Life.Sreda, a Singapore venture fund of Russian origin, is launching a new venture fund called Banking on Blockchain Fund (BB Fund) that will focus on investing in early stage blockchain companies.

The fund will provide initial capital for blockchain initiatives in some way be connected with banking, reads an article by East-West Digital News. The new fund will be headquartered in London.

As of now, BB Fund has only received $5 mln from Life.Sreda, but the company is expecting to get more from various financial institutions and collect $50 mln by the end of 2016 and $100 mln in 2017.

The new fund promises not only to accumulate the money that banks would like to invest in blockchain startups but also to return the interest. Besides, it will be offering banks expertise and analysis, helping them to find their way through the quickly expanding blockchain ecosystem. The banks need to know which startups have the best business model, which of them are developing relevant use cases – in short, which are the best ones to invest in.

2016 will be the year of general “acceptance and adoption” of blockchain technology, reads a statement on the BB Fund website. This was the reason why Life.Sreda got interested in blockchain. According to the company, the technology will occupy a dramatically different position in the world: people will be using blockchain without even knowing it. “You’ll do a money transfer and you won’t realize that the company sending that money is actually using a blockchain trail,” reads the statement.

That is why blockchain is a popular industry for investment nowadays, notes Life.Sreda. “…Venture capital funds and financial institutions are pumping over $1 billion into blockchain technology startups in 2016, four times more than in 2015, and this exponential growth is expected to continue through 2020,” claims the fund in a press release.

Life.Sreda invests in various startups, mainly connected with mobile payment, banking and digital finance. Most of the fund’s portfolio companies are situated in Europe and Southeast (and South) Asia, part of them – in North and South America.

Life.Sreda was founded in 2012 as a venture branch of Russian financial group Life. Since then the fund has separated itself from the financial group and now is completely independent of it, says Igor Pesin, partner and CFO at BB Fund.

Andrew Levich