Financing Highlights|a16z leads investment in Espresso; Arthur Hayes participates in DeFi project Juice
According to BlockBeats statistics, the total number of financings last week was 21, an increase from before, with a total amount of approximately US$214.77 million, and an average financing amount of US$10.2271 million. Among them, the infrastructure field occupies the main body, the digital asset management/payment field and the DeFi field are relatively large, the NFT/digital fashion field, the social/creator economy field and other fields have increased financing, the Metaverse/GameFi field is relatively small, and Web3.0 +AI field is not available yet. The figure below shows the proportion of financing in each sector last week:
Metaverse/GameFi
There are a total of 2 financings in the Metaverse/GameFi field, and the total amount has not been disclosed.
ZKasino
On March 19, Web3 entertainment platform ZKasino completed Series A financing at a valuation of US$350 million. The specific amount has not yet been disclosed. This round of financing was funded by MEXC, Big Brain Holdings, Trading_axe , Pentoshi and Sisyphus participated in the investment.
ZKasino is a decentralized encrypted gambling and casino platform developed by ZigZag Labs. The currently supported mainnets include BNB Chain, Polygon, and Fantom. The test network is zkSync 2.0, which will be deployed on Ethereum, Avalanche and Starknet, ensuring its multi-chain development strategy.
ZKasino users do not need to undergo any form of registration, KYC or anti-money laundering checks. Users can manage their own funds when betting on ZKasino without the need to obtain funds from a third party. Wallet deposits and request withdrawals. Secondly, ZKasino has cooperated with Chainlink to use Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Random Function), which is a provably fair and verifiable random number generator (RNG). This technology can ensure that any request is fair, random and verifiable. And the results will not be changed by any third party, whether it is developers or users, and behind-the-scenes manipulation of odds and other behaviors are strictly prohibited. ZKasino’s audit is performed by Certik.
Gameplan
On March 24, the sports metaverse platform Gameplan announced the completion of a seed round of financing, led by P2 Ventures (formerly Polygon Ventures), Emchain, OXFUN and Double Peak participated in the investment, and the financing amount has not yet been disclosed.
It is reported that Gameplan is a sports metaverse platform founded by UFC mixed martial arts superstar "Kitty Hawk" Nurmagomedov, aiming to provide MMA Fans provides a one-stop destination for events, games, shopping and interaction with sports icons, creating deeper connections between high-profile athletes and their supporters.
Gameplan is the second Launchpad project launched by OPNX. It has previously announced that it has received investment from 3AC Ventures, and OX token holders can obtain part of the Gameplan platform tokens GPLAN shares. But until now, Gameplan has only registered a Twitter and Discord, without an official website, white paper or other details. In addition, the two games "Desert Buggy Race" and "Fighting Game" that have been teased on Gameplan Twitter since the beginning of the year have yet to be seen.
NFT/digital fashion
A total of 1 financing in the field of NFT/digital fashion, totaling The amount exceeded US$1.67 million, accounting for 0.78% of the total financing last week.
BottoDAO
On March 24, BottoDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization focusing on digital art NFTs, announced the completion of a US$1.67 million financing, led by 1kx, with participation from Collab+Currency and Variant Fund. Investment, this financing was conducted through Treasury OTC transactions.
BottoDAO hopes to empower artists and democratize art creation and distribution. By utilizing Blockchain technology and NFT framework, BottoDAO has established a platform that enables digital art Not only created and shared, but also controlled by the community it serves. BottoDAO is committed to participating in the digital art space and is developing tools and platforms that promote artistic intent and expression across various media, building a decentralized, autonomous community of artists governed by the community.
Through educational programs and the development of new creative tools, BottoDAO aims to bridge the gap between traditional art and digital innovation, making digital art spaces more accessible to artists and enthusiasts . The new funding will be used to increase RD efforts to enhance Botto’s agency, autonomy, and decentralized governance, while expanding Botto’s reach and developing cross-media creation and learning capabilities to build artistic intent.
DeFi
A total of 5 financings in the DeFi field, with a total amount exceeding US$19.6 million. Accounting for 9.13% of total financing last week.
Juice
On March 19, Blast ecological DeFi project Juice completed US$7 million in financing, with participation from Arthur Hayes, DWF Ventures, Delphi Digital and others. In February, Omega announced the completion of US$6 million in financing. This round of financing was participated by Lightspeed Faction, Bankless Ventures, Wave Digital and others.
Juice is a decentralized protocol that supports leveraged cross-margin trading accounts. Users can directly use the Juice dashboard to access other protocols on Blast for liquidity mining and leveraged spot trading, earning various tokens and ecosystem rewards. It is reported that Juice is built based on Blast by the full chain and Bitcoin DeFi infrastructure OMEGA team. You can currently log in to the official project website to make deposits and borrow money to earn points.
Juice’s investment lineup is one of the best in the Blast ecosystem. The new funding will be used to help launch Omega’s Bitcoin Web3 infrastructure, the first decentralized solution that enables Bitcoin holders to leverage the value of their Layer 1 BTC to generate revenue without the need for bridges, wrappers or synthetic, allowing native Bitcoin to be used for DeFi.
Umoja
On March 19, asset hedging protocol Umoja announced that it had raised US$2 million in its second seed round of financing. This round of financing was funded by Coinbase, 500 Global, Quantstamp, and Blockchain Founders Fund, Orange DAO, Hyperithm, Psalion and Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund participated. Total seed round funding to date reaches $4 million.
Umoja Labs is a blockchain-based DeFi neobank building payment infrastructure for Africa to enhance people’s access to digital finance. Umoja was founded by Robby Greenfield, former head of social impact business at ConsenSys. It aims to help users insure investment losses like a hedge fund to ensure their financial health, and introduce asset risk management in the DeFi field to democratize wealth creation.
Umoja, which aims to simplify and automate the process of hedging various digital assets, has announced the launch of a beta version of its hedging-as-a-service product. Umoja makes it easy for users to implement and participate in hedging strategies tailored to their specific risk tolerance levels, providing protection against asset devaluation and potential liquidations. Umoja’s debut introduces the concept of CeFi dynamic periodic loss insurance for crypto-assets such as BTC, ETH and AVAX, giving investors the flexibility to hedge risks.
Remaining DeFi financing includes:
On March 22, decentralized encryption trading platform Rails completed US$6.2 million in financing. This round of financing was led by Slow Ventures, with participation from CMCC Global, Round13 Capital and Quantstamp. The new funding will be used to expand hiring for its engineering team and expand its licensing and regulatory strategy to make the trading platform "fully compliant." Rails is currently in the early stages of rolling out offshore services in a number of crypto-friendly countries, but not the United States.
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3 months On the 20th, Arbitrum’s ecological decentralized trading protocol Dolomite announced the completion of strategic financing of US$900,000, with participation from Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron and DCF GOD.
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On March 19, OrangeDX, a DeFi development company on the Bitcoin chain, announced the completion of US$1.5 million in financing from GBV Capital, Odiyana Ventures, Triple Gem Capital, Nxgen, X21, Spicy Capital , Alphabit Fund, FundLand Capital, etc. participated in the investment. OrangeDX is positioned as a multi-faceted Bitcoin protocol platform, aiming to use the Bitcoin blockchain to expand transactions, bridging, lending and other services to further expand the BRC-20 ecosystem. It is also committed to through the Initial Liquidity Offering (ILO) mechanism Cultivate new projects.
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Social/creator economy
A total of 1 financing in the social/creator economy field, The total amount exceeded US$1.5 million, accounting for 0.7% of the total financing last week.
EarlyFans
On March 20, EarlyFans, the Blast ecological SocialFi project developed by Atticc Labs, announced the completion of a US$1.5 million seed round of financing from Alliance DAO, SNZ Holding, GSR, Zee Prime Capital, GBV Capital, ProDigital Future Fund, Alchemy Ventures, CyberConnect, Mask Network founder Suji Yan, CyberConnect co-founder Ryan Li and Waterdrop Capital partner Jademont participated in the investment.
EarlyFans Built by atticc.xyz, EarlyFans is designed to help creators and early fans monetize, enabling creators to profit directly from their content, having previously been featured in Won the Blast Big Bang competition. It is reported that since its establishment 2 years ago, Atticc Labs has reached 778,000 users, 5,261 NFT holders and $2 million in gas fees burned, and is currently launching EARLY public pre-sale.
EARLY is the utility, governance and edited token of the Atticc SocialFi ecosystem. Obtain pre-sale qualifications by completing designated tasks. A new task may be released every day before the pre-sale. Points are earned for each task, and the more points you have, the more pre-sale allocations you get.
Infrastructure
A total of 7 financings in the field of infrastructure, with a total amount exceeding 99.5 million US dollars, accounting for 46.33% of total financing last week.
Espresso
On March 22, Web3 privacy system Espresso announced the completion of a $28 million Series B financing, led by a16z crypto. Polygon, Taiko, o1Labs, StarkWare, Offchain Labs, and core contributors and strategic investors from more than 30 notable ecosystem projects covering Rollups, L2 infrastructure, interoperability, and more also participated in the round. In March 2022, Espresso Systems completed $32 million in financing, led by Greylock Partners and Electric Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Blockchain Capital and Slow Ventures.
Espresso Systems is developing layer 1 blockchain infrastructure to provide fast, low-fee transactions by integrating the proof-of-stake consensus protocol with the zk rollup mechanism. The project’s Configurable Asset Privacy for Ethereum (CAPE) smart contract application is designed to provide creators with customizable privacy regarding sender and receiver addresses, as well as the amount and type of assets held or moved. It will support the creation and packaging of ERC-20 Token, and will also support NFT, etc. in the future.
Espresso is building a decentralized network as a coordination mechanism for Rollup sequencers. It is a marketplace where sequencers can both sell their block space and join a mechanism that unifies the ordering of transactions across Rollup. With Espresso, Rollup will be able to sell block construction rights to block proposers who bid on the network. These proposers can also bid for multiple Rollup blocks at the same time and become co-proposers of multiple chains. The new funding will be used to continue product development, expand investment in the rollup ecosystem, and expand the scale of the Espresso Systems team.
Related reading: " a16z: Why are we investing in Espresso, a shared sequencer network? 》
Succinct
On March 22, according to official news, Web3 infrastructure company Succinct completed US$55 million in financing, led by Paradigm. Participating investors include Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Geometry, ZK Validator, and angel investors including Sreeram Kannan from Eigenlayer, Sandeep Nailwal and Daniel Lubarov from Polygon, and Elad Gil.
Succinct’s Prover Network and SP1 enable universal ZK to be high-performance and easy to deploy without complex infrastructure. SP1 is Succinct’s next generation zkVM, enabling developers to use ZKP with Rust without sacrificing performance. Builders can iterate quickly, reuse existing crates/libraries, and write verifiable programs with auditable, maintainable code.
The Succinct Prover Network is a managed infrastructure layer for any application that outsources proof generation for open source proof systems. Deploying SP1 programs is just a click away using the Prover Network, which makes using ZKP in production simple and inexpensive. Succinct still has a lot to build to further accelerate ZK adoption.
AINN Layer2
On March 22, according to official news, the BTC Layer 2 project AINN Layer2 announced the completion of multi-million dollar financing. This round of financing was funded by Waterdrip Capita, Satoshi La, Foundinals Lab, Monday Capital, AlNN Labs, Bitrise Capital, Genblock Capital, AscendEx, Cipholio Ventures and others participated in the investment. The specific amount of financing has not been disclosed yet.
AINN Layer2 (ANVM) is an innovative Bitcoin Layer2 solution that realizes the decentralization of Bitcoin and AINN L2 through the POS consensus of Bitcoin light nodes and Taproot threshold contracts. Centralized interaction. AINN Layer2 focuses on AI-driven modular structure, improves credibility through PoS EVM chain, and realizes multi-chain interconnection from Brc20 to the EVM ecosystem. AINN Layer2 has a native asset issuance layer, namely Bitcoin mainnet and Bitcoin bridge.
In addition, AINN Layer2 features AI protocol controllers for different AI support subnets, an AI Layer 3 native token model, and prover and miner staking and unstaking. Stake AINN L2 to become a node in Layer2 Pos and safely and efficiently synchronize cross-chain operations of Bitcoin and Inscription through Schnorr signatures and Tendermint consensus.
Remaining infrastructure financing includes:
On March 21, the Application Chain Infrastructure Agreement Tanssi Network development company Moondance Labs announced the completion of US$6 million in strategic financing. Scytale Digital, KR1 and SNZ co-led the investment, with participation from Arrington Capital, Borderless Capital, Hypersphere, Blockchain Founders Fund and angel investor Gavin Wood. Funds from this round will be used to expand the Moondance Labs team and further develop Tanssi. In addition, Tanssi plans to launch an incentivized testnet campaign.
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On March 18, the Bitcoin ecological project Flash Protocol announced the completion of a private placement round of financing from Signum Capital, DWF Ventures, Cypher Capital, Cogient Investment Group, Rarestone Capital, Pentos Ventures, Portico Ventures , Innovion, PortalDefi and Keyur (Ex-CFO of Polygon) participated in the investment. Flash Protocol is a Bitcoin-native game, AI, Meme and NFT distribution platform based on the Taproot protocol. The FlashVM designed by it is the first BTC side chain to officially announce support for Taproot assets. It has the advantages of high speed, low gas fee, decentralization and other advantages. It is reported that the project will release its first IDO on the Bybit web3 inscription launchpad on March 22.
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On March 19, encryption compliance platform Keyring completed a US$6 million seed round of financing. Gumi Cryptos Capital and Greenfield Capital co-led the investment, with participation from Motier Ventures, Kima Ventures and others. The funding will be used to expand its on-chain compliance platform, which targets institutional investors and protocols.
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On March 23, the capital flow and token distribution infrastructure project Sablier completed a US$4.5 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was funded by A Capital, Fenbushi Capital, WAGMI Ventures, GD1 web3, Cyfrin , DCV, Founderheads, etc. participated in the investment. In addition, the project also stated that it has received funding from the a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, and the funds raised will be used to hire top talents, improve and expand current products, and build new payment platforms.
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Digital asset management/payment
There were a total of 4 financings in the field of digital asset management/payment, with a total amount exceeding US$91 million, accounting for 42.37% of the total financing last week.
Figure Markets
On March 18, Figure Markets, the digital asset arm of the blockchain financial company Figure, completed over US$60 million in Series A financing, led by Jump Crypto, Pantera Capital and Lightspeed Faction. , Distributed Global, Ribbit Capital and CMT Digital participated in the investment.
Figure Technologies announced that it will launch an independent company called Figure Markets, which is the "first step" in developing a unified platform for investors to trade including crypto A variety of blockchain-native assets including currencies, stocks and alternative investments.
MANTRA
On March 19, RWA project MANTRA announced the completion of US$11 million in financing, led by Shorooq Partners, Three Point Capital, Forte Securities, Caladan, Virtuzone, Hex Trust, Token Bay Capital , GameFi Ventures, Mapleblock, Fuse Capital, 280 Capital, etc. participated in the investment.
The new funding will be used to help MANTRA achieve three key goals: building compliant infrastructure, providing support to developers, and expanding the scope of the RWA tokenization project .
Remaining financing for digital asset management/payment includes:
On March 19, headquartered in Singapore-based crypto trading platform Tokenize Xchange announced the completion of US$11.5 million in financing, with participation from venture capital firm Trive and others. This brings its Series A funding round to $23 million. The digital asset trading platform plans to raise a total of $33 million in funding by the end of 2024. Tokenize plans to increase its Singapore headcount five-fold over the next 18 months, with the new funding going toward team development. The company plans to hire a large number of compliance and operations experts.
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On March 18, blockchain payment company Zone announced the completion of a US$8.5 million seed round of financing, led by Flourish Ventures and TLcom Capital, and Digital Money Group, VKAV (Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures) and Alter Global participated in the investment. The new funding will allow Zone to further expand its network coverage in Africa, connecting more banks and financial services companies. Zone is a decentralized payment network located in Africa. Its Layer1 blockchain network digitizes legal payments, allowing participating institutions to directly execute payment transactions without intermediaries, while fully automating settlement, reconciliation, etc.
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Other financing
There was 1 other financing, with a total amount of US$1.5 million, accounting for 0.7% of the total financing last week. Including:
On March 22, SAVAGE, a streaming media application based on Polygon, completed a US$1.5 million seed round of financing, led by Faculty Group, Polygon Ventures, Morningstar Ventures , and Ash Crypto participated in the investment. It is reported that SAVAGE is currently working with Samsung to provide users with high-quality photos and videos in Web3, and its smart TV application can realize IRL display connection and upload in any market.
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Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.
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