Source: Cointelegraph Original: "{title}"
The cryptocurrency market experienced significant volatility in the first quarter of 2025. Investor sentiment swung from one extreme to another, with Bitcoin (BTC) rebounding to historical highs, undergoing a major correction, and receiving strong support from President Donald Trump.
Amidst the noise, venture capital firms continued to expand their investments in blockchain and crypto startups, focusing on decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs), Web3 gaming, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, and derivatives trading markets.
The latest edition of the VC Roundup highlights seven funding announcements from across the industry.
Blockchain developer Alchemy launched a $5 million "Everyone Onchain Fund" to promote Web3 applications on Ethereum. This fund will provide developers building on Alchemy with gas credits of up to $10,000 and compute credits of $20,000. Initial support will be provided for OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit.
Alchemy currently offers a "rollups-as-a-service" solution, allowing developers to launch and grow their own blockchains.
One of Alchemy's most notable partners is World, a biometric digital identity project that evolved from Worldcoin. Since its launch, World has amassed over 23 million global users.
Related: Superchains will reach 80% of Ethereum L2 transaction volume by 2025—Optimism executive
Layer 1 RWA network developer Mavryk Dynamics completed a $5 million funding round led by venture capital firms Ghaf Capital, Big Brain, MetaVest Capital, Cluster Capital, Collective Ventures, and Atlas Funds. Five other venture capital funds also participated in this round.
Mavryk is developing an RWA tokenization platform, claiming it will bridge traditional finance and decentralized finance (DeFi) by offering non-custodial features, including protocol treasuries, grants, and liquidity mining. The company stated that its Mavryk network has already secured over $360 million in RWAs.
According to data from RWA.xyz, as of early March, the RWA market has reached a size of $17.9 billion.
The on-chain value of real-world assets has significantly increased. Source: RWA.xyz
The developer of the decentralized exchange Rho Protocol, Rho Labs, completed a $4 million seed funding round led by CoinFund. Other investors include Auros, Flow Traders, and Speedinvest. Rho operates a decentralized derivatives market where users can stake, lend, and trade perpetual futures in one place. The company claims to have processed over $7 billion in nominal trading volume.
CoinFund co-founder Alex Felix stated that Rho Labs is filling a gap in the cryptocurrency market that hinders the normalization of funding and forward rates between CeFi and DeFi.
The Teneo protocol is a DePIN project that completed a $3 million seed funding round led by venture funds RockawayX and Borderless, with Generative Ventures also participating. This funding will be used to advance Teneo's mission of democratizing access to social media data.
Teneo is built on the Layer 1 network Peaq and operates a Web3 browser extension that allows users to contribute to its data network in exchange for Teneo points, which can be redeemed for the upcoming Teneo token. The company claims to have over 3.5 million users across 191 countries.
DePIN growth peaked in December 2024. Source: DePINscan
Related: Cryptocurrency venture capital is "particularly optimistic" about DePIN and RWAs - HashKey Capital
Ethereum Layer 2 developer Fluent Labs raised $8 million in a funding round led by Polychain Capital, with six other venture funds and seven angel investors participating. Fluent describes itself as a "hybrid execution network" as it seeks to eliminate the silos that restrict on-chain virtual machines. It currently supports Ethereum Virtual Machine, Solana Virtual Machine, and WebAssembly applications.
Over 60 projects are currently being developed on the Fluent ecosystem, with use cases extending to DeFi, consumer applications, and gaming.
UAE-based blockchain startup The Game Company has secured $10 million in funding to develop its cloud gaming infrastructure, allowing users to play any game on personal computers and consoles. Investors in this round include Telcoin, BullPerks, and Singularity DAO.
The Game Company claims to have over 500,000 users on its waitlist. In a recent testing phase in the UAE, registrations exceeded 43,000, with 41,000 on-chain transactions and over 10,000 unique wallets created.
Once operational, users will have access to over 1,300 games on PlayStation, Microsoft Store, and Steam. Available games include Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Rocket League.
Web3 gaming studio ACID Labs completed an $8 million funding round led by a16z Speedrun to advance the development of its social gaming infrastructure. Other investors include NFX, Fusion VC, and several gaming executives. ACID is the company behind the Telegram game Boinkers, which has 11.5 million players monthly. The company intends to use this funding to continue expanding its Web3 social gaming presence on Telegram.
This investment comes amid a surge in Web3 gaming activity. According to DappRadar, the number of daily active Web3 gamers reached 7.3 million from January 2024 to January 2025. Overall, blockchain gaming activity surged by 386% during this period.
Related: AI agents will accelerate the adoption of Web3 gaming
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