“The emerging digital asset ecosystem remains an investment opportunity without parallel”
‘s () net asset value jumped five-fold last year as it reaped the benefit of the upsurge in interest in cryptocurrencies.
NAV per share at the end of the year to December 2020 was 28.97p, compared to 5.72p a year earlier as assets in the crypto investor’s portfolio jumped in value to £37.9mln from £7.5mln.
Profits for the year soared to £30.3mln (£1.15mln).
In a statement Aquis-listed KR1 said: “The company’s investment team has, again in 2020, delivered to shareholders a truly exceptional performance, further extending their outstanding track record of shareholder returns since the company’s establishment in 2016.”
Managing directors George McDonaugh and Keld Van Schreven added: “We believe the emerging digital asset ecosystem remains an investment opportunity without parallel, a revolution in two parts:
“Firstly, a new financial system being built out and secondly, decentralised technologies forming the base layer for a new and better internet.
“Much of the innovation inherent in the breakthrough that is the invention of digital scarcity is still to be uncovered.
“Over the past year, Ethereum has seen incredible activity in on-chain transaction volume and transaction fees, which is a huge achievement for Ethereum and decentralised finance (“DeFi”) ecosystem.
“The utility and impact of many DeFi protocols is staggering, generating jaw dropping fees with one such example Uniswap leading the charge, generating trade volume and fees that exceeded volumes on some of the most prominent centralised exchanges.
“In the Ethereum ecosystem we backed MetaCartel Venture DAO, Lido and Swarm, which are all key projects supporting and benefiting from Ethereum’s growth over the past time period.
“Focusing on other blockchains in the portfolio, it is our firm belief that, in time, further innovative decentralised networks such as Polkadot or Cosmos are going to become as important as Ethereum for the blockchain space and we have continued to support their respective ecosystems with several investments.
Polkadot’s sister chain Kusama has also recently hit a major milestone with the crowdloan and parachain systems kicking off as planned and allowing the application layer to form.
“With Polkadot soon to follow suit in the coming months, we expect to continue seeing an excellent pipeline of investment opportunities in this area and also great opportunities emerging from, both, Kusama’s and Polkadot’s parachain auctions.”