Highlights of this Issue
According to PANews incomplete statistics, there were 20 blockchain investment and financing events worldwide last week (7.29-8.4), with a total funding scale exceeding $112 million. Both the number of events and the funding scale have decreased. An overview is as follows:
- DeFi: There were 6 investment and financing events, including the cryptocurrency lending protocol Morpho, which raised $50 million in a strategic financing round led by Ribbit Capital.
- DePIN: There were 2 investment and financing events, with Daylight completing a $9 million Series A financing round, led by A16z Crypto.
- AI: 1 investment and financing event was announced in the AI field, with Hyperbolic completing a $7 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction.
- Infrastructure and Tools: There were 3 financing events, including the point trading protocol Pichi Finance completing a $2.5 million seed round financing, jointly led by Signum Capital, UOB Venture Management, and Mantle Network.
- Other Blockchain/Crypto Applications: 5 financing events were announced, including the prediction market DuelNow based on Arbitrum completing an $11 million financing round, led by GEM Digital Limited.
- Centralized Finance: There were 2 financing events, including cross-border payment infrastructure provider Layer2 Financial announcing the completion of a $10.7 million Series A financing, led by Galaxy Ventures.
DeFi
Decentralized cryptocurrency lending protocol Morpho raised $50 million in a strategic financing round led by Ribbit Capital. Other participants in this private token sale include a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Variant, Pantera, Brevan Howard, BlockTower, Kraken Ventures, Hack VC, IOSG, Rockaway, L1D, Mirana, Cherry, Semantic, Fenbushi, Leadblock Bitpanda, and Robot Ventures. According to the introduction, Morpho was launched two years ago and has evolved from an optimization layer to Morpho Blue, which is a platform that increases interest rates for Aave and Compound users, and Morpho Blue is an infrastructure on which others can build cryptocurrency lending applications and develop their own risk management strategies.
DeFi liquidity and trading engine service provider Liquorice announced the completion of a $1.2 million Pre-Seed round financing, led by Greenfield Capital, with participation from Polymorphic Capital, L2 Iterative Ventures (L2IV), 1inch, HASH CIB, Efficient Frontier, Follow the Seed, and Horadrim.Capital. According to the introduction, Liquorice provides single-sided lending pools integrated with MEV-free trading engines, aiming to promote liquidity for intention-based trading systems, and has already integrated with aggregators such as 1inch, Uniswap X, and CoW Swap.
Hack VC leads Chateau Capital's Pre-Seed round financing
Hack VC has led Chateau Capital's Pre-Seed round financing. Chateau is a protocol that brings traditional finance's private equity and fund investments onto the chain, providing DeFi participants with access to these private market opportunities. By connecting DeFi participants with institutional-grade real-world assets (such as private equity), Chateau aims to replace traditional financial systems. Chateau currently allows non-U.S. investors to access tokenized private credit funds managed by a team with extensive Wall Street experience, as well as over 1,000 tokenized pre-IPO private equity, including OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, ByteDance, and Zipline.
Solana ecosystem meme coin collateral platform BlonkFi completes pre-Seed financing
Solana ecosystem meme coin collateral platform BlonkFi announced the successful completion of pre-Seed financing led by UOB Venture Management and Signum Capital. This round of investors includes Manifold Trading, Kyros Ventures, Hypotenuse Labs, and other strategic partners. BlonkFi is a core liquidity infrastructure protocol designed to address the liquidity issues of volatile, mid-market value assets such as meme tokens by collateralizing them.
Binance Labs announced its investment in aPriori through an incubation program to advance MEV-driven liquidity staking. The new round of financing will enable aPriori to expand its team, accelerate research and development efforts, strengthen security protocols, and further optimize blockchain performance to cope with large-scale adoption. According to the introduction, aPriori focuses on providing MEV-driven liquidity staking solutions on the Monad network, creating an MEV-driven liquidity staking platform on Monad to decentralize the network and enhance user experience.
Decentralized cross-chain asset management platform Mycel completes seed round financing, with participation from CV Labs, etc.
Decentralized cross-chain asset management platform Mycel announced the completion of seed round financing on X platform, with participation from CV Labs, FLICKSHOT, gumi Cryptos Capital, Arriba Studio, double jump.tokyo Inc., Incubate Fund, ????? ?????, and Gavin Birch. The specific amount has not been disclosed. Mycel provides cross-chain settlement infrastructure using transferable accounts (TAs) to connect and synchronize state machines, aiming to accelerate the optimization of token market prices.
DePIN
DePIN project Daylight completes $9 million Series A financing, led by A16z Crypto
DePIN
The DePIN project Daylight has completed a $9 million Series A financing round, led by A16z Crypto, with participation from Framework Ventures, Lattice Fund, Escape Velocity, and Lerer Hippeau. Co-founder and CEO Jason Badeaux stated that the company began in April and completed the financing process within 10 days. He declined to comment on the structure, valuation, or whether any investors occupy board seats (either as advisors or directors) in this round of financing. The Series A financing brings Daylight's total funding to $13 million, as the company previously raised $4 million in seed funding in the summer of 2022.
Daylight is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project focused on energy distribution. Founded in 2022 by Badeaux, Udit Patel, and Evan Caron, all with backgrounds in the energy industry, Daylight is building a decentralized protocol that allows users to connect their energy devices (such as thermostats, batteries, electric vehicles, and solar inverters) to its application and receive rewards. Users can also join the Daylight marketplace to access energy upgrades for homes or buildings, such as solar panels, electric vehicle chargers, heat pumps, and water heaters. Daylight provides rewards in the form of points, which can be redeemed within the application. When asked if these points will be exchanged for Daylight's own tokens in the future, Badeaux declined to comment.
Climate data DePIN project Raad Labs completes $2.25 million seed round financing, led by CoinFund
Cryptocurrency venture fund CoinFund announced that it has led Raad Labs' $2.25 million seed round financing. Raad Labs, incubated by Montauk Climate, is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project dedicated to improving the management and collection of climate data through distributed personalized weather stations and other atmospheric sensors. The project uses cryptographic incentive mechanisms to encourage individual investment and self-deployment of weather stations to improve the accuracy of weather models and provide new data for climate risk management and emission quantification.
NFT
NFT startup Mintify completes $3.4 million new round of financing
NFT startup Mintify has completed a $3.4 million new round of financing, with participation from ARCA, Cumberland, Psalion, Master Ventures, Zeneca, GM Capital, Spencer VC, and over 50 angel investors. Mintify's total funding has reached $5 million. Mintify is currently building infrastructure for NFT order books in the gaming, art, and real-world asset markets. The platform already supports Ethereum, Base, and Blast, and plans to support Ordinals and other systems by the end of this year.
AI
Hyperbolic has completed a $7 million seed round financing with the aim of becoming a leading open AI cloud service provider. This round of financing was led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Chapter One, LongHash, Bankless Ventures, Republic Digital, Nomad Capital, CoinSummerLabs, and Third Earth Capital. The funds will be used to advance the development of Hyperbolic's open AI cloud platform, including recruiting key engineers and creating a supportive ecosystem for developers. Hyperbolic plans to provide verifiable and secure AI services by integrating global GPU computing resources and utilizing blockchain technology to address industry bottlenecks in computing resource costs and allocation. Hyperbolic's first product is an AI inference service, promising high performance at a lower cost. Its innovative approach uses "heterogeneous computing" technology to optimize tensor operations across various hardware, allowing developers to access powerful open-source AI models through simple API calls. Additionally, Hyperbolic is building a GPU marketplace, providing an intuitive and automated interface for users to rent and supply GPUs, supported by its decentralized orchestration layer, Hyper-dOS (Hyperbolic Distributed Operating System).
Infrastructure & Tools
Point trading protocol Pichi Finance completes $2.5 million seed round financing
Point trading protocol Pichi Finance has announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed round financing, jointly led by Signum Capital, UOB Venture Management, and Mantle Network, with participation from DWF Ventures, Wise3 Ventures, Genesis Block Ventures, and others. This investment enables Pichi Finance to target new point plans for trading on the first day, create insurance pools to collectively earn income and points, and expand to other EVM chains. Pichi Finance is a trustless point trading protocol that introduces the ERC-6551 account solution, providing price discovery services for tokens before and after TGE.
Web3 integrated platform Agent Exchange completes $1 million financing
Web3 integrated platform Agent Exchange has announced the completion of a $1 million financing round, with participation from The Block CEO Larry Cermak, BRC20 founder Domo, Web3 developer Cygaar, former Coinbase engineer 0xBeans, stinkypablo.eth from Abstract, David Choi from MetaStreet, Mr. Block (@mrblocktw), Caladan, and others. According to the official introduction, Agent has implemented flexible creation and management of sub-accounts through the ERC-6551 standard. Through these tokenized accounts, it enables users to conveniently earn and trade points in the pre-market.
Cryptocurrency software and data management provider Lukka secures strategic financing from Animoca Capital
Cryptocurrency software and data management provider Lukka announced that Animoca Brands has selected it as an enterprise data management provider. In addition, growth capital fund Animoca Capital has made a strategic investment in Lukka. Under their collaboration, Animoca Brands will utilize Lukka's enterprise data management software to support audit-ready reconciliation of cryptocurrency financials and global reporting across multiple business entities.
Other
Mining company Argo Blockchain raises $8.3 million through private financing
Bitcoin Mining Company Argo Blockchain Raises $8.3 Million in Private Financing
Argo Blockchain, a Bitcoin mining company, has announced that it raised $8.3 million through a private placement of ordinary shares and warrants to institutional investors. Argo will issue 57.8 million ordinary shares at a subscription price of £0.1125 per share, with accompanying warrants exercisable at the same price per share over a period of five years. The funds raised will be used for working capital, general corporate purposes, and debt repayment. The new shares are expected to begin trading on the London Stock Exchange on July 31st. Despite a 8% drop in ARBK stock price on Tuesday, it has risen by 21% over the past 30 days.
Icebreaker has announced the completion of a $5 million seed round financing, led by CoinFund, with participation from Accomplice, Anagram, and Legion Capital. The company, valued at $21 million, aims to be a blockchain version of LinkedIn and the world's first open-source network for building professional connections. Its co-founders, Dan Stone and Jack Dillé, come from Google and Coinbase, with Stone being a former project manager at Coinbase and co-founder of Google's largest cross-identity measurement and marketing platform, while Dillé was the design lead for Google Workspace. The company aims to create an "open graph of reputation and identity" and challenge the closed network of LinkedIn, allowing users to find candidates and opportunities online and create a shared context and trust through blockchain.
Jokerace, a On-Chain Competition Platform, Completes $3 Million New Financing
On-chain competition platform Jokerace has completed a $3 million new financing round, led by Maven 11 and approximately 30 angel investors. The three-person team has developed an easy-to-use no-code application that allows developers to launch on-chain competitions and hackathons, as well as distribute grants and other rewards to community members. The idea is to incentivize users to participate in specific projects they find meaningful by providing crypto rewards. Jokerace, launched last year, is currently live on over 90 blockchains. The company has built a solution that can be launched on any EVM-compatible platform "in minutes" and has been adopted by projects such as Polygon, Farcaster, and Bankless.
Paradigm, a venture capital giant, recently led a $2.2 million financing round for MetaDAO, a governance experiment based on Solana. MetaDAO is a project that has been in the works for months, aiming to establish a governance structure based on market forces rather than voting, allowing prediction markets to determine event outcomes through a "futarchy" structure. Supporters believe that market participants will make better choices than politicians. According to MetaDAO's anonymous founder Proph3t, Paradigm will hold 3,035 META tokens, becoming the largest single holder, accounting for 14.6% of the total supply. Approximately 30 angel investors have also purchased 965 META tokens, bringing the total financing to $2,229,950. The project, which launched a month ago, is building a governance structure based on market forces rather than voting.
UGA platform We.Rich has secured $2 million in seed round financing led by Folius Ventures and Animoca Brands. We.Rich is the originator of the UGA (User Generated Asset) concept, aiming to drive the transition of crypto assets from the PGA era to the UGA era. By providing a zero-cost, zero-threshold asset issuance experience and an AI-driven personalized asset recommendation engine, We.Rich enables everyone to become a founder and makes everything tradable.
Centralized Finance
Cross-border payment infrastructure provider Layer2 Financial has announced the completion of a $10.7 million Series A financing, led by Galaxy Ventures, with participation from Accomplice and Sapphire Ventures. Headquartered in Toronto, Layer2 Financial securely transfers billions of dollars in fiat and digital currencies globally each year. Its clients include non-bank financial institutions, traditional banks, neobanks (also known as fintech companies, such as Revolut and Monzo), corporate organizations, and other payment companies. The company's multi-partner platform provides clients with compliant payment services for various currencies. Through its application programming interface (API), clients can collect and send payments using automated clearing houses (ACH), the Federal Reserve's Fedwire system, Swift, the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), and tokenized assets, including transfers between digital and fiat currencies. The platform is currently regulated in approximately 34 states in the United States, which constitutes the majority of its business. Additionally, the platform is licensed in Canada and Europe.
Cryptocurrency Proprietary Trading Company Breakout Raises $4.5 Million in Seed Round Financing
Cryptocurrency proprietary trading company Breakout Trading Group has raised $4.5 million in a seed round financing led by RockawayX, with other investors including Andrew Kang's Mechanism Capital, Round13 Capital, C² Ventures, and IOBC Capital. According to co-founder and CEO Alex Miningham, the company began its seed round financing in February and concluded the oversubscribed round earlier this month. Breakout initially sought $3 million, received commitments of $6 million, and ultimately closed the round at $4.5 million. The seed round financing utilized a token warrant-based pricing round. RockawayX now holds a board seat at Breakout and led this round of financing. After securing new funds, Breakout plans to expand into the Asia-Pacific and Latin American regions and attract more users through its global alliance program.
Institutional Funds
OKX Ventures and Aptos Foundation Launch $10 Million Fund
OKX Ventures, the investment arm of OKEx, and Aptos Foundation have jointly launched a $10 million fund to support the widespread adoption of the Aptos ecosystem and Web3. The fund will operate and develop accelerator projects in partnership with Ankaa, focusing on infrastructure, DeFi, real-world assets, GameFi, and providing entrepreneurial support and professional guidance. The Ankaa accelerator program will open for applications this month and will select the first five projects to join the accelerator in September. OKX Ventures has invested in over 300 projects in the past two years and aims to further drive blockchain innovation through its collaboration with Aptos Foundation.
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