A state-backed bank in France is reportedly launching a multimillion-dollar initiative to invest in crypto projects.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, French government-owned bank Bpifrance – which has nearly $110 billion in assets under its management – is rolling out a $27 million crypto venture fund to invest in digital asset startups.

Not only will the fund target projects that offer tokens in return rather than equity, it will also focus on blockchain protocols with “a strong French footprint” within the fields of decentralized finance (DeFi), artificial intelligence (AI), staking and asset tokenization.

Bpifrance deputy CEO Arnaud Caudoux says the bank needs to step up its accumulation strategy to be able to compete with the US now that pro-crypto politician Donald Trump is president once again.

As stated by Cardoux, according to Bloomberg,

“The new US policy is creating massive attractivity for all crypto companies from across the world. We want to keep those companies here because we strongly believe that it’s very important in the future to have our own ecosystem.”

Earlier this month, Trump announced that the US will adopt Bitcoin (BTC) and other digital assets as strategic reserve assets, which at the time caused a “sell-the-news” event.

Bpifrance first became interested in cryptocurrencies in 2014 when it struck a deal with the hardware developer Ledger. In 2022, it went on to invest in the DeFi lending platform Morpho.

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