(Bloomberg) -- Blockchain startup StarkWare said its valuation quadrupled to $8 billion in a funding round, adding to tentative signs that venture capitalists are looking past a rout in cryptocurrency markets. 

The Israeli company, whose technology speeds up blockchain transactions, raised $100 million in the financing, which was led by Greenoaks Capital. Tiger Global and Coatue Management also invested in the round, according to a statement on Wednesday. StarkWare was valued at $2 billion as recently as November. 

StarkWare’s announcement came on the same day as Hong Kong-based crypto firm Babel Finance disclosed a funding round that valued it at $2 billion. In another sign that VC investors aren’t turning their backs on digital assets, Andreessen Horowitz said it raised a $4.5 billion crypto fund, the largest to date. 

Read more: Andreessen Horowitz Raises Record $4.5 Billion Crypto Fund

Even with the latest deals, VC investment in digital-asset startups this quarter looks unlikely to match the previous three months, when the sector raised $9.7 billion according to PitchBook data. So far this quarter, the tally stands at roughly $5.3 billion, the data show.

StarkWare was co-founded in 2018 by Chief Executive Officer Uri Kolodny, Eli Ben-Sasson, Michael Riabzev and Alessandro Chiesa. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin participated in the company’s seed funding round. StarkWare will use the proceeds to invest in areas such as product development and engineering, Kolodny said in an interview.  

The company’s blockchain technology speeds up digital transactions by alleviating congestion. Its StarkEx platform, which is used by companies such as Sorare and Immutable X, has handled more than $500 billion of transactions since it started two years ago, according to StarkWare.

StarkWare’s technology has been used to mint roughly 60 million nonfungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, Kolodny said. 

A string of high-profile misadventures -- from the $600 million hack of play-to-earn crypto game Axie Infinity in March to this month’s collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin -- have left venture investors nursing large losses and highlighted the potential pitfalls of funding the boom-and-bust industry. A Bloomberg index of cryptocurrencies has plunged almost 50% this year. 

Still, crypto proponents like Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon have argued recently that bear markets like this one tend to serve as springboards for technological leaps. Some have drawn parallels with the dot-com shakeout of the early 2000s, out of which companies like Twitter Inc. and Facebook eventually rose. 

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