Despite the ongoing crypto winter, which has affected many businesses in the greater Web3 space, investments continue pouring into the space.

On Jan. 17, the Hong Kong-based global asset manager HashKey Capital announced the closing of a $500 million investment round for its FinTech Investment Fund III.

According to the company, Fund III will be used to invest in infrastructures, toolings and applications that will help push mass adoption of blockchain and crypto technologies.

Speaking with Cointelegraph, Xiao Xiao, an investment director at HashKey Capital, said the synergies in the Web3 space are a key factor to what keeps investors coming back for more.

“Web3 is growing too fast to be ignored. Many traditional institutions and internet giants are interested in crypto. Some are learning how to participate in this paradigm shift.”

Xiao said financial organizations can see cryptocurrency as another asset class to diversify their portfolio. Likewise, he highlighted that investing in a fund creates an easy intro to engage with the Web3 space.

According to the investment director, the crypto winter has also seen a “significant change” in the type of investor entering the space.

“As more and more institutional investors join, investment decisions are dependent on the longer-term value and return, rather than short-term objectives.״

Founded in 2018, HashKey Capital has managed over $1 billion in client assets and has invested in some of the industry’s biggest players. This includes projects such as Animoca Brands, Polygon, Moonbeam and Blockdaemon, among others.

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Xiao said as far as short term investments are concerned, those creating projects with real life use cases are on everyone’s radar. 

In the past few years, the infrastructure layer has seen major innovations. This layer includes interoperability, privacy and data availability, among others. However, there haven’t been many real adopted cases.

“The middle layer, which incorporates infrastructure into real use cases, can therefore be considered highly important. And this kind of middle layer should be productized and easy to use.”