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Crypto had a big bounceback year in 2023. Now, venture investors are returning.

Venture funding for crypto-related companies in the fourth quarter of 2023 totaled $1.9 billion, a 2.5% increase from the prior quarter, PitchBook said Thursday. It marks the first time that venture VC investments in crypto startups have risen since the March quarter of 2022.

It’s a welcome stat for crypto entrepreneurs who’ve been bruised by the last couple of years of the so-called “crypto winter,” which made it much harder for founders to raise money.

Venture funding for crypto firms slumped significantly in 2022 after a rise in interest rates from major central banks led to a flight of investors from riskier assets like tech stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Problems for crypto ventures were compounded that year by major collapses of crypto companies like Do Kwon’s controversial algorithmic stablecoin Terra and Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.

Major venture funds like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Tiger Global were bruised by the downturn in crypto deals. In some cases, like the fall of FTX, funds had to write off their entire stake.

“It’s no secret investors have been writing more checks,” Le said in a CNBC interview. “Now we’re starting to see it in the data.”

Le said that crypto venture funding has bottomed with a rise in crypto asset prices and public market valuations of crypto-related companies such as Coinbase, Marathon Digital, and MicroStrategy.

In the past 12 months, bitcoin has more than doubled in price and is now worth over $52,000 apiece. Coinbase stock has similarly surged, up nearly 140% year-over-year.

“Generally a lot of times we see there’s a correlation between investments in private markets and the public markets,” Le told CNBC. “There’s a lot of publicly-traded crypto companies that are up in the last year, and we’re starting to see on the private side that trend as well.”

PitchBook said the number of deals declined 2.4% in the fourth quarter, however. Le explained this means that the strongest startups are getting the investments. “There is a little bit of concentration of capital going into fewer companies in the crypto space,” he said.

Bitcoin briefly crosses $52,000 as it recaptures $1 trillion market cap: CNBC Crypto World

PitchBook noted that the most notable crypto ventures receiving funding focus on finance and technology solutions, such as the tokenization of real-world assets like real estate and stocks on the blockchain, and decentralized computing infrastructure.

Notable fundraises during the quarter included crypto exchanges Swan Bitcoin and Blockchain.com, which raised $165 million and $100 million, respectively.

The quarter’s largest deal was a $225 million investment in Wormhole, an open-source blockchain development platform company, backed by the likes of Coinbase Ventures, Jump Trading, and ParaFi Capital, at a $2.5 billion valuation.

Meanwhile, Together.ai, a decentralized cloud platform for large foundation models, raised $102.5 million in a Series A round led by Nvidia, Emergence, and Kleiner Perkins, at a post-money Valuation of $463.5 million.

Much of the activity can be attributed to the wave of interest in crypto from financial institutions following the launch of the first spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the U.S. late last year, Le said.

“The ETFs got approved, there’s a lot of money, I think you’re going to see a lot of passive money flowing into bitcoin,” Le told CNBC.

“In the U.S., you’ve got trillions of dollars from big funds and wealth advisors that did not invest in bitcoin traditionally and now they can.”

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Nvidia positioned to weather Trump tariffs, chip demand ‘off the charts,’ says Altimeter’s Gerstner

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Nvidia positioned to weather Trump tariffs, chip demand 'off the charts,' says Altimeter's Gerstner

Altimeter CEO Brad Gerstner is buying Nvidia

Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner said Thursday that he’s moving out of the “bomb shelter” with Nvidia and into a position of safety, expecting that the chipmaker is positioned to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.

“The growth and the demand for GPUs is off the charts,” he told CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” referring to Nvidia’s graphics processing units that are powering the artificial intelligence boom. He said investors just need to listen to commentary from OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk.

President Trump announced an expansive and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday. The plan established a 10% baseline tariff, though many countries like China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to steeper rates. The announcement sent stocks tumbling on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 5%, headed for its worst day since 2022.

The big reason Nvidia may be better positioned to withstand Trump’s tariff hikes is because semiconductors are on the list of exceptions, which Gerstner called a “wise exception” due to the importance of AI.

Nvidia’s business has exploded since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and annual revenue has more than doubled in each of the past two fiscal years. After a massive rally, Nvidia’s stock price has dropped by more than 20% this year and was down almost 7% on Thursday.

Gerstner is concerned about the potential of a recession due to the tariffs, but is relatively bullish on Nvidia, and said the “negative impact from tariffs will be much less than in other areas.”

He said it’s key for the U.S. to stay competitive in AI. And while the company’s chips are designed domestically, they’re manufactured in Taiwan “because they can’t be fabricated in the U.S.” Higher tariffs would punish companies like Meta and Microsoft, he said.

“We’re in a global race in AI,” Gerstner said. “We can’t hamper our ability to win that race.”

WATCH: Brad Gerstner is buying Nvidia

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YouTube announces Shorts editing features amid potential TikTok ban

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YouTube announces Shorts editing features amid potential TikTok ban

Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images

YouTube on Thursday announced new video creation tools for Shorts, its short-form video feed that competes against TikTok. 

The features come at a time when TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is at risk of an effective ban in the U.S. if it’s not sold to an American owner by April 5.

Among the new tools is an updated video editor that allows creators to make precise adjustments and edits, a feature that automatically syncs video cuts to the beat of a song and AI stickers.

The creator tools will become available later this spring, said YouTube, which is owned by Google

Along with the new features, YouTube last week said it was changing the way view counts are tabulated on Shorts. Under the new guidelines, Shorts views will count the number of times the video is played or replayed with no minimum watch time requirement. 

Previously, views were only counted if a video was played for a certain number of seconds. This new tabulation method is similar to how views are counted on TikTok and Meta’s Reels, and will likely inflate view counts.

“We got this feedback from creators that this is what they wanted. It’s a way for them to better understand when their Shorts have been seen,” YouTube Chief Product Officer Johanna Voolich said in a YouTube video. “It’s useful for creators who post across multiple platforms.”

WATCH: TikTok is a digital Trojan horse, says Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass

TikTok is a digital Trojan horse, says Hayman Capital's Kyle Bass

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Tech stocks sink after Trump tariff rollout — Apple heads for worst drop in 5 years

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Tech stocks sink after Trump tariff rollout — Apple heads for worst drop in 5 years

CEO of Meta and Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th U.S. president in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025.

Saul Loeb | Via Reuters

Technology stocks plummeted Thursday after President Donald Trump’s new tariff policies sparked widespread market panic.

Apple led the declines among the so-called “Magnificent Seven” group, dropping nearly 9%. The iPhone maker makes its devices in China and other Asian countries. The stock is on pace for its steepest drop since 2020.

Other megacaps also felt the pressure. Meta Platforms and Amazon fell more than 7% each, while Nvidia and Tesla slumped more than 5%. Nvidia builds its new chips in Taiwan and relies on Mexico for assembling its artificial intelligence systems. Microsoft and Alphabet both fell about 2%.

Semiconductor stocks also felt the pain, with Marvell Technology, Arm Holdings and Micron Technology falling more than 8% each. Broadcom and Lam Research dropped 6%, while Advanced Micro Devices declined more than 4% Software stocks ServiceNow and Fortinet fell more than 5% each.

Read more CNBC tech news

The drop in technology stocks came amid a broader market selloff spurred by fears of a global trade war after Trump unveiled a blanket 10% tariff on all imported goods and a range of higher duties targeting specific countries after the bell Wednesday. He said the new tariffs would be a “declaration of economic independence” for the U.S.

Companies and countries worldwide have already begun responding to the wide-sweeping policy, which included a 34% tariff on China stacked on a previous 20% tax, a 46% duty on Vietnam and a 20% levy on imports from the European Union.

China’s Ministry of Commerce urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel” the unilateral tariff measures and said it would take “resolute counter-measures.”

The tariffs come on the heels of a rough quarter for the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the worst period for the index since 2022. Stocks across the board have come under pressure over concerns of a weakening U.S. economy. The Nasdaq Composite dropped nearly 5% on Thursday, bringing its year-to-date loss to 13%.

Trump applauded some megacap technology companies for investing money into the U.S. during his speech, calling attention to Apple’s plan to spend $500 billion over the next four years.

Evercore ISI's Amit Daryanani on keeping Apple's outperform rating despite tariffs

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