The funding environment is getting worse? It’s just the elimination game speeding up. I’ve talked to quite a few project teams this year, and they all say it’s hard to raise funds. But the truth is, it’s not “hard”—it’s that the era of PPT-based fundraising is over. Without something real to show, it’s tough to impress VCs these days. So, if you look at some of the projects that have raised significant amounts, you’ll notice a trend: the good projects are attracting a crowd of investors. And without exception, these projects tend to have strong technical and engineering capabilities, solid team backgrounds, and a clear flywheel effect. Take aPriori, which recently secured $20M in funding, as an example. Why are big names like Binance, HashKey, Hashed, and Pantera willing to invest so heavily? If you analyze it, you’ll find a lot of commonalities with other projects that have raised large amounts. From a VC’s perspective, the prerequisite for writing big checks is that your project must have a high ceiling. aPriori is working on liquidity-related infrastructure, which has always been a favorite among investors—not only does it generate real cash flow, but its potential is also massive. Beyond the sector itself, the level of innovation in a project determines how much support it gets from VCs. The core highlight of aPriori is that it brings high-frequency trading (HFT) architectures from traditional finance into on-chain liquidity infrastructure, designed to meet the future demand for large-scale institutional-grade trading. What’s even more impressive is how they address the industry’s pain points. By integrating AI into order flow, they can intelligently distinguish between bot trades and normal trades, maximizing liquidity efficiency. From this angle, it’s also clear why they’re building on Monad. Looking back at their team setup, it’s a combination of tech experts, engineers, and quantitative strategy engineers. With this kind of lineup, it’s no surprise they’ve developed such a standout product. In today’s market, uncertainty has increased, and certainty has become more expensive for VCs. But as long as a project has characteristics like those mentioned above for aPriori, the chances of securing significant funding are high. If a project is strong enough, even in a crypto winter, VCs will still line up to throw money at it.