Rare Bits, a crypto-collectible trading site, raises $6M Series A led by Spark Capital with First Round, Craft Ventures, SV Angel, and Justin Kan participating
Context & Ripple Effects
Rare Bits' $6M Series A lands in April 2018, when crypto-collectibles are barely a category — making Spark Capital, First Round, Craft Ventures, SV Angel, and angel Justin Kan early institutional money in trading marketplaces built on non-fungible tokens.
The related coverage shows how far that early bet traveled: Bitski's $19M Series A with Jay-Z, MrBeast, and Serena Williams in 2021 brought celebrity capital into NFT storefronts, FanCraze reportedly raised a $100M Series A for cricket NFTs in 2022, and by 2024 Figure Markets raised $60M for broader crypto trading — a scale-up arc that starts with rounds like this one.
First-order effects
- Rare Bits gets a $6M war chest to build its crypto-collectible trading site while the market is nascent, and Spark Capital secures one of the earliest venture positions in the NFT marketplace sector.
Second-order effects
- The same seed-stage syndicate re-forms around the collectibles thesis three years later — First Round and SV Angel both appear in Alt's $31M sports-cards round — showing early backers compounding their conviction across adjacent marketplaces.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, digital-ownership marketplaces become a durable venture category that survives crypto winters: rounds scale from single-digit millions in 2018 to nine-figure raises like FanCraze's, and the endgame looks less like collectibles sites and more like general trading platforms such as Figure Markets.
The trend: Venture capital has treated crypto-collectible marketplaces as a recurring thesis, with check sizes scaling from Rare Bits' $6M in 2018 toward nine-figure rounds as digital assets matured into mainstream trading venues.