Financing selection for the 7th week of 2023, with the Arbitrum ecosystem leading the way in gaming.

According to BlockBeats statistics, there were a total of 19 financing deals last week, covering GameFi, NFT, social and other fields, with a total amount of over $129 million and an average financing amount of $15.5 million. Among them, the infrastructure sector accounted for the majority, while the financing amount in the NFT sector increased significantly, and digital asset management/payment decreased significantly. The following chart shows the financing distribution of each sector last week:

Metaverse/GameFi

There were a total of 3 financings in the Metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount exceeding 6.3 million US dollars, accounting for 4.86% of the total financing amount last week.

Trident

Reasons for attention: After Trident announced its public financing through Token, according to Dextools data, the project has risen to become the hottest project in the Arbitrum ecosystem, with its token (PSI) rising more than 120% in the past 24 hours.

BlockBeats News, on February 5th, Trident, a game on the Arbitrum ecosystem, announced the completion of a $3 million financing through a token public offering. According to official explanations, due to team errors, the over-raised amount was about 4.91%, and the excess will be supplemented by tokens held by the team. The total amount of tokens will not change.

Trident is a free web3 MMO game that generates an infinite universe. It proposes a new sustainable GameFi model called "Risk To Earn". Risk To Earn rewards not only participating players, but also rewards players based on their game performance. It provides opportunities for all players who want to win matches based on skillful operations, rather than how many tokens they hold or which characters they can afford.

And, the premise of Risk to Earn is that it is a zero-sum game, similar to what is commonly referred to as "trading" in financial markets. When one person loses a game, another person wins a game, and they will receive the "adventure" bounty from the losing person, which is why it is called "risk earning". Therefore, this pattern is sustainable, and both players must bet, and the bounty will continue to flow back and forth between the players.

My NFT Wars

Reasons to follow: The parent company iLogos Game Studios has participated in the production of "Angry Birds 2" and maintains cooperative relationships with gaming giants such as Sony, EA, Disney, and Ubisoft.

BlockBeats News, on February 4th, Web3 metaverse game "My NFT Wars" announced the completion of a $2 million private placement round, led by Social Discovery Group, with participation from Nika Tech Family, Blackshield Capital, Wannabiz, as well as angel investors such as Potap, Megogo.net co-founder Fedor Drozdovski, and others.

My NFT Wars is a Web3 MMORPG that adopts a token-based Play-Create-Own model, using NFTs and tokens to incentivize players. Similar to mainstream mobile games, players can choose to play actively or passively. In automatic mode, players do not need to do anything and battles can be completed automatically. After obtaining tokens through battles and other means, players can choose to use them to strengthen their characters or purchase equipment, or they can pledge them or engage in liquidity mining.

My NFT Wars is expected to begin closed Alpha testing in the second quarter of 2023, open Beta testing in the first quarter of 2024, and officially launch in the third quarter of 2024.

NFT/Digital Fashion

In the NFT/digital fashion field, a total of 3 financing deals were completed with a total amount of 26.05 million US dollars, accounting for 20.1% of the total financing amount last week.

Fungify

Reason for attention: The first decentralized NFT index token.

BlockBeats News, on February 2nd, non-custodial NFT index and algorithmic lending protocol Fungify completed a $6 million financing round, led by CitizenX, with participation from Distributed Global, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Taureon Capital, Anagram, Flow Ventures, former Polychain Capital President Joe Eagan, and Merit Circle founder Mark Borsten.

Fungify has launched the first decentralized NFT index token, supported by NFTs in Fungify MarketVault and redeemable, using Chainlink NFT floor price feeds to track prices. Regardless of investment level, anyone can access a wide range of NFTs in the community without worrying about the liquidity of individual NFT collections.

Fungify plans to launch in the first or second quarter of 2023 after completing security audits.

Magic Eden

Reason for attention: Magic Eden is the largest NFT marketplace on Solana, with over 90% market share in the Solana ecosystem.

BlockBeats News, on February 2nd, according to SEC documents, Tan Lu, CEO of NFT market Magic Eden, filed a new round of financing with the SEC on January 24th. The total amount raised in this round of financing is $16,859,571.

Magic Eden is the largest NFT marketplace on Solana, which once held over 90% of the market share in the Solana ecosystem. Later, it also integrated with the Ethereum and Polygon blockchain ecosystems, and is now a leading multi-chain NFT marketplace.

The core team of Magic Eden consists of four co-founders. CTO Sidney has previously served as an Engineering Manager at Uber and Facebook, focusing on artificial intelligence, machine learning, search recommendations, and other fields. CEO Jack has worked at FTX for a period of time. COO Zhuoxun was the second employee at dYdX and has served as a senior product manager at Coinbase. Chief Engineer Zhuojie was a colleague of Sidney's during their time at Uber.

Regarding financing, in March 2022, Magic Eden completed a Series A financing of $27 million, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Paradigm, Greylock, and others. In June of the same year, they completed a Series B financing of $130 million, led by Electric Capital and Greylock, with continued participation from Sequoia Capital and Paradigm. The post-investment valuation increased by approximately 10 times since the Series A financing, reaching $1.6 billion.

DeFi

In the DeFi field, a total of 3 financings were completed with a total amount of 8.8 million US dollars, accounting for 6.79% of the total financing amount last week.

Archimedes

Reason for attention: Will fully collateralized leveraged lending explode along with the DeFi derivatives track?

BlockBeats News, on February 2nd, DeFi lending platform Archimedes announced the completion of a $4.9 million seed round of financing, led by Hack VC, with participation from Unassociated Venture, Psalion, Truffle Ventures, Cogitent Ventures, Haven VC, and Palsar.

Archimedes is an experimental lending platform, and its product will be launched this month. Based on AMMs such as Curve, Archimedes provides original revenue opportunities that can multiply users' earnings. Users who use leverage on the platform will receive an NFT representing a stablecoin position that generates revenue, with a leverage ratio of up to 10 times the amount of collateral.

Liquidity providers provide assets to the 3CRV/lvUSD pool on Curve and receive CRV and ARCH rewards. Borrowers can borrow from these pools and prepay all loan interest to obtain up to 10x stablecoin leverage. The Archimedes protocol packages leveraged positions into NFTs, allowing users to trade positions without closing them.

ARCH is the native token of the Archimedes protocol, which adopts the veToken model in addition to governance functions. OUSD is the stablecoin of the protocol, endorsed by lvUSD in the Curve pool to help borrowers obtain leverage. Archimedes' lending and borrowing activities are always fully collateralized and everything is done within the protocol, so collateral will never leave the Archimedes treasury.

Squid

Reason for attention: A novel cross-chain interaction solution, excluding cross-chain bridges.

BlockBeats News, on February 1st, DeFi liquidity protocol Squid announced the completion of a $3.5 million financing round, led by North Island Ventures, with participation from Distributed Global, Fabric Ventures, Galileo, Chapter One, and Node Capital.

It is reported that Squid is a DeFi liquidity protocol based on Axelar, which uses existing DEXs to trade and send any native tokens between chains. Transactions can be combined with Axelar's universal messaging, so Squid can facilitate one-click trading of any asset between any application and any user. Buy NFTs from any market, use multi-chain DeFi, play games on another chain, all without signing multiple transactions or downloading multiple wallets.

The messages sent by Squid for cross-chain transactions mainly include three parts: the axlUSDC bridging request, the instructions to be executed on the target chain for the exchange, and the further logic to be executed after the exchange. Developers can package Squid with their own smart contracts and execute any logic using the assets received on the other end.

Squid routes all its trades through the axlUSDC/USDC stablecoin pool and the USDC/native token pool on the standard AMM in order to minimize the number of liquidity pools that need to be capitalized and achieve efficient liquidity for each token. Currently, Squid supports EVM chains such as Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Moonbeam, Binance Chain, Fantom, and the Cosmos ecosystem.

Social/Creative Economy

In the social field, a total of 2 financing rounds were completed with a total amount of 4 million US dollars, accounting for 3.09% of the total financing amount last week.

Port3 Network

Reasons for attention: A full-site infrastructure in the social field with an impressive investment lineup.

BlockBeats News, on February 3rd, Web3 social data portal website Port3 Network completed a $3 million seed round of financing, led by KuCoin Ventures, with participation from Jump Crypto, SNZ, Block Infinity, Dragon Roark, ViaBTC, Cryptonite, Lapin Digital, Cogitent, and Momentum6.

Established in 2022, Port3 Network is a portal website for acquiring and aggregating Web3 social data. Port3's SoQuest application allows projects to incentivize users to share their data through tasks and rewards to drive traffic. The Port3 team currently has 15 members and plans to use the funds to increase Port3's market share and customer base.

Port3 mainly includes SoGraph and SoQuest. SoGraph uses project incentives to encourage users to share their identity and data, in order to achieve social data acquisition and aggregation. Its internal algorithm can refine and standardize user data, and segment user profiles based on preferences, values, and authenticity. SoGraph also builds an open and collaborative on-chain data oracle, which is fully customizable, to integrate and optimize the use of social data by Web2 and Web3 platforms.

SoGraph includes three functional products: SoQuest, SoSignal, and SoPush. They are used to provide data and obtain data for all participants in the Port3 ecosystem. SoQuest provides Web3 Quest solutions for projects and organizations, SoSignal provides customized social dashboards and social and market insights, and SoPush is a tool for information and message transmission.

Polemix

BlockBeats News, on February 1st, Web3 KOL video platform Polemix announced the completion of a new round of financing of $1 million, with Be Kind Tech Fund, a venture capital fund under Globant, a digital native company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, participating in the investment.

Polemix is based on Ethereum and mainly provides short video production services for KOLs. Supporters of KOLs can purchase limited NFTs based on the "proof of support" consensus mechanism, which allows them to establish direct contact with KOLs, such as participating in ZOOM meetings, while supporting their careers. They can also unlock access to additional content.

Currently, several well-known opinion leaders have joined Polemix, including former President of the United Nations Security Council Kishore Mahbubani, renowned experimental psychologist Steven Pinker, and former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Shashi Tharoor.

Infrastructure

There were a total of 6 financing deals in the infrastructure sector, with a total amount of 75.22 million US dollars, accounting for 58.05% of the total financing amount last week.

EigenLayer

Reason for attention: Eigenlayer is another attempt to modify the Ethereum base layer since Flashbots modified the official Ethereum client to support MEV.

Eigenlayer is a protocol that modifies the Ethereum protocol at the base client layer, allowing validators to re-stake their already staked ETH to other protocols and perform parallel validation. In other words, users can reuse their staked ETH to validate other protocols, such as oracles and data availability modules. Each application can customize the standards for penalizing validators.

On February 4th, the Ethereum re-staking protocol EigenLayer is undergoing a Series A financing round, with plans to raise $50 million. According to sources, this round of financing may bring EigenLayer's post-trading equity valuation to $250 million and its fully diluted valuation (FDV) to $500 million.

According to three different sources, the fundraising process began before the November collapse of the cryptocurrency trading platform FTX and is expected to be completed soon. EigenLayer has not yet responded to requests for comment.

BlockJoy

Reasons for Attention: The operating costs for blockchain nodes can be reduced by 80% compared to traditional Web2 cloud service providers.

BlockJoy is a Web3 infrastructure operation service company that helps node operators deploy and manage blockchain nodes. BlockJoy is specifically designed to support blockchain nodes, which can reduce operating costs by up to 80% compared to traditional cloud providers. BlockJoy allows customers to run their nodes on bare metal servers while providing them with cloud-like convenience without paying cloud-like costs.

On February 3rd, BlockJoy, a blockchain node-as-a-service startup, announced the completion of a total of $12 million in seed and Series A funding, with participation from Gradient Ventures, Draper Dragon, Active Capital, Borderless Capital, Tribe Capital, Bessemer, Renegade Ventures, and others. The new funds will be used to launch a patented blockchain node management software. BlockJoy aims to support customers in deploying and running decentralized blockchain nodes on any infrastructure. BlockJoy co-founder Sean Carey, who is also a co-founder of Helium, and Chris Bruce started BlockJoy as a staking service project. Later, they decided to use a specially built Web3 infrastructure platform and make it available to any company or individual to deploy and manage their own nodes on any infrastructure of any protocol.

数字资产管理/支付

translates to

Digital Asset Management/Payment

In the field of digital asset management/payment, a total of 2 financings were completed with a total amount exceeding 9.2 million US dollars, accounting for 7.1% of the total financing amount last week.

GTX

BlockBeats News, on February 4th, BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes posted on social media that there are rumors that the CEX project "GTX" established by Su Zhu, the founder of Three Arrows Capital, and Kyle Davies, the co-founder of CoinFLEX, has completed financing. According to the previous market rumors, the target fundraising amount for GTX is $25 million, and it will enter the market with debt trading as its entry point.

Su Zhu once said that from the ruins left by the FTX explosion, this is a new continent with 1 million creditors and a market size of $20 billion. However, because FTX's creditors cannot withdraw assets from the platform, and the current debt market has cumbersome processes and high handling fees, the experience for small creditors is very unfriendly. Therefore, GTX will build a debt trading market similar to BTC's order book style, which is always full of depth, and can also increase financial liquidity by using debt as collateral for trading.

In addition, bankruptcy platform debt trading is a market where the buyer and seller are very unequal. The buyer is much less than the seller. In the matching transaction, the platform often charges higher transaction fees than the general spot trading platform. Therefore, the income of this track project will be considerable. The debt trading market formed for encrypted assets has gradually grown and will reach a scale of billions of dollars. Currently, this track is still a blue ocean market, and the launch of GTX has aroused widespread attention.

Pow.re

BlockBeats News, on February 2nd, Canadian cryptocurrency mining company Pow.re announced that it had completed a Series A financing round with a valuation of $150 million and raised $9.2 million. The round was led by Haru Invest, a cryptocurrency asset management platform, with participation from digital asset trading companies Trinito and RFD Capital. Pow.re also received a strategic investment of $18 million from Haru to fund its expansion into Paraguay.

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