VC Investors Stay Bullish on European Crypto Startups Despite Market Challenges
Despite last year's challenges and the collapses of leading industry players, venture capital investors supported startups in the crypto space.
According to a report by European investment firm RockawayX, European-based crypto startups received a record-high of $5.7 billion in VC investment in 2022. Additionally, European decentralized finance startups attracted $1.2 billion in investment, a 120% increase from the previous year.
RockawayX CEO Viktor Fischer noted that the crypto market is cyclical and that investments made during downturns have yielded positive results.
Europe has the highest number of crypto startups globally, with 3,977 headquartered in the region. However, the United States leads in the number of startups with over $1 million in funding and those with a valuation of over $1 billion.
Top global investors in European startups include Animoca Brands, Coinbase, Blockchain Capital, and Digital Currency Group.
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More than half of all investments in European crypto startups in 2022 were in financial services (52%), with infrastructure and Web3 making up 32% and 16%, respectively.
While investment in financial service-based startups declined by 19% compared to the previous year, infrastructure investment increased by 24%.
Europe’s crypto-friendly status is set to receive a further boost with the impending Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations, which lawmakers in the European Union are currently finalizing. A final vote on the MiCA rules is scheduled for April 2023.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
