The crypto industry has not had a great run over the past year. Along with increasing regulatory scrutiny and skeptical investors, capital deployment has pulled back significantly from the highs of 2021, which has left many young startups struggling to raise funds.
This capital crunch is affecting the Bitcoin ecosystem as well. According to Erik Svenson, co-founder and CFO of blockchain infrastructure firm, Blockstream, Bitcoin-focused companies are falling behind as fewer checks are being written.
“I think investment into crypto kind of peaked early last year,” Svenson said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast this week. “But Bitcoin itself has always been an area that has been undercapitalized.”
Founded in 2014, Blockstream focuses on its own sidechain technology, dubbed Liquid Network, and it has bitcoin mining operations and provides hardware wallets for bitcoin and other assets. Notably, it doesn’t have a token of its own, unlike many other crypto companies that launched their own during the initi …
