The 9th week of 2023 financing selection, SocialFi continues to grow, a16z moves frequently
According to BlockBeats statistics, there were 23 financings last week, with a total amount of about 236 million U.S. dollars, and an average financing amount of 10.73 million U.S. dollars. Among them, the digital asset management/payment field still occupies the main body, the infrastructure and Metaverse/GameFi fields have relatively more financing, the social sector financing scale and quantity have continued to increase significantly, the NFT field has less financing, and the DeFi field has no financing. The picture below shows the financing ratio of each sector last week:
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Metaverse/GameFi
A total of 5 financings in the metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount of more than 28.3 million US dollars, accounting for 11.99% of the total financing last week.
Million on Mars
Reasons to care: CEO Erik Bethke, a Mars geek who earned a PhD in space science in the 1990s, has long wanted Create a game where people build settlements on Mars.
BlockBeats news, on February 17, the chain game Million on Mars announced the completion of a $3.5 million seed round of financing, Great South Gate and Widus Partners Leading the investment, Solana Labs and others participated in the investment. The new funds are used to support its blockchain-based space simulation, adding more systems and virtual environments to the game.
This game is about simulating how to solve the problem of colonizing Mars, and hypothetically how to provide a reasonable rocket for SpaceX, Rocket Lab or other aerospace companies, etc. In the game, players start with 40 acres of land and become financially independent on Mars through self-management.
Million on Mars employs 25 people worldwide, with developers who have worked on Starfleet: Command, Development of several games such as GoPets, Mafia Wars, and FarmVille. Currently, the game has over 14,000 daily active users.
It is reported that the chain game Million on Mars can run on the Solana and Wax blockchains. In addition, the game has been online for more than six months, and some games have been released as early as It will be live by the end of 2021.
Unagi
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Reason for attention: Lianchuang Charlie Guillemot is the son of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. He has established a long-term cooperative relationship with Arsenal and has a Binance investment background.
BlockBeats news, on February 17, blockchain game developer Unagi announced the completion of a US$5 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by Sisu Game Ventures, with participation from Sfermion, Signum Capital and 2B Ventures. With the new funding, Unagi hopes to grow its team from 25 to 40 people.
Unagi co-founders Remi Pellerin and Charlie Guillemot are both from well-known game maker Ubisoft. It is worth noting that Charlie Guillemot is the son of Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot.
Unagi was founded in 2021 with Ultimate, a free fantasy football game launched on BNB Chain Champions came into the public eye and received a $4 million investment from Binance Labs last November. At present, Ultimate Champions has established cooperative relations with 45 partners, including the Premier League Arsenal.
YGG
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Reason for attention: YGG is almost the largest Web3 game guild at present, and has established cooperation with more than 80 games and infrastructures around the world.
BlockBeats news, on February 17, Yield Guild Games (YGG), a chain game association, has raised 13.8 million US dollars through the sale of tokens, led by DWF Labs and a16z. As one of the earliest supporters of YGG, a16z also led the guild's US$4.6 million financing in August 2021.
Other investors include Galaxy Interactive, Sangha Capital Fund, Sanctor Capital and angel investor David Lee. Lee, a former corporate lawyer at Google, is currently executive vice president of Samsung Electronics and the head of Samsung Next.
YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon revealed that YGG will use the new funds to further develop its soul Bind reputation token. The Reputation Token was launched in a test last year, but it is only rewarded for in-guild activities such as content creation. YGG stated that it will cooperate with developers to put Token directly into the game, and complete selected tasks or tasks will be rewarded. Additionally, Gabby Dizon said that reputation tokens will also play a bigger role in the platform’s ecosystem when the platform launches an improved web application, which is scheduled to be announced at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in late March. .
Nefta
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Reasons to watch: Over the past eight months, Nefta's valuation has risen 225%.
BlockBeats news, on February 16, Web3 game entertainment infrastructure company Nefta completed a $5 million seed round of financing, led by Play Ventures, Polygon Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Sfermion and Picus Capital participated in the investment, with a valuation of 32.5 million Dollar. Nefta aims to provide tools for enterprises entering and developing in the Web3 space. These tools include custom APIs, software development kits and white label services to help enterprises integrate digital assets, multi-chain wallets and custom marketplaces. It is reported that in the past eight months, Nefta's valuation has increased by 225%. Last June, Nefta raised $1 million from Picus Capital at a valuation of $10 million, previously reported.
Currently Nefta has 8 employees and plans to double the team size soon Hiring across multiple functions including business development, account management and technology. The seed round brings Nefta’s total raised to date to $6 million, and as part of the deal, Play Ventures general partner Kenrick Drijkoningen will join Nefta’s board.
NFT/Digital Fashion< /h3>
A total of 2 financings in the field of NFT/digital fashion, with a total amount of 7 million US dollars, accounting for last week 2.97% of the total financing amount.
Aura Network
Reason for attention: "NFT chain" led by Hashed and Coin98.
BlockBeats news, on February 15, Aura Network, the Cosmos ecological NFT blockchain, completed a Pre-A round of financing of US$4 million. This round of financing was led by Hashed and Coin98. GuildFi, Istari Ventures and K300 Ventures participated in the investment. This round of financing will be used to continue to promote the ecological development of Aura Network.
Aura Network focuses on building an NFT network that is strongly associated with reality, providing NFT from Mint to sales One stop complete service. The company was established in the fourth quarter of 2021, and the team size has grown from less than 20 people at the beginning to more than 200 people today. At present, Aura Network has successfully iterated three test networks of Halo, Serenity and Euphoria, and launched two dApps, AuraScan, a native blockchain browser, and Pyxis Safe, a multi-signature management tool. The mainnet Xstaxy will be launched by the end of the first quarter of this year.
NFEX
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Reason for attention: A decentralized NFT derivatives exchange that provides NFT perpetual contracts.
BlockBeats news, on February 15, NFT derivatives DEX NFEX completed a $3 million seed round of financing, this round of financing was led by ABCDE Capital, with participation from Amber Group and Firestone Ventures .
NFEX provides users with NFT perpetual contracts, users can use leverage and go long on NFT Short function. At present, NFEX has started internal testing on Polygon's Mumbai test network, and the internal testing is only open to Waitlist users in the form of invitation and application. BlockBeats note, ABCED has previously released the NFEX investment Memo, for more information, please read "ABCDE: Why we should lead the investment in NFT Perpetual contract trading platform NFEx? 》
Social/Creator Economy
A total of 5 financings in the social field, with a total amount of 22.5 million US dollars, accounting for 9.53% of the total financing last week.
Phi
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Reason for attention: Co-founded by AAVE&Lens founder Stani, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko, ENS core developer matoken.eth, and Gitcoin People Scott Moore, Sudoswap Lianchuang 0xmons and many other senior Crypto Builder support.
BlockBeats news, on February 18, ENS-based social platform Phi announced the completion of a $2 million seed round of financing, led by Chapter One and Delphi Digital, Polygon Ventures, Bankless co-founder Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman, Kartik Talwar from ETH Global, and Scott Moore from Gitcoin participated in the investment.
Phi allows users to generate their own personalized space using their ENS domain and claim in-game items based on their wallet activity. Users can use the tools provided by Phi to build their own Web3 world, which can display their interactions, on-chain progress, personal taste and social graph. Phi aims to accelerate the visualization and gamification of the Web3 ecosystem, allowing the next million people to enter the decentralized world, and accelerate the mass adoption of the entire Web3 ecosystem by providing more casual access points such as social, gaming, and art.
Phi stated that this round of financing will be used to accelerate the design and development of improved UI/UX and new social/gaming features, and to create a community to expand and more The cooperation of the agreement, and the creation of Phi derivatives at the same time.
Sending Labs
Reason for Concern: A rare large-scale financing project in the social field, how does the social network built from the underlying structure compete with the existing SocialFi ecosystem?
BlockBeats news, on February 16, Web3 communication project Sending Labs announced the completion of financing of 12.5 million US dollars, led by Insignia Venture Partners, MindWorks Capital and Signum Capital, K3 Ventures, LingFeng Innovation Fund , UpHonest Capital and Aipollo Investment participated in the investment.
Sending Labs will launch two flagship products, SendingMe and SendingNetwork. Among them, SendingMe is an encrypted chat platform where users can monetize the projects they create through marketplaces, airdrops, and NFT auctions. The team's current flagship product is SendingNetwork, a software development kit for crypto application developers to build social functionality in the spirit of Web3 decentralization.
Sending.Network has three types of nodes, the client node is installed on the user device Instant messaging nodes, edge nodes are responsible for message relay and offline storage, and base nodes are for users to back up their social graph data on the blockchain. Messages between online wallets on Sending.Network are sent directly without involving any other nodes, and offline wallets use edge nodes of their choice to cache received messages.
As the backbone of the P2P network, the edge nodes can be further divided into ordinary nodes and high-speed nodes. The latter has a higher network bandwidth. All nodes in the network, whether they are clients or edge nodes, are connected using three fixed types of P2P network protocols. One is a high-throughput, high-latency network similar to current P2P protocols for general messaging and infrastructure maintenance. The second is a fast routing protocol that uses high-bandwidth routing and edge nodes to minimize communication delays. The third is an anonymous routing protocol for user communications where enhanced privacy protection is critical.
Zion
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Reason for Concern: After Nostr brings the Lightning Network ecology on fire, can more user-friendly social applications take over the banner of the development of the "Lightning Ecology"?
BlockBeats news, on February 16, the decentralized social network Zion completed a financing of 6 million US dollars at a valuation of 53 million US dollars, XBTO Humla Ventures led the round, with Kingsway Capital, Bitcoiner Ventures, UTXO Management, and Tony Robbins, Aaron Rodgers, Aubrey Marcus, Mark Moss, Cory Klippsten, Robert Breedlove, Shawn Stevenson, Dan Held, Griffin Johnson, Anthony Pompliano and Donald Park participating.
Zion v2 uses the self-proclaimed "Web5" standard combined with the Bitcoin Lightning Network to generate a network of decentralized identities, communities and social content. Centralized services are replaced with interoperable common social data exchange standards. With Zion v2, creators and fans can have their own identities online, and creators can have their own communities for true peer-to-peer relationships.
The team has launched the first mobile application based on this architecture. Zion DID accounts created by users can be used to access their own DWN and Bitcoin Lightning wallets. Users can boost the influence of their posts by tipping them with Bitcoin to create and encourage communities, messages, posts, comments, and support for creators. According to the Zion team, it has provided services to more than 3,000 creators and processed more than 120,000 transactions between creators and fans using the Lightning Network.
Infrastructure
A total of 6 financings in the field of infrastructure, with a total amount of more than 47.2 million US dollars, accounting for 20% of the total financing last week.
Cysic
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Reason for attention: The investment lineup is bright. Can Cysic, which is optimistic by many institutions, become the Nvidia of the zk track?
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BlockBeats news, on February 17, ZK chip startup Cysic completed a $6 million seed round of financing, led by Polychain Capital, A&T Capital, Hashkey, SNZ Holding, Web3 .com Foundation and ABCDE Capital participated Vote.
Cysic is an industry-leading ZK hardware acceleration project, founded by Leo Fan and Bowen Huang at the end of August 2022, dedicated to designing advanced ASIC chips to Help reduce the generation time of ZK proof. Cysic has formed a first-class hardware design and development team, and has completed the FPGA-based POC design.
At this stage, the project has realized the POC verification of MSM calculation based on FPGA, and the project code is SolarMSM. At this stage, SolarMSM will provide external services through SaaS. At present, Cysic and many leading Some ZK project parties have reached cooperation intentions and will provide them with testing services in the near future. According to the testimony of many industry authorities, SolarMSM is in the Top-Tier position in the industry in accelerating MSM computing performance. According to the POC results, it can be proved that Cysic The ZK hardware acceleration capability is already in the leading position in the industry.
ABCDE has published a Cysic investment memo before. For more information, please read ABCDE: Why do we invest in ZK hardware acceleration project Cysic?".
Orb Labs
Reasons for concern : Bain Capital Crypto led the investment and is committed to providing secure, high-speed, and low-cost cross-chain communication services.
BlockBeats news, on February 14, blockchain interoperability protocol Orb Labs announced the completion of $4.5 million in financing, led by Bain Capital Crypto, Shima Capital, 6th Man Ventures, Aves Lair, Newman Capital, Modular Capital and SevenX Ventures participated in the round.
Orb Labs, founded in 2022, is a blockchain interoperability startup that plans to launch earlybird, a cross-chain messaging protocol, in the coming months, Allows developers to choose the most effective security model for their application based on factors such as use case, cost, and speed. Another product Orb Labs is developing, MagicLane, is an efficient, secure, and composable full-chain Token and information delivery platform built on Earlybird. Earlybird is conveniently used in the case of
Monad Labs
Reason for attention: The founders and investment lineup are impressive. Can the high TPS bonus restore the competitive advantages of EVM and L2 at the application layer?
BlockBeats news, on February 14, the EVM-compatible blockchain project Monad Labs, founded by Keone Hon, the former research director of Jump Trading, announced his resignation and completed a $19 million seed round of financing. Dragonfly Capital led the round, with participation from Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, angel investors Naval Ravikant, Cobie, and Hasu.
The Monad blockchain will launch on a testnet in the coming months, with plans to deploy to mainnet later this year. Monad will use a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and will be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The founders of Monad Labs are Keone Hon and Jinglan Wang. They have worked together in Jump Trading for 7 years. The origin of Monad was born in Keone Hon's development of a low-latency HFT trading system and the development of Jump Crypto. They combined HFT Combining our experience with some new ideas, we have created a brand new smart contract platform.
Monad Labs is a new proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain and decentralized computing The platform, combining optimal performance and portability, is dedicated to providing the infrastructure for mass cryptocurrency adoption and supporting developers to build socially impactful and sustainable decentralized applications (dApps).
Monad Labs provides throughput several times higher than any existing smart contract blockchain Order of magnitude, through algorithmic improvements to virtual machine design and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism, its new blockchain can process 10,000 transactions in 1 second with instant certainty. Monad Labs provides this performance while maintaining full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode, a standard widely used for smart contract implementations, allowing full compatibility with existing Ethereum dApps and tools. Monad Labs leverages experience and technology from the fields of high-frequency trading (HFT) and cryptocurrencies to optimize the performance, security and scalability of smart contract platforms.
Caldera
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Reason for attention: Can the second-tier project led by Sequoia and Dragonfly lead to the concept of "App-Rollup" and help the explosion of the application layer ?
BlockBeats news, on February 14th, Web3 infrastructure provider Caldera completed two rounds of financing totaling 9 million US dollars, this round of financing was led by Sequoia Capital and Dragonfly, Neo, 1kx and Ethereal Ventures participated in the investment.
Caldera provides the easiest and most convenient App-Rollup distribution solution for anyone This solution can be used to start an Optimistic Rollup application chain within 5 minutes. These apps - Rollup can have higher performance and lower network fees, and can also rely on Rollup's architecture to inherit security from Layer 1 such as Ethereum. It is reported that the new funds will be used to develop the team and establish partnerships to support developers. BlockBeats note, for more on Caldera, please read "Caldera: Start a Rollup of Your Own in 5 Minutes".
Digital asset management/payment
A total of 3 financings in the field of digital asset management/payment, with a total amount of more than 820 billion US dollars, accounting for 34.75% of the total financing last week.
Stelo Labs
BlockBeats message, february On the 17th, Web3 security company Stelo Labs completed a $6 million seed round of financing, led by a16z. This round of financing will be used to expand the team and its products, and meet user needs. Stelo Labs launched the Stelo extension last September to help users protect their wallets from scams and phishing attacks. Stelo currently supports the Ethereum network and hopes to expand to other EVM compatible chains in the future.
The team launched the Stelo browser extension in September to protect users from scams and Violations of phishing. At the heart of all Stelo Labs products is the Stelo transaction engine. The main job of the engine is to simulate transactions, aggregate data and risk analysis. Simulated transactions can let users know which assets are interacting with their wallets. Data aggregation uses rich data inside and outside the chain, such as DID, identifiable NFT and its Price, etc., risk analysis is to analyze transactions and display risk factors to prevent users from being phished or scammed.
Alongside
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BlockBeats message, 2 month 15 On the 2nd, the encryption index platform Alongside completed 11 million US dollars in financing. This round of financing was led by a16z, and Coinbase Ventures, Franklin Templeton Investments, Village Global and Not Boring Capital, as well as several angel investors participated in the investment.
In January this year, the startup launched its first product, the Alongside Crypto Market Index ( AMKT), allowing people to broadly access the entire encrypted asset market through a single Token. AMKT represents a basket of digital assets designed to track the market capitalization of the cryptoasset market.
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