Zora Gets $50 Million From Crypto Funds

Zora, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), said earlier this week that it had secured $50 million in its current investment round.

Haun Ventures led the round, which increased the company’s valuation to $600 million and included Coinbase Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and others.

Zora is a marketplace for buying, trading, and generating NFTs based on Ethereum. The platform has been used to auction some of the industry’s most valuable NFTs, including the $4 million “Doge” NFT.

Zora co-founder Jacob Horne stated that the new funding will be utilized to improve creative tools.

This is an acceleration of the public infrastructure that allows you to advance as artists, developers, and communities in our ecosystem. More permissionless code on more chains, stronger APIs, more Zoratopias throughout the world, and more grants and hackathons are all part of the plan.”

Haun Ventures’ investment in Zora is the fund’s first since its inception.

Katie Haun revealed in March that she had secured $1.5 billion for Haun Ventures following the departure of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The fund was split into two halves, with $500 million going to early-stage crypto businesses and $1 billion going to accelerated funds.

Sam Rosenblum, transaction team head at Haun Ventures, commented on the latest investment:

“Today, we are honored to be supporting Zora on its next adventure. We’ve barely scratched the surface of NFTs in web3, and we believe Zora will emerge as one of the most important protocols (and DAOs) as the NFT ecosystem and accompanying use cases grow in importance in the years ahead.”

Meanwhile, non-fungible tokens continue to grow in popularity and have just reached record highs.

According to data from Nonfungible.com, the NFT market traded over $17 billion in 2021, up 21,000 percent from the previous year. According to the research, 2.5 million wallets traded NFTs last year, up from 89,000 the year before, while the number of purchasers increased to 2.3 million from 75,000 in 2020.

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