Key takeaways:
- Near has received a $150 million investment from leading cryptocurrency investors, including Three Arrows Capital and a16z
- The freshly acquired funds will be used for ecosystem expansion and to help solidify Near’s position among the leading DeFi chains
- The price of NEAR jumped over 10% on the news and reached an all-time high of $19.43
Near Foundation, the owner and developer of a leading Ethereum competitor, Near (NEAR), has announced the close of a $150 million financing round led by Three Arrows Capital with participation from several prominent crypto investment firms. The new capital will reportedly go towards the expansion of Near’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
Near aims to use the newly acquired funds to bridge the gap between Near Protocol and Ethereum
The recently concluded funding round was led by Su Shu’s Three Arrows Capital and featured some of the more notable players in the crypto investment circles, including Alameda, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and Dragonfly Capital, to name just a few. Dragonfly’s General Partner Ashwin Ramachandran commented on his company’s involvement in the funding round:
“Near has done a great job from a technology standpoint, and we want to help them achieve a level of developer, user, ecosystem adoption which reflects their current level of technology innovation.”
The $150 million haul comes three months after Near announced a massive $800 million ecosystem fund with an aim of attracting a large number of developers and decentralized projects to the rapidly growing Layer-1 network. According to CoinDesk, some investors who participated in the latest funding round have expressed their commitment to helping boost the liquidity of new DeFi projects as they go live on the chain.
According to blockchain analytics firm DeFi Llama, Near has been quickly amassing value locked in decentralized applications running on its platform over the last couple of months. The total value locked (TVL) has increased from a little over $26 million on November 1 to roughly $166 million today. Despite quick growth, Near is trailing far behind the largest DeFi ecosystems. For reference, Ethereum’s TVL at the time of this writing is $150 billion, ahead of Terra’s $18.5 billion and BSC’s $15.1 billion.
Following the announcement, the price of Near’s native NEAR token skyrocketed by more than 10% and is changing hands at an all-time high value of $19.43 at press time.
