The economic landscape may seem dire at the moment, but it's unlikely to affect blockchain development, according to Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead. In an interview for Real Vision on Thursday, the venture capitalist said that he believes blockchain technology will perform based on its own fundamentals, regardless of the conditions indicated by traditional risk metrics:

During the first half of this year, Pantera Capital raised about $1.3 billion in capital for its blockchain fund, with a special emphasis on scalability, DeFi, and gaming projects. "We've been very focused on Defi the last few years, it's building a parallel financial system. Gaming is coming online now and we have a couple hundred million people using blockchain. There's a lot of really cool gaming projects, and there still are a lot of opportunities in the scalability sector", he added.

Long-term optimism contrasts with the actual drop in venture capital in the industry, however. August saw the fourth consecutive month-on-month decline in capital to $1.36 billion, according to Cointelegraph Research data. The inflows represent a 31.3% drop from July’s $1.98 billion, with 101 deals closed in August, on an average capital investment of $14.3 million — a 10.1% decline from July.

The crypto winter was expected to spur consolidation in the sector, but recent numbers from Crunchbase revealed that only four deals with VC-backed crypto companies were concluded in the United States this quarter — a setback from the 16 transactions from the first quarter of the year.

Sandeep Nailwal, Managing Partner at Symbolic Capital, explained that bear market has pushed away even big players in the industry:

The crypto exchange FTX does not seem to be affected by this problem.