Financing highlights | Electric leads investment in re-staking protocol Puffer; Pantera leads investment in DEX Thruster

According to BlockBeats statistics, the total number of financings last week was 27, an increase from the previous time, with a total amount of approximately US$127.175 million and an average financing amount of US$4.7102 million. Among them, DeFi occupies the majority, with relatively more financing in the infrastructure and metaverse sectors, more financing in the digital asset management/payment field and other fields, less financing in the Web3.0+AI field and the social/creator economy field, and no financing in the NFT/digital fashion field. The following figure shows the proportion of financing in each sector last week:

Metaverse/GameFi

In the Metaverse/GameFi field, there were 3 financings with a total amount of US$13.6 million, accounting for 10.69% of the total financing last week.

AVALON

On April 15, according to official news, AI metaverse game AVALON completed $10 million in financing, led by BITKRAFT Ventures and HASHED, and participated by Coinbase Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Delphi Digital, Spirit DAO, Sanctor Capital, DEXT Force Ventures, Follow the Seed, LVT Capital, Andromeda Capital, FocusLabs, LiquidX and Momentum6.

AVALON is an AI-driven universe where players can explore, conquer dungeons, play custom games, find rare loot and build new worlds for others to experience. AVALON combines the depth of tabletop role-playing games with the vast world of MMOs. Players can use tools to create their own stories, just like Desktop Dungeon Masters. These player-driven stories become part of the core game world, creating a shared and evolving universe.

Avalon CEO and founder Sean Pinnock said that the Avalon universe prioritizes providing an immersive gaming experience by combining cutting-edge technologies such as Unreal Engine 5 with an AI-assisted user-generated content system. The team's focus on no-code solutions enables players to easily create game logic. In addition, the project's upcoming NFT series will introduce AI-driven avatar NFTs. The announcement stated that the closed early access version of the game will be launched later this year.

Other financing in the Metaverse/GameFi field includes:

On April 16, based on the expansion architecture HyperGrid chain game development, the full-chain game LONT GAMES announced the completion of a $2.6 million seed round of financing. It also received technical support from OKX and Bitget Wallet. The new funds will be used for team expansion and to accelerate the development of LONT GAMES games. The team plans to start the pre-sale of Solana and Base network tokens at 20:00 Beijing time on April 16, and has signed pre-listing agreements with multiple head CEXs.

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On April 18, Web3 game platform Circle of Games completed $1 million in equity financing, with participation from Nazara Technologies FZ LLC and The Hashgraph Association. COG plans to use the new funds to rapidly advance its listing strategy, enhance platform capabilities, and expand its international influence in the United States, the European Union, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia in 2024.

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DeFi

There were a total of 6 financings in the DeFi field, with a total amount of more than US$55.5 million, accounting for 43.64% of the total financing last week.

Puffer

On April 16, according to CoinDesk, the Ethereum re-staking agreement Puffer completed a $18 million Series A financing round, led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Lemniscap, Franklin Templeton, Avon Ventures (affiliated with Fidelity Investments), Mechanism, Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca and GSR. The new round of funds will be used to launch Puffer's mainnet. As previously reported, on August 8 last year, Puffer Finance announced the completion of a $5.5 million seed round of financing, led by Lemniscap and Lightspeed Faction, with other participating investors including Brevan Howard Digital, Bankless Ventures, Animoca Ventures, Kucoin Ventures, etc.

Puffer Finance is developing a capital-efficient and fully permissionless liquidity staking protocol designed to lower the barrier to entry for individual stakers. The protocol resists slashing risk through Secure-Signer and can provide an innovative solution for inactive slashing, reducing Puffer's node operator capital requirements to only 2 ETH, allowing more people to participate in staking verification.

The Puffer Finance team includes a mathematician who gave up his PhD midway, an alumnus who worked at NASA (on actual space mathematics projects), and an experienced professional in the Metaverse field. The team claims to have collaborated with well-known Ethereum researchers and is guided by leaders in the industry, community, and research.

Related reading: " Puffer Finance: LSDfi protocol that lowers the entry threshold for independent validators "

Centrifuge

On April 17, RWA lending protocol Centrifuge announced the completion of US$15 million in Series A financing, led by ParaFi Capital and Greenfield, with participation from Circle Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Arrington Capital, Spartan Group and Wintermute Ventures.

Centrifuge has its own independent dedicated blockchain, Centrifuge Chain, which is developed based on the Substrate framework and can share the security of the Polkadot network. Centrifuge believes that a dedicated blockchain for RWA has many advantages, including lower transaction fees and excellent scalability. Compared with general smart contract blockchains such as Ethereum, it has greater flexibility, can provide dedicated block space to process RWA transactions, and can define the order of transactions to ensure that RWA-related transactions can proceed normally in extreme cases such as network congestion.

Centrifuge's main product Tinlake is also deployed on the Ethereum mainnet. Centrifuge said it will build a lending market called Centrifuge Pools on the Base network. Centrifuge Pools hopes to provide the on-chain utility of real-world assets such as U.S. Treasuries in the traditional financial ecosystem, and the program will be funded and built by the DAO.

Thruster

On April 18, according to The Block, Blast Ecosystem DEX project Thruster completed a $7.5 million seed round of financing with a valuation of $70 million. This round of financing was led by Pantera Capital, with participation from OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Manifold Ventures and Arche Fund (formerly Coin98 Ventures). Angel investors include Santiago Santos, Frax founder Sam Kazemian, Pendle founder TN Lee, Stacked founder Alex Lin, Renzo founder Kratik Lodha, and Axelar founder Georgios Vlachos. Thruster is building a first-of-its-kind DEX on top of Explosion’s top fleet and tokens. The Thruster team is experienced token builders with backgrounds in bootstrapping and building products for large token protocols. Others include: Development of Thruster to support dedicated fair launch mechanisms and token management tools, built by Explosion to be the best; and for general user use, Thruster supports favorable yield and LP opportunities, built in social and analytical features, and an easy trading experience. Thruster will home to better liquidity tokens and token/NFTFi teams building on Explosion. Thruster’s core AMM has been audited three times. The three audits included Code4rena, Sparkware (founder Ladboy is a top 10c4/Cantina hired auditor) and Peckshield. All three audits found no medium or higher issues with the AMM code. Thruster's contract also passed the review of some technical founder friends.

The rest of DeFi financing includes:

On April 16, the decentralized trading platform Crypto Valley Exchange (CVEX) completed a total of US$7 million in financing through pre-seed and seed rounds, led by Fabric Ventures and Kyber Capital Crypto Fund, and participated by AMDAX, Wave Digital, Funfair Ventures, Seier Capital Family Office, Five T Group and Saxon. The funds will be used to launch its DEX mainnet this summer. It is reported that CVEX aims to provide transparent and cheap futures and options trading for cryptocurrency holders.

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On April 17, the decentralized perpetual contract platform Aark announced the completion of its seed round of financing, with participation from HashKey Capital, Arrington Capital, Cypher Capital, Morningstar Ventures, IVC and Metavest. Aark will use the new investment to expand its team. Aark is a leveraged perpetual contract trading platform that is involved in the field of Liquidity Re-Pledge Tokens (LRT). Aark provides a Delta neutral yield for LRT, thereby providing liquidity to traders.

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On April 18, Runes DEX completed a $2 million seed round of financing. The funds from this round of financing will be used to expand Runes DEX's technical infrastructure and enhance its user interface.

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Social/Creator Economy

A total of 1 financing was raised in the social/creator economy field, with a total amount of US$1.3 million, accounting for 1.02% of the total financing last week.

Only1

On April 21, Solana Ecosystem NFT social platform Only1 announced the completion of a $1.3 million strategic financing round led by Newman Group, with participation from Folius Ventures, Modular Capital, PetRock Capital and angel investors. After this round of financing, the project has raised a total of $4.3 million. BlockBeats previously reported that in 2021, Solana Ecosystem NFT social platform Only1 completed more than $3 million in financing, with participation from A41 Ventures, Satori Research and Ellipti Ventures.

Earlier this month, Only1 released a flow update to help creators and institutions optimize sales. Updates include on-ramps payments partnership with Alchemy Payments, content search using OpenAI Clips for some concepts LLM, original CRM for Mold and more.

Angelina, head creator on Only1, earned a net $21,000 in revenue. The next step for Only1 is to help 1M creators and agencies make a live site and provide fans with a great experience. All of this will benefit holders of our platform token $LIKE through revenue-based buybacks.

Infrastructure

A total of 13 financings in the infrastructure sector, with a total amount of over $36.87 million, accounted for 29.00% of the total financing last week.

SendingLabs

On April 16, according to official news, Web3 communication platform SendingLabs recently announced the completion of a $7.5 million seed round extension financing, bringing its total seed round financing to $20 million. The investment was completed in October last year, with participation from Nomad Capital, Symbolic Capital, Web3.com Ventures, Galxe, SWC Global, Coinbase Ex-CTO Balaji Srinivasan and Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon, marking a revolutionary milestone in the field of decentralized communications.

SendingNetwork is building a decentralized communication network that aims to rebuild the TCP/IP model through blockchain, connect wallet addresses using decentralized routers, build peer-to-peer communications based on wallet addresses, and reshape Internet infrastructure to achieve better security, privacy, and user control. It is reported that SendingNetwork completed a $12.5 million seed round of financing in February last year.

Decentralized communication plays a vital role as a key component of the DePin ecosystem. SendingNetwork enhances the reliability and resilience of distributed communication infrastructure through the decentralized routers of the community host, empowers enhanced data transmission between decentralized applications (dapps), and lays the foundation for building a more secure, decentralized and scalable Web3 ecosystem.

Ord.io

On April 17, Ordinals manager Ord.io completed a $2 million pre-seed round of financing, led by Bitcoin Frontier Fund and Sora Ventures, with participation from Antalpha Ventures, Kommune Fund, Edessa Capital, Petrock Capital, PG Capital, Eden Block, Arca, Longhash Ventures, Daxos Capital, Portal Ventures, UTXO Management, etc.

As an Ordinals browser, ord.io is more interesting in that it has become the "liver white holy land" of Ordinals. The platform uses object recognition technology to analyze the inscriptions and evaluate their content, allowing users to like or dislike the inscriptions. Now the cold start method of many projects is to let players like their inscriptions on ord.io and leave comments and addresses.

Ord.io provides users with an application/browser for inscription services such as GIFs, texts, videos, games, etc. It was launched in March 2023 and quickly became a leading platform for exploring and interacting with the expanded Ordinals ecosystem on the Bitcoin blockchain. Ord.io has also introduced a system for classifying rare sats, called Satributes, which has been widely recognized in the Ordinals community. The new funds will be used to recruit more developers.

Nebra

On April 17, blockchain research and development organization Nebra announced that it had completed $4.5 million in financing in the Pre-Seed and Seed rounds, led by Nascent and Bankless Ventures, and participated by angel investors such as Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation, Kartik Talwar of ETHGlobal, Nick White of Celestia, and Sandy Peng and Haichen Shen of Scroll.

Nebra is a research and development organization that expands and writes proof verification on the blockchain, dedicated to making the future of zero knowledge a reality. Nebra researches and builds technology, infrastructure, and products to promote the mass adoption of zero-knowledge proofs. To achieve this vision, the first step is to expand Ethereum's proof settlement capabilities in a trustless and censorship-resistant way. To this end, Nebra is developing universal proof aggregation technology to aggregate proofs from different circuits, different proof systems, and different parties.

The second step will use this technology to bootstrap a decentralized proof network that can horizontally scale proof capacity with more and more nodes. The new funds will be used to advance the development of a shared settlement layer, advance and democratize zero-knowledge proof technology to reduce the cost of proof settlement on Ethereum and other blockchains, thereby creating a new Internet shared settlement layer.

Infrastructure The rest of the financing includes:

On April 16, RWA project RWA Inc. announced on the X platform that it had completed a $1.175 million private placement financing, with participation from Castrum Capital, Maven Capital, Unreal Capital, Decubate.com, SkyGardians Capital, Undefined Capital, DuckDAO, etc., as a supplement to the more than $9 million in financing promised in previous rounds.

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On April 16, the consumer-centric L2 protocol Saakuru Protocol announced that it had completed US$2.4 million in financing in an oversubscribed private round, led by Based VC and ARC Community, with participation from Kyber Network, PG Capital, Wizard Capital, Decubate Ventures, Oracles Investment Group, BCW Ventures, Steady Stack, W3GG, Calib3r, Rarible, Worlds Beyond, Uptrend Digital, Arclight Studio and IBC Group.

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On April 17, the GEODNET Foundation announced the completion of more than $2 million in strategic financing, with CoinFund, Pantera Capital, VanEck and Santiago R. Santos participating. The additional funds raised will support the foundation in achieving its short-term goals, including decentralization and developer ease of use.

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On April 17, Bitcoin Layer 2 solution Merlin Chain announced the completion of a new round of financing. The specific amount has not been disclosed. This round of financing was led by Spartan Group and Hailstone Labs, and more than a dozen institutions including Amber Group, Presto Labs, IOBC Ventures, Sandeep (Polygon CEO), UTXO Management (a fund under Bitcoin Magazine), and Primitive Ventures participated in the investment. It is reported that Merlin Chain has facilitated more than 9 million transactions and hosted more than 70 real-time projects, with a total locked value (TVL) of more than 4 billion US dollars.

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On April 16, Plena, an encryption application using account abstraction, completed a $5 million financing, with ConsenSys, Cointelegraph, Big Brain Holdings, DeWhale, GBV, WebWise, Galxe, Normie Ventures, FounderHeads and others participating. Plena has announced a partnership with DAO Maker, Chain GPT, Decubate, AI Tech and Coin98's Viction Chain to launch its airdrop event.

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On April 17, stablecoin startup Usual Labs completed $7 million in financing, led by IOSG and Kraken Ventures, with participation from GSR, Mantle, Starkware, Flowdesk, Avid3, Bing Ventures, Breed, Hypersphere, Kima Ventures, Psalion, Public Works and X Ventures. The new funds will be used to launch the stablecoin USD0 on the Ethereum mainnet in the second quarter of this year, and funds will be provided for the testnet stage and smart contract audits.

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On April 18, Zeko Labs, the parent company of the cross-chain zero-knowledge expansion protocol Zeko Protocol, completed a $3 million pre-seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by YBB Capital, UOB Venture Management and Signum Capital, and Autonomy Capital, Cogitent Ventures, GBV, SkyVision Capital (SVC) and Presto Labs participated in the investment. The new funds will be used to expand the team, accelerate product development, and motivate the ecological team. Zeko Protocol is a collaboration between o1Labs and Mina Foundation, and aims to transform the software development space by putting advanced zero-knowledge proof capabilities in the hands of developers, greatly expanding the design space for EVM and non-EVM applications.

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On April 18, Merlin Chain Ecosystem Launchpad Platform MerlinStarter completed its seed round of financing, with participation from Amber Group, Arkstream Capital, MoonHill Capital, Cogitent Ventures, Mapleblock, CGV and Sidedoor Ventures. The specific amount has not yet been disclosed.

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On April 19, Lambda Finance, a Bitcoin ecosystem stablecoin protocol, announced the completion of a $1.8 million angel round of financing, with participation from Curve CEO Michael Egorov, Hashcow, AladdinDAO, A TEAM DEFI, DLC.Link, Threshold Network, etc.

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On April 20, SatScreener, a rune analysis infrastructure protocol, completed a $500,000 Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Sora Ventures.

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Digital Asset Management/Payment

A total of 1 financing in the field of digital asset management/payment, with a total amount of over 10 million US dollars, accounting for 7.86% of the total financing last week.

Homium

On April 16, according to CoinDesk, real estate equity mortgage and securitization platform Homium completed a $10 million Series A financing, led by Sorenson Impact Group and Avalanche Ecosystem Fund Blizzard. Homium has issued its first home equity loans on Avalanche.

It is reported that Homium aims to help release trapped home equity and solve housing affordability issues in various situations. Homium also provides investable assets to institutional investors through digital securities backed by homeowner equity.

Web3+AI

A total of 2 financings were raised in the Web3+AI field, with a total amount of US$2.3 million, accounting for 1.81% of the total financing last week. Including:

On April 15, AI platform Inference Labs completed a $2.3 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Delphi Ventures, Digital Asset Capital Management and Mechanism Capital, with participation from Big Brain Holdings, BitScale Capital, Newman Capital and Seed Club Ventures. Inference Labs aims to combine artificial intelligence with Web3 technology to reduce counterparty risk. It is committed to making artificial intelligence more user-friendly, secure and user-friendly, with a focus on a decentralized and privacy-centric future.

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Solana on-chain AI model training platform NavyAI announced that it has completed its seed round of financing, with X Ventures, AlfaDAO, and Moni participating. The specific amount and valuation have not been disclosed. NavyAI is a blockchain layer dedicated to AI model training and self-learning, providing cost-effective solutions to reduce AI bias. Through decentralized GPU resources, users can access and train virtual AI models to improve artificial intelligence accessibility and fair innovation.

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Other financing

There was 1 other financing with a total amount of US$7.6 million, accounting for 5.98% of the total financing last week. Including:

On April 19, Superlogic, an enterprise-level loyalty platform driven by blockchain and AI, announced the completion of a US$7.6 million strategic round of financing, with participation from Amex Ventures, Sangha Capital, 10SQ Capital, Nima Capital, Actai Unicorn Fund, Chainlink Capital and others. So far, the total financing has reached US$15 million, and its early investors also include Warner Music Group, Mirabaud, Galaxy Interactive and Liquid 2 Ventures.

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