Financing selection for the 6th week of 2023, with notable increase in Launchpad project.

According to BlockBeats statistics, there were a total of 26 financing deals last week, covering areas such as GameFi, NFT, and social media, with a total amount exceeding $340 million and an average financing amount of $15.5 million. The digital asset management/payment sector accounted for the majority, while there were relatively more financing deals in the infrastructure and metaverse/GameFi sectors, and very few in the NFT and social media sectors. There were no financing deals in the DeFi sector. The following chart shows the financing distribution across various sectors last week:

Metaverse/GameFi

There were a total of 6 financings in the Metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount exceeding 85.3 million US dollars, accounting for 24.98% of the total financing amount last week.

Voldex

Reasons for Attention: User-generated content (UGC) games have rapidly gained popularity in recent years. Social gaming platforms such as Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft have hundreds of millions of players, which has led to a large number of creators making world-class UGC games to cultivate creativity and social engagement.

BlockBeats News, on January 25th, game studio Voldex announced the completion of its Series A financing led by a16z, with continued participation from Dune Ventures and Makers Fund, as well as new investors including POW Interactive and Mitch Garber's Lalotte Ventures. In addition, Andrew Chen, a general partner at a16z, has joined Voldex's board of directors. Voldex has not disclosed the amount of financing.

Voldex aims to improve the quality of user-generated content platforms such as Roblox and Minecraft by acquiring and enhancing existing games. Voldex stated that it will use the new funding to expand its team and continue supporting existing games, enabling them to receive impressive UGC games from excellent game creators. Voldex also plans to help unleash everyone's potential by developing new features and updates that combine with IP.

Currently, Voldex has over 1 million active users per day, 3.5 million members in Roblox groups, and over 400,000 members on Discord. Voldex supports some of the largest UGC games in Minecraft and Roblox, including Driving Empire (the top-ranked driving game in Roblox), ZO Samura (the top-ranked samurai game in Roblox), and OneBlockMC (the largest single-block game server in Minecraft).

Brave Group

Reason for attention: Brave Group and Animoca Brands Japan are working together to create high-end Japanese IP.

BlockBeats News, on January 27th, according to CryptoNewsZ, Japanese virtual IP company Brave Group announced the completion of a new round of financing of 300 million yen (about 2.3 million US dollars), with Animoca Brands Japan, a strategic subsidiary of Hong Kong Web3 company Animoca Brands, participating. So far, Brave Group's total financing amount has reached 3.04 billion yen. As previously reported by BlockBeats, Brave Group announced the completion of a $10 million financing round in June 2022, with participation from Dawn Capital and OSAKA GAS.

Brave Group was founded by Keito Noguchi in 2017. Currently, the company has mature businesses in several verticals in the metaverse, such as RIOT MUSIC and Vspo, which are focused on creating IP. According to Keito Noguchi, CEO of Brave Group Inc., the company is committed to creating high-end IP. Kyoya Okazawa, co-founder and CIO of Animoca Brands Japan, stated that their goal has always been to support the development of Japanese IP, which is why they have formed an alliance with Brave Group.

It is reported that Brave Group has also reached a capital and business alliance with Animoca Brands KK, aiming to expand its local IP business and accelerate global development in the metaverse field. Animoca Brands will support Brave Group's Web3 strategy.

Fastex

Reasons for Attention: Fastex has opened a huge network with over 7,000 users and 500+ partners, aiming to provide diverse solutions for enterprises and communities to create a complete Web 3.0-driven ecosystem.

BlockBeats News, on January 29th, the Web3 ecosystem Fastex supported by SoftConstruct has completed two rounds of financing, successfully raising $23 million in equivalent funds. The funds raised in this round of financing will help Fastex accelerate its technology development and enter the next stage of its roadmap.

It is reported that the multi-product ecosystem of Fastex's encryption service is supported by Fasttoken (FTN), including the NFT market ftNFT, the encryption payment transfer tool Fastex Pay, the game metaverse FastexVerse, and the spot trading platform Fastex Exchange. As of early 2023, more than 100 blockchain game providers have established partnerships with Fastex.

In addition, FTN will provide power for Fastex Chain, an upcoming EVM-compatible blockchain tailored for use cases centered around DeFi and NFT. The new blockchain will utilize high-performance Proof of Stake Authority (POSA) consensus for transaction validation.

NFT/Digital Fashion

In the NFT/digital fashion field, a total of 4 financing deals were completed with a total amount of 5.5 million US dollars, accounting for 1.89% of the total financing amount last week.

Gifto

Reason for attention: The Web3 virtual gift platform Gifto will provide a new opportunity to strengthen user groups and explore the ecosystem.

BlockBeats News, on January 24th, Web3 virtual gift platform Gifto completed a $2.5 million financing round, which was invested by Poolz Ventures. Gifto is a project supported by Binance Launchpad, aiming to establish a protocol that allows NFTs such as e-cards, PFPs, generated art, or red envelopes to be given as gifts to friends and family.

Poolz, which participated in the financing, is a decentralized cross-chain IDO platform built on the Web 3.0 infrastructure. In addition to supporting Gifto's execution of the 2023 new roadmap, it will also build its Gifto Store within its ecosystem to become a decentralized circulation place for NFT artworks and other gift monetization, allowing content creators and fans to give NFT artworks and gifts to their friends.

In addition, Gifto has also launched many new products, such as gifting in the metaverse, Twitter red envelopes, task rewards on Telegram bots, which are used to reward users for completing tasks aimed at the crypto community and KOLs, as well as a bulk distribution system for NFT lotteries. As of the time of writing, the native Gifto Token (GTO) has seen a 24-hour increase of over 40%.

EZswap

Reasons to follow: Another community-centered NFT decentralized exchange after Sudoswap.

BlockBeats News, on January 26th, NFT trading platform EZswap announced on social media that the platform completed a $1 million Pre-Seed round of financing with a $40 million Token valuation in October 2022. The platform's code has been audited by security company Beosin and will officially launch at the end of January. In addition, on January 30th, Polygon's NFT trading platform EZswap announced that it will collaborate with Polygon and Galxe to host the Flamingo event to reward early adopters who use EZswap.

It is reported that EZswap claims to be the first community-centered decentralized NFT exchange (DEX), built using an automated market maker (AMM) model, with the goal of simplifying NFT trading by increasing liquidity and sharing profits with the community.

Social/Creative Economy

In the social field, a total of 2 financing rounds were completed with a total amount of 8.7 million US dollars, accounting for 2.98% of the total financing amount last week.

StoryCo

Reasons for attention: StoryCo is developing an alternative way for creators and fans, by providing opportunities for collaboration and joint ownership of new story IP, to contribute to the story IP.

BlockBeats News, on January 26th, according to Business Insider, Web3 content platform StoryCo announced the completion of a $6 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by Collab + Currency and Patron, with participation from Floodgate Ventures, Blockchange Ventures, Sfermion, Flamingo DAO, and others.

 StoryCo hopes to create a fair competitive environment, giving a wider range of people the opportunity to voice their opinions, tell their stories, and create a more sustainable content model that brings true value back to fans and creators. Formerly known as Story DAO, the platform connects creatives with consumers outside of the traditional Hollywood ecosystem and allows audiences to collaborate on stories.

It is reported that the website deliberately avoids using Web3 terminology, and NFTs are referred to as StoryPass within the platform. Holders can access the project's treasury, which includes NFT sales, IP licensing revenue, and royalties. Story DAO aims to change the way IP is created and owned, shifting from a top-down, centralized, and closed sandbox model to a bottom-up, decentralized, and open-source framework.

Additionally, StoryCo's first story universe, The Disco Ball, is an interactive and immersive visual story that blends different forms of media to create a rich and engaging experience, and is planned to be released in early 2023. Users' StoryPass will be used to obtain various rewards in The Disco Ball, including the chance to obtain free and extremely rare Disconauts, some amazing experiences, and ownership of future franchise rights.

StoryCo's co-founder J.P. Alans is an experienced development manager who previously co-created and led GOLF MEDIA, a direct-to-consumer media platform and production company. The other co-founder, Justin Alanis, is an experienced entrepreneur with a background in technology and private equity. He currently serves as a core community member in several decentralized organizations that support, invest in, and promote the development of emerging web3 technology companies.

ValuesCo

Reason for attention: Will trying to expand into application scenarios beyond personal social networks become the ultimate destination for Social Tokens?

BlockBeats News, on January 26th, Web3 creator economy project ValuesCo announced the completion of a $2.7 million seed round of financing, with angel investors Flori Ventures, Metaweb Ventures, and Celo President Rene Reinsberg participating.

ValuesCo, formerly known as Socialstack, is a community-driven incentive system designed for brands, non-profit organizations, and individual creators. Its goal is to enable communities to issue social tokens without a Web3 background and to build and market community interaction experiences within the Ethereum, Polygon, Celo, and other public chain ecosystems. The team renamed to ValuesCo to reflect its new vision of "creating a fair and renewable future."

Through ValuesCo, brand owners can initiate tasks with marketing attributes, while customers can gain incentives by promoting their participation and influence goals, providing a way for brands to attract positive customers. Non-profit organizations and communities can attract more participants through the issuance of social tokens or incentive plans, and carry out gamified incentive activities to expand their influence, such as corporate sponsorship or donations. Individual creators can participate in incentive activities or drawings to receive rewards or generate influence in their favorite communities.

Infrastructure

There were a total of 7 financing deals in the infrastructure sector, with a total amount exceeding 821 billion US dollars, accounting for 28.16% of the total financing amount last week.

Calimero Network

Reason for attention: Can the NEAR ecosystem leverage privacy sharding to return to the mainstream competition of public chains?

BlockBeats News, on January 23rd, Calimero Network, a blockchain infrastructure in the NEAR ecosystem, completed a $8.5 million seed round of financing. Khosla Ventures, Lyrik Ventures, and NEAR Foundation jointly led the investment, with participation from GSR, FJ Labs, and Warburg Serres. Calimero Network is a privacy shard service platform based on NEAR, which helps projects and companies store information on their own privacy shards while maintaining the ability to interact with the public blockchain. Its founders, Sandi Fatic and Mario Halambek, are among the first infrastructure engineers from NEAR.

Calimero's privacy shards can be understood as customizable sidechains built on top of the NEAR protocol. It is an independent network that does not share validators, execution, and state storage. Calimero's privacy shards mainly support three operation modes: individual ownership, team ownership, and community ownership. The shards can support up to 200,000 transactions per second, but the standard shard deployment throughput is 5,000 transactions per second.

Users can use Calimero privacy shards to execute cross-shard and public chain transactions while ensuring privacy, achieving interoperability with open source protocols and dApps such as DeFi and NFT. The team has also developed a shard management console (Calimero Console) to allow users to deploy their own privacy shards and develop, test, and deploy contracts in seconds.

QuickNode

Reason for attention: As a competitor in the same field as Alchemy, will QuickNode have greater room for imagination?

BlockBeats News, on January 24th, according to Cointelegraph, blockchain development platform QuickNode announced that it has completed a Series B financing of $60 million with a valuation of $800 million. 10T Holdings, LLC led the investment, with participation from Tiger Global, 776, Protocol Labs, and QED, among others.

QuickNode was founded in 2017 as a company that provides "node-as-a-service" for Ethereum to its clients, helping them eliminate the complex tasks of managing Ethereum full nodes and synchronizing the latest blocks. Currently, it has expanded its supported blockchain networks to 16 mainstream blockchain protocols, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Arbitrum.

QuickNode is committed to becoming the AWS or Azure of the Web3 field, helping customers build blockchain-based Web3 applications faster. The funds raised in this financing will be used to accelerate the company's global expansion and further enhance its construction capabilities, laying the foundation for a decentralized, globally interconnected future and simplifying the process for Web2 developers to enter Web3.

Tribes

Reason for attention: Is it possible for the Web3 version of "chatting with Alipay" to successfully integrate finance and socialization?

BlockBeats News, on January 23rd, according to CoinDesk, Web3 social wallet Tribes announced the completion of a $3.3 million pre-seed round of financing, led by Kindred Ventures, South Park Commons, and Script Capital.

Tribes is committed to integrating the management of digital assets for Web3 users with their daily social activities, helping the next generation of cryptocurrency consumers, creators, communities, and DAOs collaborate and build relationships. The Tribes social wallet combines secure management tools such as (Gnosis) Safe multi-signature wallets, Coinbase wallets, and Web3 social basic applications such as ENS and Lens. It can help users achieve various needs such as co-investing in digital assets, creating collector communities, and operating DAO organizations.

Tribes founder and CEO Hish Bouabdallah revealed that this round of financing was completed in October last year. The Tribes wallet allows users to communicate directly through the wallet, rather than using external messaging services such as Discord or Twitter. Currently, its app is available on the Apple and Google app stores.

Ethos

Reason for attention: Wallet infrastructure for the emerging Move ecosystem.

BlockBeats News, on January 26th, Sui ecological wallet Ethos completed a $4.2 million seed round of financing, led by Gumi Cryptos Capital and Boldstart Ventures, with participation from Tribe Capital, Matrix Port, and Mysten Labs, the development team behind the Sui network.

The Ethos team previously launched the EthosConnect API to support developers in developing on the Sui chain. This is an NPM software package that can easily connect wallets to dApps on Sui, while also helping users achieve one-click sign-in for email or social applications.

Digital Asset Management/Payment

In the field of digital asset management/payment, a total of 5 financing deals were completed with a total amount of over 139 million US dollars, accounting for 47.82% of the total financing amount last week.

Asset Reality

BlockBeats News, on January 25th, Asset Reality, a digital asset recovery solution based in London, announced the completion of a $4.91 million seed round of financing. The round was led by Framework Ventures, with participation from TechStars, SGH Capital, and Chris Adelsbach, founder of Outrun Ventures. Asset Reality will use this round of financing to triple the size of its engineering team and expand its operations and growth management team.

Asset Reality was founded in April 2020 by a group of asset recovery professionals and cryptocurrency investigators. It has since built an international team with experience in solving some of the earliest cryptocurrency asset recovery cases, including managing and liquidating cryptocurrencies in the infamous Silk Road case. Asset Reality is specifically designed to improve asset recovery efforts in both the public and private sectors. In addition to supporting victims of cryptocurrency crimes, it helps companies and law enforcement agencies safely recover and manage proceeds from criminal seizures by increasing transparency and auditability throughout the process.

Blockstream

BlockBeats News, on January 25th, Bitcoin and blockchain infrastructure company Blockstream announced the completion of $125 million in convertible notes and secured loans to expand its institutional Bitcoin mining custody services. The statement said that the company completed a $210 million Series B financing in August with a valuation of $3.2 billion and will use all the funds raised to expand its mining facilities to meet strong demand for large-scale custody services.

Blockstream's new round of financing did not mention the company's valuation. However, Bloomberg reported on December 7th that the company is seeking to raise funds at a valuation 70% lower than the previous round of financing (less than $1 billion). In August 2021, the company completed a $210 million Series B financing with a valuation of $3.2 billion.

Tane

BlockBeats News, on January 28th, according to globenewswire, Tane, a Web3 incubator located in Dubai, New York, and Tokyo, announced the completion of an $8 million new round of financing, with DEEPCORE Inc., XTech Ventures Co. Ltd, DeNA Co. Ltd, B Dash Ventures Inc., and a group of individual investors participating.

Tane is currently led by managing partner Ikuma Mutobe, mainly investing in seed and early-stage Web3 startups and projects, and providing guidance in entrepreneurship, finance, engineering, and business development. Its focus on the crypto field includes infrastructure (Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains), privacy and cross-chain solutions, security, consumer applications and token economics, DAO, NFT, and DeFi.

Other Financing

Other financing totaled 3 transactions with a total amount of 20.5 million US dollars, accounting for 7.03% of last week's total financing. Including:

On January 26th, Spatial LABS, a Web3 wearable technology startup based on the Polygon blockchain, announced the completion of a $10 million seed round of financing, led by Blockchain Capital and with participation from Marcy Venture Partners, a venture capital firm co-founded by Jay-Z. BlockBeats previously reported that Spatial LABS completed a $4 million pre-seed round of financing in November last year, with participation from Marcy Venture.

It is reported that Spatial Labs plans to use this new funding to continue expanding its blockchain-supported technology and expand into other industries such as media and entertainment. At the same time, they will launch a device called Node to simplify the development and deployment of augmented reality experiences, reducing the barriers to entry for web3 and augmented reality.

On January 26th, Senken, the world's largest blockchain-based carbon credit financing and trading platform, announced the completion of a $7.5 million new round of financing, led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Offline Ventures, Kraken Ventures, and Climate Capital. Senken uses blockchain technology to provide additional security and transparency for its customers at the data level. The company also revealed plans to build innovative financial tools called "Carbon Forwards" and launch a token of the same name to help more environmental projects achieve tokenization of carbon credits.

On January 27th, PlanetWatch, a Web3 air quality data company, announced that it had completed a new round of financing of $3 million through the Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) and bank loans. Borderless Capital led the investment, with participation from Algorand Inc. and the Algorand Foundation. PlanetWatch primarily analyzes and sells air quality data using smart contracts and Web3 business models. With the new funding, the company plans to strengthen its technological infrastructure, expand its monitoring network, promote business development initiatives, and build the world's largest decentralized air quality monitoring network based on the Algorand blockchain.

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