investor named Patrick Mayr states that both the Cherry as well as LPs (Limited Partners) are supporting the fund. As per him, the new investors pursuing crypto are also providing support for the respective fund. Though the group at the back of the fund, taking account of Luca Prosperi of MakerDAO (to be an advisor) and Brett Sun (former CTO of Aragon) to be researcher, will invest across the world, Mayr expects that it has the potential to capitalize on the roots thereof in Europe to explore what he considers to be an untouched market.
Significant crypto investments
He elaborated his point by claiming that crypto is strongly linked with Europe as the prominent token Ethereum was also initiated in Berlin. However, in some of the previous months, a large number of crypto founders have been witnessed across Europe just similar to a crypto entrepreneurs’ waterfall.
The crypto founders selected on the behalf of Cherry will be provided funds mainly via token-based investments on equity. The respective fund has in advance secretly funded BlackPool – a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), Morpho (an optimizer of lending protocols), as well as Lido (a staking platform).
The NFT endeavor as well as the consumer participation
One being asked whether the fund would invest money into NFTs (non-fungible tokens), Mayr replied that they are exploring the market in this respect as they possess the required funds for the investment. To pursue the intention of NFTs, the platform would partner up with Blossom Capital (a venture capital), which just declared having had purchased a digital collectible.
In his words, governance counts to be playing a dynamic role in web3. Several, if not the majority, of the web3-based decentralized protocols, offer the consumers the capability to buy tokens permitting them to cast votes for proposals to influence the project’s development.
James Thompson