Highlights of This Issue
CryptoRank statistics indicate that in 2026, the average single financing amount in the crypto industry is primarily concentrated in the prediction market, with an average financing amount per round reaching 118 million dollars. The following categories are exchanges (76.2 million dollars), blockchain (47.8 million dollars), and compliance (29.4 million dollars).
This week's financing is a snapshot of the year's capital flow: large capital continues to gather in trading, compliance, and digital asset infrastructure, with traditional financial institutions becoming increasingly important participants. Among them, the Japanese financial group SBI Holdings participated in two large financings: Gauntlet and EDX Markets.
Compared to crypto financing, the AI sector saw multiple large transactions exceeding 100 million dollars this week. Prime Intellect completed 130 million dollars in Series A financing, Norm secured 120 million dollars in new financing, and Gradium's cumulative financing scale surpassed 100 million dollars. Notably, these projects primarily establish business models around enterprise-grade AI infrastructure, legal services, and real-time voice applications.
Last week, the activity in the crypto primary market remained overall sluggish, with centralized finance and on-chain finance continuously attracting more capital. According to incomplete statistics from PANews, last week (July 6-12), there were 9 fundraising events globally in the blockchain sector, with a total capital scale exceeding 261 million dollars, overview as follows:
- DeFi sector announced 1 fundraising event, with the DeFi risk control and asset allocation platform Gauntlet securing 125 million dollars exclusively from SBI Holdings;
- Infrastructure & Tools reported 4 fundraising events, including a 17 million dollars seed round raised by post-quantum cryptography management platform QIZ Security, led by Merlin Ventures;
- Centralized Finance revealed 3 fundraising events, with crypto exchange EDX Markets completing 76 million dollars in Series C financing, led by SBI Holdings;
- Web3+AI sector announced 1 fundraising event, with PayGo obtaining strategic investments from Signum Capital, Ledger Capital, and UOB, accelerating the construction of micro-payment infrastructure for the machine economy.
Crypto Financing
DeFi
DeFi risk management giant Gauntlet secures 125 million dollars from SBI Holdings
DeFi risk control and asset allocation platform Gauntlet received 125 million dollars in exclusive financing from the Japanese financial group SBI Holdings, far surpassing its nearly 24 million dollars in 2022 at a valuation of about 1 billion dollars in Series B. SBI, a financial group listed in Tokyo with a market capitalization exceeding 10 billion dollars, has invested in several crypto companies including Ripple, Circle, and Morpho. Gauntlet was founded by former Wall Street quantitative analyst Tarun Chitra and initially provided stress testing and risk analysis for DeFi protocols. In recent years, it has shifted its business to "vault curation," assessing the risk of various DeFi yield vault strategies, with clients including Apollo, Coinbase, and stablecoin issuer Circle.
Infrastructure & Tools
QIZ Security announced the completion of a 17 million dollars seed round financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The company positions itself as a management platform for crypto assets and post-quantum cryptography (PQC), providing continuous discovery, risk modeling, and governance of crypto assets to help large financial, telecommunications, healthcare, and critical infrastructure clients achieve "crypto agility," addressing the risk of "Q-Day," when quantum computing may emerge that could crack existing encryption systems as early as 2029, and collaborating with Cisco, AWS, Google, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, EY, and IBM to promote enterprise quantum security migration planning.
TrueDAO announced the completion of 10 million dollars in strategic financing, led by Brevan Howard Digital, with contributions from Zee Prime Capital and Jump Capital. The funds will be used for core AI protocol development, AI risk control and stress testing systems, security audits and real-time monitoring, bug bounty programs, and to advance global compliance assessments and ecosystem cooperation. TrueDAO is positioned as a modular decentralized financial infrastructure across chains, providing liquidity and reserve management, risk warnings, profit distribution, and governance support for various projects. The project will subsequently promote the testnet, developer tools, and ecosystem integration, and will disclose protocol operation and reserve data in phases, with specific launch dates and token incentives depending on official announcements and regulatory requirements.
KOR Protocol, focused on the entertainment sector, has completed 7.5 million dollars in Series A financing, with participation from 1kx and Blockchain Capital, achieving a valuation of 100 million dollars. The funds will be used for platform development, ecosystem growth, and partner integration, with plans to launch a token. KOR Protocol is an on-chain creative asset clearing platform based on Coinbase Layer 2, providing verification, routing, and settlement infrastructure for creative works such as music and film. By registering assets on-chain, KOR helps creators match with suitable brands, platforms, and distributors and enables programmable split payments through stablecoins such as USDC.
Blockchain analytics company Elliptic announces investment from Circle Ventures
Blockchain analytics company Elliptic announced on the X platform that Circle Ventures has invested in Elliptic. The specific amount has not been disclosed. This investment follows Elliptic's 120 million dollars Series D financing in May, led by One Peak with participation from Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank, and the British Business Bank. Circle has also joined Elliptic's Agentic Design Partner Program, which brings together infrastructure providers, compliance leaders, and technology teams to collaboratively develop cutting-edge agent compliance solutions.
Centralized Finance
Crypto exchange EDX Markets completes 76 million dollars Series C financing, led by SBI Holdings
Wall Street-backed crypto exchange EDX Markets announced the completion of 76 million dollars in Series C financing, led by the Japanese financial group SBI Holdings. The funding will be used to expand its institutional digital asset trading, clearing, and settlement capabilities, accelerate product development, and promote global business expansion. SBI previously launched a yen stablecoin JPYSC supported by a trust bank and plans to handle dollar stablecoins such as RLUSD and USDC in Japan. This investment is viewed as part of its strategy to strengthen its compliant digital asset infrastructure. Earlier this year, EDX launched the "EDX FlowConnect" crypto-as-a-service product and submitted an application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish the regulated custody and clearing firm EDX Trust to provide custody, clearing, settlement, and risk management services for institutional clients.
Tether announced a 20 million dollars investment in the strategic growth financing round of Latin America’s on-chain financial services platform Mercado Bitcoin, supporting its expansion in tokenization, stablecoin payments, credit, on-chain capital markets, and compliant digital financial services. Founded in 2013, Mercado Bitcoin currently has 4.5 million users, with over 2 billion Brazilian real in tokenized assets issued and holds more than 10 financial licenses in Brazil and Europe. Tether stated that this investment will further promote the development of on-chain financial infrastructure in Brazil and Latin America and accelerate the mainstream application of stablecoins and asset tokenization.
Crypto startup M1X Global completes 5.5 million dollars seed round financing, led by Paradigm
Crypto startup M1X Global has completed 5.5 million dollars in seed round financing, led by Paradigm, with Breed VC participating, reaching a total financing amount of 8.5 million dollars. Previously, the company completed a 3 million dollars angel round financing in March, with investors including former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and Cumberland Labs CEO Tama Churchouse.
Building sovereign financial infrastructure, M1X Global partnered with the Republic of the Marshall Islands to issue USDM1. USDM1 is a tokenized dollar-denominated sovereign debt instrument, guaranteed one-to-one by U.S. treasury bonds and natively issued by a sovereign nation on a public blockchain. USDM1 was initially issued on the Stellar blockchain and is now also available for trading on the Canton and Solana blockchains.
Web3+AI
PayGo secures strategic investments from Signum Capital, Ledger Capital, and UOB to accelerate micro-payment infrastructure development for the machine economy
HTTP native payment infrastructure PayGo, based on the x402 open standard, has officially announced the completion of strategic financing, with investors including UOB, Signum Capital, and Ledger Capital. Reportedly, PayGo is natively built on the ENI blockchain, with the core business providing request-level instant stablecoin (USDT/USDC) payment and settlement services for APIs, AI agents, and the machine economy without accounts, subscriptions, or API keys, with PAYG as the governance token for the project.
Acquisitions
Cross-border payment infrastructure company Nium acquires crypto wallet and card issuer Cypher
Cross-border payment infrastructure company Nium announced the acquisition of crypto-native non-custodial wallet and card issuer Cypher. This transaction will expand Nium's core capabilities in compliance funds flow and settlement infrastructure between fiat and digital assets. Cypher was founded by Kuberan Marimuthu (Kube), supported by Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures, focusing on cross-product development between on-chain and bank systems for the past four years. Kube has joined Nium as Vice President of Digital Assets, and the Cypher engineering team has also joined.
Korea's Mirae Asset Group approved to acquire 92.06% stake in Korbit for 133.4 billion KRW
Korean regulators have announced the approval of Mirae Asset Consulting, a subsidiary of Mirae Asset Group, to acquire 92.06% of South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Korbit, with a transaction amount of approximately 133.4 billion KRW (about 98 million dollars). This transaction is reported to be the first acquisition of a virtual asset exchange by a traditional financial group in Korea. Due to Korbit's low market share, regulators believe that this merger will not have an exclusionary effect on competition in securities or asset management sectors, nor will it significantly impact the competitive landscape for future digital asset ETFs.
Selected AI & Robotics Financing
AI
Decentralized AI protocol Prime Intellect announced the completion of 130 million dollars Series A financing, led by Radical Ventures, with participation from NVIDIA Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and existing investors, bringing total funding above 150 million dollars to build an open superintelligence stack. Founded in 2024, Prime Intellect aims to construct an "open superintelligence stack" that provides enterprises with full-stack AI agent development infrastructure covering computation, large-scale reinforcement learning, sandboxing, evaluation, and deployment, with clients including Ramp, Zapier, and over 6,000 enterprises and startups, generating annual revenues exceeding 100 million dollars. The company plans to expand its computing clusters and reinforcement learning scales, and is betting on frontier areas including long-cycle agents, recursive language models, and continuous learning.
AI legal service company Norm completes 120 million dollars financing, led by Khosla Ventures
AI legal startup Norm secured 120 million dollars in its latest funding round, post-money valuation around 1.2 billion dollars, led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue Management, among others, accumulating over 260 million dollars in total funding. Founded in 2023, Norm differs from the traditional model of selling software to law firms by establishing Norm Law, which directly provides legal services collaboratively delivered by lawyers and AI engineers, charging based on results instead of hourly rates. The company is also developing "AI regulatory AI" compliance agents for regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, aiming to use the new funds to expand its team of engineers and lawyers and enhance related systems.
Paris-based startup Gradium, which provides voice AI models, announced its cumulative financing scale has exceeded 100 million dollars and introduced NVIDIA as a new shareholder in its latest seed round expansion. Gradium stated that it has recently launched real-time speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), Gradium Translate, and Phonon products within months and plans to set up a new office in San Francisco to be close to the local startup ecosystem and accelerate the recruitment of related talents.
AI writing startup Marker secures 13 million dollars in seed round financing
London-based AI writing startup Marker, co-founded by the former creative head of DeepMind, has emerged from stealth development, announcing the completion of a 13 million dollars seed round financing. This round was led by Index Ventures, with Local Globe participating. Angel investors include co-founder of Writely Steve Newman, co-founder of Slack Cal Henderson, and Thomas Wolf from Hugging Face. Marker’s early testing users have utilized the platform to write various content, including blog posts, Substack newsletters, business documents, memos, and novels. "AI slop" is increasingly concerning, and Marker’s CEO Steinback stated: "We are at a critical moment where people can choose the future of writing; I believe people will choose solutions that value writing techniques rather than those that produce shoddy work that severely erodes the essence of writing."
Robotics
Physical AI startup Mowito has completed 3 million dollars in Pre-Seed financing, led by Version One Ventures, with All In Capital, Unisol, and iSeed participating, while AI researchers Soumith Chintala and founders from Foundry Robotics, Coformer.ai, and Better Capital participating as angel investors. Mowito was founded in 2024 by Puru Rastogi, Adityanag Nagesh, and Safar V, aiming to build AI foundation models for industrial robotic arms, addressing the bottlenecks of software programming in manufacturing automation by enabling robots to learn tasks through observing human demonstrations instead of explicit programming, allowing engineers to avoid rewriting control code when product lines change.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
