Despite the downtrend, fundraising in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has grown from $0.9 billion to $2.7 billion between 2021 and 2022.
The year 2022 was marked especially by a bear market, with many companies going bankrupt one after another. However, one area seems to have done well through fundraising: decentralized finance (DeFi).
Indeed, according to the latest CoinGecko research, total funding has grown from $0.93 billion in 2021 to $2.7 billion last year.
Across all sectors, the majority of fundraising in 2022 took place in January and May, before Bitcoin (BTC) dropped below $30,000 according to data from DefiLlama.
It is important to point out that CoinGecko’s data includes a $1 billion LUNA token sale conducted in February 2022 by the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG). This fundraising alone accounts for 37% of Defi’s funding this year.
However, even removing this statistic, we still observe that the amount of money raised in DeFi has increased by 82.8% from 2021 to 2022: from 0.93 to $1.9 billion.
If DeFi has raised significant funds by 2022, there is one area that has clearly suffered as a result of falling prices: centralized exchanges (CEX). And for good reason, their total funding rounds fell from $16.2 billion in 2021 to 4.3 last year, dividing by more than 3.76.
For this data, FTX and FTX.US together account for 18.6% of these total grants.
Yet another area that has seen investments grow year-on-year: blockchain infrastructure with $6.10 billion, up 40.2%.
In addition, the NTF ecosystem has exploded with funding amounting to $ 1.4 billion and $883 million in the past two years, respectively. At the same time, mining fell from $1.69 billion to $965 million.
Overall, all of these investments are still much higher than in 2019 and 2020, which tends to indicate a certain resilience in the industry.
