Crypto Investment Firm Arca Launches $30M Fund Dedicated to NFTs

Asset management firm Arca has launched a $30 million fund dedicated to non-fungible tokens (NFT), according to a new regulatory filing.

• Arca, which had a total of $500 million in assets under management as of the third quarter, began accepting investments in the Arca NFT Fund on Nov. 15 and has so far raised $11.4 million from 68 inventors toward its total $30 million goal.
• Arca tells CoinDesk the fund is only open to existing Arca limited partners (LPs) and is already oversubscribed.
• “We decided to create a standalone vehicle based on the lifecycle of the NFT ecosystem … [that] was mature enough for a fund but still very early,” Sumana Maitra, Arca’s chief marketing officer, told CoinDesk in an email.
• Sasha Fleyshman is the portfolio manager for the Arca NFT Fund and Jeff Dorman will oversee as CIO.
• Last month, Arca entered the world of early-stage investments with the Endeavor Fund. The fund closed above its $30 million goal and has put money behind Bitwave, Lattice and BlockchainSpace.
• Asked to compare the Endeavor Fund to the NFT Fund, Maitra said Endeavor looks at early-stage investments across many sectors, including NFTs and gaming, but will predominantly invest in companies supporting NFT growth via equity and token investments.
• “The NFT fund focuses on investing in the actual NFTs themselves, many of which have immediate cash flows and yields and unique properties that accrue directly to the token holder,” Maitra told CoinDesk.
• Investment focuses for the Arca NFT Fund will include digital property, in-game assets, art and collectibles and how NFTs interact with decentralized finance (DeFi), to name a few.
• Arca’s NFT fund marks the latest venture capital bet on digital assets. In a research note published last month, Bank of America said VC investments in the sector surpassed $17 billion for the first half of 2021, up from $5.5 billion in the same period last year.

CORRECTION (Nov. 24, 18:08 UTC): Corrected “liquidity providers” to “limited partners” in second bullet point and corrected spelling of Sasha Fleyshman in fourth bullet.