Highlights of this Issue
According to PANews incomplete statistics, there were 22 blockchain investment and financing events globally last week (7.15-7.21), with a total fund size exceeding $89 million. The fund size continued to decline. An overview is as follows:
- DeFi announced 7 investment and financing events, among which the real-world asset (RWA) credit protocol Zivoe raised $8.35 million, with participation from Andrew Keys.
- Web3 Games revealed 2 investment and financing events, with the Web3 player community platform Oh Gamers receiving a $3 million investment, with participation from Axia8 Ventures.
- AI field announced 1 investment and financing event, with the crypto AI startup Mira completing a $9 million seed round financing, jointly led by Bitkraft Ventures and Framework Ventures.
- Infrastructure and Tools track announced 7 financings, among which Allium Labs completed a $16.5 million Series A financing, led by Theory Ventures.
- Other Blockchain/Crypto Applications announced 1 financing, with the SocialFi platform RECRD announcing a $4 million financing, led by the Sui Foundation.
- Centralized Finance field announced 4 financings, among which the fintech company Caliza raised $8.5 million, led by Initialized.
DeFi
RWA Credit Protocol Zivoe Raises $8.35 Million, Plans to Launch Its Credit Protocol on July 31
The real-world asset (RWA) credit protocol Zivoe has raised $8.35 million, with investors including Andrew Keys, Iceberg Capital, and Concave. Zivoe plans to launch its credit protocol on July 31, connecting on-chain liquidity and real-world borrowers through blockchain technology, providing lower interest rate loans, and directly interacting with consumers in the long term. This release will also conduct an initial batch issuance (ITO), allowing participants to obtain risk-rated loan investments and revenue opportunities by providing liquidity.
Bitcoin Lending Protocol Liquidium Completes $2.75 Million Seed Round Financing
The Bitcoin lending protocol Liquidium has announced the successful completion of a $2.75 million seed round financing, with major investors including Wise 3 Ventures, Portal Ventures, Asymmetric Capital, AGE Fund, NGC Ventures, CMS Holdings, Newman Capital, VidenVC, DeGods, and several individual investors. Liquidium is a Bitcoin DeFi platform where users can use Bitcoin NFTs (Ordinals) and Runes as collateral for Bitcoin lending. CTO Peter Giammanco stated that Liquidium is prioritizing the introduction of BRC-20 assets and expanding to wallets such as OKX and Phantom, aiming to maximize its accessibility in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The multi-chain decentralized exchange ZKEX has announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed round financing. This round of financing was participated by Distributed Capital (Fenbushi Capital), KKXVC, RockTree Capital, NGC Ventures, L2 Iterative Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, IDG Blockchain, Whale Ground, Moonhill Capital, Blocklabs Capital, Optic Capital, Hyperithm Group, and G20 Group. The new funds will support ZKEX in launching mobile applications and Telegram bots in the next quarter.
Stablecoin Developer Bima Labs Completes $2.25 Million Seed Round Financing
Stablecoin developer Bima Labs has completed a $2.25 million seed round financing, led by Portal Ventures, with participation from Draper Goren Blockchain, Sats Ventures, Luxor Technology, CoreDAO, and Halo Capital. In addition, angel investors such as Ryan Fang from Ankr, Brian Crain from Chorus One, Jeffrey Feng from Sei Labs, and Smokey from Berachain also participated in this round of financing. It is reported that Bima has developed the Bitcoin-backed stablecoin USBD, which can be minted by providing Bitcoin liquidity collateral and re-collateralizing tokens. Bima stated that it will accept collateral from multiple blockchains, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin scaling networks, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible networks, and Solana.
Leveraged Interest Rate Trading Platform RateX Completes Seed Round Financing, Participated by GSR, Animoca Ventures, and Others
The margin-based leveraged synthetic interest rate trading platform RateX has announced the successful completion of seed round financing. Investors in this round of financing include GSR, SNZ Holdings, Presto Labs, Animoca Ventures, Initial Ventures, G Ventures, KuCoin Ventures, Summer Ventures, and LeadBlock Bitpanda Ventures. RateX is a leveraged interest rate trading DEX built on Solana. On RateX, users can benefit from the fluctuation of yields in a capital-efficient manner by longing or shorting synthetic yield tokens (YT) with leverage of up to 10 times. In addition to leveraged yield trading, RateX also offers features such as fixed income investment and synthetic point trading to meet the needs of different users.
Derivatives Trading Platform JOJO Completes Seed Round Financing, Led by SevenX Ventures
The Base chain-based derivatives trading platform JOJO has completed seed round financing, led by SevenX Ventures, with participation from SmrtiLab, Shadow Labs, Bitlink, PAKA, and Clairvoyant, among others. According to the introduction, JOJO is led by Radar Bear, co-founder of DODO, and former CTO David of DDEX, integrating Turing-complete hybrid liquidity models, diversified asset collateral mining, quantitative trading robots, leverage trading of up to 1000 times, and automated funding rate arbitrage, among other functions.
RWA Project SkyTrade Completes Pre-Seed Round Financing, Led by Modular Capital and Portal Ventures
RWA project SkyTrade announced the completion of its Pre-Seed round financing led by Modular Capital and Portal Ventures, with participation from the Solana Foundation, Mercatus Center, and angel investors Adam Gries and Jason Yanowitz. SkyTrade is building an Air Rights Marketplace.
Web3 Games
Web3 player community platform Oh Gamers completes $3 million seed round financing
Web3 player community platform Oh Gamers announced a $3 million seed investment and incubation guidance from renowned crypto venture fund Axia8 Ventures and several angel investors. This funding will drive Oh Gamers' early development and help achieve its mission of putting players at the center and reshaping the value distribution in the gaming ecosystem. Axia8 Ventures, a venture capital fund, focuses on providing early support to Web3 startups. Oh Gamers aims to be a bridge for traditional gamers to enter Web3 games and transform them into a core force for the future growth of Web3 games.
HashKey Capital and TOP invest in Catizen.AI issuance platform PLUTO Studio
The Open Platform (TOP) and HashKey Capital announced their investment in the Catizen.AI issuance platform PLUTO Studio.
AI
Crypto AI startup Mira, focusing on decentralized machine learning infrastructure, emerged from stealth mode and completed a $9 million seed round financing jointly led by Bitkraft Ventures and Framework Ventures. Mira's co-founders Sidhartha Doddipalli and Karan Sirdesai stated that the platform aims to help developers quickly build AI-native applications, with over ten projects already using Mira's infrastructure to develop AI applications. Mira plans to launch a blockchain record platform transaction in the future. Currently, Mira has 25 employees in Singapore and India, and Sirdesai plans to hire at least 5 more engineers to expand the team.
Infrastructure & Tools
Visa's data partner Allium Labs completed a $16.5 million Series A financing, led by Theory Ventures, with its founder Tomasz Tunguz joining the board. Kleiner Perkins and Amplify Partners also participated in this financing. Allium Labs stated that it has raised a total of $21.5 million and plans to invest in data infrastructure and listing plans to provide services that enable financial institutions to accept digital assets. Allium Labs provides enterprise-level blockchain data for companies such as Visa, Stripe, and the Uniswap Foundation, and plans to use the funds for data infrastructure construction and market expansion. The latest data from the Visa OnChain Analytics Dashboard, launched in collaboration with Visa, shows a resurgence in stablecoin demand in 2024, with a circulating supply close to $150 billion and 27.5 million monthly active users.
Blockchain data network developer Chainbase completed a $15 million Series A financing led by well-known internet companies and Matrix Partners China, with other investors including Folius Ventures, Hash Global, DFG, JSquare, Mask Network, and Bodl Ventures. Additionally, the company's existing investors include XVC, M77 Ventures, ZhenFund, and FountainBridge Capital. Chainbase plans to launch its mainnet and governance token CBT in the fourth quarter of this year. This round of financing will be used to establish a global local community, enhance developer and user participation, and increase network awareness. Chainbase's network supports over 15,000 developers and 8,000 projects, managing over 500 billion data calls.
Blockchain cloud computing company Nirvana Labs completes $4 million seed round financing
Blockchain cloud computing company Nirvana Labs completed a $4 million seed round financing, jointly led by Castle Island Ventures and RW3 Ventures, with participation from BitGo Ecosystem Fund, Hash3, Third Earth, and Play Ventures, among others. This financing brings the company's total funding over the past six months to $5.7 million. Nirvana Labs is developing Nirvana Cloud, a cloud infrastructure designed for Web3, which has been used by well-known crypto companies such as Chainlink, BitGo, Goldsky, Thirdweb, and Pairpoint.
Intent-based cross-chain interoperability protocol Owlto Finance announced an investment from Matrixport in a new round of financing, valuing the company at $150 million. This milestone follows the $8 million financing two months ago and is an important step for Owlto to enter the next stage of development. Owlto Finance expressed gratitude for the support of existing investors, including Bixin Ventures, CE Innovation Capital, Presto Labs, Hailstone Labs, and stated that it will continue to focus on transparency and fairness, provide updates on progress, and give back to the community through the Owlto Point Program.
Web3 Identity Verification and Private Key Management Tool Privy Receives Strategic Investment from Coinbase Ventures
Privy announced on X platform that it has received a strategic investment from Coinbase Ventures. This funding will be used to deepen user and partner relationships and help developers build better products on-chain. Privy stated that over the past 18 months, the project has closely collaborated with multiple product teams at Coinbase, assisting developers in building on Base, providing funding for their user accounts, setting up Coinbase smart wallets, and utilizing Magic Spend, among other activities. Privy's openness aims to provide a seamless user access and participation experience for the next generation of crypto applications, driving their rapid development. Last November, Privy completed a $18 million Series A financing round, led by Paradigm.
OKX Ventures Announces Strategic Investment in zkLink, the First Aggregated Layer3 Rollup Network
OKX Ventures announced its strategic investment in zkLink. The zkLink Nova created by zkLink is a multi-chain aggregated Layer 3 network based on zero-knowledge proof technology. It aggregates fragmented liquidity from multiple Layer 1 blockchains and Layer 2 Rollup networks using zkLink's independently developed multi-chain ZK-Rollup architecture, providing developers with a unified access gateway. Since 2021, zkLink has evolved into an aggregated infrastructure for assets, liquidity, and applications across various L1 and Ethereum L2, offering two core solutions: zkLink Nova and zkLink X, both utilizing zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology to respectively provide a general smart contract platform and a customized high-performance dedicated solution for developers. According to the latest data on the official website, the zkLink Nova mainnet for general aggregation Layer 3 has over 1 million unique wallet addresses and a total locked value (TVL) on-chain of $1 billion within two months.
Modular Network DILL Completes Pre-Seed Round Financing, Led by FSL Ecosystem
Modular network DILL has completed its Pre-Seed round financing, with FSL Ecosystem leading the investment. Other participants include LayerZero Labs, Modular Capital, Pendle co-founder TN Lee, and Manta's victorji.eth, with the specific amount yet to be disclosed. Dill is a data availability layer that proposes a paradigm-shifting scalability solution, utilizing the same technology stack as the Ethereum Go client to ensure high performance. Its validity proof ensures fast finality through aggregated KZG polynomial commitments. Data sovereignty is crucial for these applications, and Dill will allow consumers of any application chain to participate in permissionless networks through light clients in extreme cases when a licensed DA (e.g., a DA with only 100 nodes) stops operating for some reason, most chains will be unable to do anything, while Dill will enable data sovereignty for any application chain.
Centralized Finance
Fintech Company Caliza Raises $8.5 Million, Led by Initialized
Fintech company Caliza has raised $8.5 million to enable real-time currency transfers in Latin America using USDC. Founded by American entrepreneur Ezra Kebrab in 2021, Caliza provides API and front-end payment systems based on crypto stablecoins, allowing instant transfers and providing U.S. digital dollar accounts for international merchants. Initialized led this round of financing, marking the venture capital firm's first investment focused on Latin America. Caliza plans to expand to Mexico in the fall and double its team size in Brazil. Caliza's mission is to "empower everyone, regardless of their location or circumstances, to access instant and stable liquidity."
Digital Asset Investment Management Platform Haruko Completes $6 Million Series A Financing
The UK-based digital asset investment management platform Haruko has completed a $6 million Series A financing. This round was jointly led by White Star Capital's digital asset fund and MMC Ventures. With this, the company has raised a total of $16 million. This investment will help the company expand into Southeast Asia and further consolidate its global influence. Founded in 2021 by Shamyl Malik, Adam Carlile, and Omer Suleman, Haruko provides digital asset technology solutions for institutions. It offers the necessary transparency for effective financial management, compliance, investor reporting, and financial control functions.
Stablecoin Cross-Border Payment Platform PEXX Completes $4.5 Million Seed Round Financing
Singapore-based fintech startup PEXX has successfully completed a $4.5 million seed round financing. This funding was led by TNB Aura, with participation from Antler and EMO Capital, among other well-known venture capital and crypto investors. PEXX will use this funding to develop its innovative stablecoin-to-fiat payment platform, aiming to simplify the cross-border currency transfer process. The platform allows users to transfer Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) directly to global bank accounts without intermediaries or bank accounts. The financing will be used to strengthen the company's engineering and product teams, as well as expand its marketing and business development in Southeast Asia. Additionally, EMO Capital will assist PEXX in Web3 marketing, brand promotion, and strategic partnerships. PEXX has obtained certification from the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), ensuring its compliant operation as an independent remittance dealer and digital currency exchange provider. The PEXX platform supports the conversion of stablecoins into 16 different fiat currencies and direct transfer to bank accounts, greatly simplifying the process of converting crypto to fiat.
Crypto investment platform Truvius has completed a $3.2 million Pre-Seed round financing, led by Galaxy Ventures, with participation from New Form Capital, Chainview Capital, and several angel investors. Founded in 2022, Truvius is a crypto investment platform for individual and institutional investors. The platform states its compliance with the regulations of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and has partnered with Anchorage Digital, the only federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, to provide custody and trading services for clients.
Other
Web3 Social
Web3 Social Protocol beoble Receives $3 Million Strategic Investment
Web3 Social Protocol beoble Receives $3 Million Strategic Investment
beoble, a Web3 social protocol, disclosed on the X platform that it has raised an additional $3 million from existing investors, which is a strategic investment. The Web3 social platform beoble aims to provide enhanced decentralized wallet-to-wallet communication. With a range of innovative features such as earning, following, discovery, and a reward-based model tailored for the Web3 community, beoble prioritizes user privacy, security, and contribution. In a previous announcement in February, beoble had raised a total of $7 million in two rounds of financing, with major investors including Hashkey, Samsung, DCG, DWF Ventures, Nomura Laser Digital, Cypher Capital, and Blockchain Founders Fund.
Institutional Funds
Anthropic Launches $100 Million AI Fund Anthology Fund
The AI startup company Anthropic announced on its official website that it will partner with Menlo Ventures to establish a new $100 million fund called "Anthology Fund," targeting startups using Anthropic's Claude AI model to build products. Menlo will provide the entire funding, while Anthropic will provide technical support. Approved companies can receive a $100,000 investment and a $25,000 "credit" to access Anthropic's most advanced models. Anthology Fund will focus its investments on startups in several areas, including companies developing AI trust and security tools, as well as those applying AI in original ways in fields such as healthcare or cybersecurity. Anthropic will not hold stakes in these companies but may consider them as potential acquisition targets in the future. The fund is similar to the OpenAI Startup Fund, which invested $175 million in AI companies and is backed by Microsoft, the largest investor in OpenAI.
The Sei Foundation announced the launch of a $50 million Japan Ecosystem Fund, with initial focus on Web3 gaming, social, and entertainment use cases. The foundation officially announced this fund at the "Sei Web3 Day for Japan" event held in Tokyo on April 27th, aiming to attract local talent, discover promising Japanese startups, and bring them into Sei. The Sei Foundation encourages interested parties to apply for funding from this ecosystem fund.
The Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitrue announced the launch of a $40 million investment fund to support AI, DeFi, and GameFi startups. Bitrue Ventures will provide up to $200,000 in funding for each project, along with development expertise, industry connections, and management support. Projects in the fields of artificial intelligence, tokenization of real assets, GameFi, decentralized physical infrastructure networks, and DeFi will be given priority. Eligible startups also have the opportunity to issue tokens on Bitrue.
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