Financing selection for the 10th week of 2023: Betting on hardware wallets as the consensus?
Metaverse/GameFi
There were a total of 7 financings in the Metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount exceeding 49.97 million US dollars, accounting for 14.3% of the total financing amount last week.
Worldwide Webb
Reasons to follow: Cross-project metaverse game, received tens of millions of dollars investment from Pantera Capital, and is about to launch a 5V5 MOBA mode integrated with over 200 NFT collections.
BlockBeats News, on February 23rd, Pixel Universe Worldwide Webb completed a $10 million Series A financing round, with Pantera Capital as its sole investor. The funds will be used not only to enhance Worldwide Webb's influence, but also to expand its team and integrate other chains besides Ethereum.
Worldwide Webb is a pixel-style MMORPG game where players can use NFTs from other games and IPs as their avatars in the game. In the coming weeks, Worldwide Webb will release a MOBA mode called Blockbusterz, where owners of over 200 NFT collections such as CryptoPunks, BAYC, and Doodles can battle using their NFT avatars and win NFTs as rewards.
Kratos
Reasons for attention: Valued at $150 million, rooted in the Indian Web3 market, and has acquired IndiGG.
BlockBeats News, on February 23rd, Indian Web3 gaming company Kratos completed a seed round of financing with a valuation of $150 million, with Accel leading the investment and participation from Prosus Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and Nazara Technologies, among others.
In addition, the company also acquired the sub-DAO IndiGG of Yield Guild Games DAO through token exchange. Existing INDI Token holders will receive new Kratos Tokens. Kratos co-founder stated that "the new token will be launched within 12 months".
Kratos was established in September 2022, with a business model of bringing game developers and players to its platform and earning revenue from both parties. As part of the acquisition of IndiGG, Kratos will continue to build the IndiGG brand.
IndiGG completed a $6 million seed round of financing in January 2022, with participation from Redshirt India, Lightspeed, Variant Fund, Animoca, Jump Crypto, and others.
Azra Games
Reasons for attention: The team has a large number of members from EA, and has received a $25 million seed round investment led by a16z. The game development progress is good.
BlockBeats News, on February 21st, blockchain gaming company Azra Games announced the completion of an additional $10 million seed round of financing, with a16z leading the investment through its $600 million gaming fund GAMES FUND ONE, and participation from NFX, Coinbase Ventures, Play Ventures, and Franklin Templeton. Azra Games had previously received a $15 million seed round of financing led by a16z in May 2022.
Azra Games was co-founded by entrepreneur Sonny Mayugba (serving as Chief Operating Officer), Travis Boudreaux, and veteran game designer Mark Otero (serving as Chief Executive Officer). Mark Otero previously served as General Manager of Capital Games, a well-known game development studio under EA, and was the producer of the billion-dollar revenue game "Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes". Azra plans to release its first game later this year, a sci-fi/fantasy style ARPG game called Legions & Legends based on Ethereum.
Strider
Reasons to follow: a16z partner + senior gaming team leader, using the creativity of the community to meet the creative needs of NFT and blockchain games.
BlockBeats News, on February 21st, Web3 story-driven game platform Strider announced the completion of a $5.5 million financing round. This round of financing was led by Makers Fund and Fabric Ventures, with participation from Shima Capital, Sfermion, Magic Eden, and several other funds. As of now, the company's total financing amount has reached $8.5 million. This round of funding will be used to expand the Strider team and help content creators use production and distribution tools to enter the platform.
BlockBeats previously reported that Strider completed a $3 million financing round in February last year, led by 1kx, with participation from Decasonic, Scalar Capital, Sfermion, Metaorient, Yield Guild Games (YGG), Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey "Jihoz" Zirlin, and Polygon co-founder Jaynti "JD" Kanani.
Strider co-founder Andrew N. Green, who was not only a well-known partner at a16z, a famous venture capital firm, but also accumulated rich experience in the game industry at well-known game companies such as EA, Atari, and Take-Two Interactive. The other two co-founders, Nick Braccia and Michael Cala, are also senior professionals in the game industry. Nick Braccia was responsible for the content and strategy of well-known games such as "Westworld" and "Dead Space", while Michael Cala worked on creative development for "GTA:SA" and "Red Dead Redemption".
Strider aims to build a decentralized creative platform for "community co-creation stories", gathering the imagination and creativity of the community to provide high-quality story content and IP for the gaming and entertainment industries. To enhance the immersion of real-time collaborative creation in the community, Strider will provide tools for real-time collaboration, including a drag-and-drop interface and AI that generates images and videos based on text.
Strider has established partnerships with Web3 gaming ecosystems such as Axie Infinity, YGG, and TreasureDAO. Currently, Strider is assisting TreasureDAO in building a game studio and providing advisory support in the development of TreasureDAO's NFT project, "Smol Brains" game "Smolville".
Other financing in the Metaverse/GameFi field includes:
On February 23rd, Web3 game publishing and procurement company HDLabs announced the completion of a 100 million Korean won financing, with Iskra participating and reaching a strategic partnership with HDLabs. HDLabs is about to launch its first turn-based RPG game "3 Kingdoms Multiverse (3KM)", while Iskra will also try different elements and models of Web3 game projects and explore other game cooperation opportunities. In addition to the game business, HDLabs also provides blockchain solutions for developers, startups, enterprises, and governments.
On February 21st, blockchain game developer Curio announced the completion of a $2.9 million seed round of financing. The round was led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from TCG Crypto, Formless Capital, Smrti Lab, Robot Ventures, Zonff Partners, and several angel investors. The funds from this round will primarily be used to expand the team, with a focus on hiring blockchain engineers, microeconomists, game designers, and customer engineers. Curio will also seek to hire an art director and a community manager.
Curio was founded in 2022 by engineers and gamers Kevin Zhang and Yijia Chen. Its blockchain games are entirely driven by smart contracts, enabling a new form of multiplayer computation that allows all participants to contribute to a "shared universe." The founders say this allows games to be almost entirely player-created. The company's first game, Treaty, is a blockchain-based strategy game where users can write and deploy smart contracts.
On February 21st, RPG blockchain game Chainmonsters completed a $1.5 million financing, with specific financing information yet to be disclosed. It will be launched on Epic Games on March 6th.
NFT/Digital Fashion
In the NFT/digital fashion field, a total of 3 financings were completed with a total amount of 4.5 million US dollars, accounting for 1.29% of the total financing amount last week.
NeoSwap AI
Reasons for Attention: Multiple projects and users trading simultaneously, NFT trading with "cultural salon" and AI concepts.
BlockBeats News, on February 25th, NFT trading platform NeoSwap AI completed a $2 million Pre-Seed financing round with a valuation of $15 million. The round was led by DACM and AngelHub, with participation from Gossamer Capital, Cavalry Asset Management, Stacks Ventures, Dhuna Ventures, and several angel investors.
NeoSwap AI is an NFT trading platform that supports multiple projects and users to trade simultaneously. Simply put, users can join a "party" and list their NFTs for sale in the "party", while also selecting the NFTs listed by other users in the "party" that they want to purchase and setting their own purchase budget. NeoSwap will formulate the optimal transaction for each user based on their settings, and package all transactions in a smart contract for all users to sign and confirm the transaction.
NeoSwap turns NFT trading into a "cultural salon" - you bring what you don't want, I bring what I don't want, we both bring money, and if we like each other's items, we exchange. Therefore, transactions completed through NeoSwap may ultimately only obtain NFTs, only obtain FTs, or obtain both. In addition, NeoSwap also introduces AI technology to recommend potential trading items and partners based on historical data, improving the success rate of each "cultural salon" transaction.
NFT/Digital Fashion field's other financing includes:
On February 22nd, NFT project Awaken completed a $500,000 seed round of financing, led by Hong Kong Web3 incubator TopoStation and some well-known investors. Awaken is a story-driven NFT project led by several Japanese artists, aimed at creating content to attract more Web2 artists to join Web3.
On February 21st, Broadway Exchange, a digital collectibles trading platform, announced the completion of a $2 million seed round of financing. The round was led by No Guarantees, a Broadway theater production company. Broadway Exchange is built on the Flow network and launched a test version in May 2022. So far, it has partnered with more than a dozen theater partners, including "2:22 A Ghost Story," "Yes! The Musical," and "Ohio State Murders." Recently, the company partnered with Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest musical, "Bad Cinderella," which will premiere on Broadway in March 2023.
DeFi
In the DeFi field, a total of 4 financings were completed with a total amount of 16.5 million US dollars, accounting for 4.72% of the total financing amount last week.
Tsunami Finance
Reasons for attention: The potential of the Aptos ecosystem as a DeFi protocol. Can "Dynamic Liquidity Pricing" bring higher and more stable returns to LPs?
BlockBeats News, on February 24th, Aptos ecological derivative protocol Tsunami Finance completed a $1.3 million Pre-seed round of financing, led by Big Brain Holdings and Mirana, with participation from Zeta Markets, Hedge Labs, Pontem, Brilliance Ventures, BuilderVC, Marin Digital Ventures, Soju, Switchboardxyz, Coral DeFi, RNR Capital, Aptos Monkeys, and Time Research.
Tsunami Finance provides margin trading and spot trading, and proposes the concept of "dynamic liquidity pricing" to provide better yield protection for liquidity providers. With Tsunami Finance, LPs can passively earn profits with lower risk than typical AMM pools.
The liquidity of Tsunami is priced based on dynamic fees and external data, and provides dynamic increases and decreases in fees on top of highly competitive base fees by processing real-time price feedback from Oracle. This allows Tsunami to properly protect and reward LP without being affected by market conditions.
For liquidity providers, Tsunami provides a collection-type LP Token TLP, which minimizes impermanent loss risk through diversification of blue-chip tokens and stablecoins, while maximizing returns by generating leveraged trading fees. For traders, Tsunami provides a 0% price impact trading method, which reduces funding rates and increases collateral value over time.
Huma Finance
Reasons for attention: With an impressive investment team and a compliance route endorsed by Circle, can DeFi achieve "mass adoption"?
BlockBeats News, on February 24th, DeFi project Huma Finance announced the completion of an $8.3 million seed round of financing, with participation from Race Capital, Distributed Global, ParaFi, Circle Ventures, and Folius Ventures, among others. Its partners include Circle, Request Network, and Superfluid. Huma's first product will be built on Ethereum and Polygon and is a on-chain factoring market. Huma plans to use the funds to further develop the platform and expand its business scope to new markets.
Huma Finance is an income support loan agreement for individuals and businesses. The agreement enhances the ability of partners and communities by providing decentralized, transparent, and accessible financial infrastructure and a thriving ecosystem. Its goal is to convert income into a first-class primitive that can be borrowed.
Through partnerships with infrastructure providers such as Circle, Request Network, and Superfluid, Huma has launched the first on-chain factoring market on the Ethereum mainnet and Polygon. Individuals and businesses can borrow against unpaid invoices on Request Network and against payment streams on Superfluid. These invoices and payment streams are tokenized and used as collateral in the factoring process.
Affine Protocol
Reasons for attention: With an impressive investment team, since the market rebounded, derivative products and strategy management protocols in the DeFi sector have continued to emerge, and may become the main narrative for the next wave of growth in DeFi.
BlockBeats News, on February 23, DeFi yield protocol Affine Protocol completed a $5.1 million financing, led by Jump Crypto and Hack VC, with participation from Circle Ventures and Coinbase Ventures. Affine aims to solve the problem of depreciation losses in liquidity provision, and its flagship basket USD yield provides automated diversification and yield through liquidity management strategies.
Affine is a cross-chain investment and savings protocol that allows users to easily register funds on Polygon in an efficient and cost-effective manner, while also gaining investment opportunities on multiple chains. Affine is currently in the mainnet testing phase and the protocol mainly consists of two parts: strategies and baskets. Strategies are the basic units of Affine, and users can build strategies such as buying tokens and borrowing on Compound on top of them.
The Basket is a diversified and dynamically rebalanced insurance vault/index, providing exposure to one or multiple strategies, and offering the benefits of a diversified investment portfolio through easy interaction with a multitude of assets or protocols held in a single asset. The Yield Basket is a strategy basket that provides yield to users, with the testnet version being Alp Save. The Token Basket contains strategies that provide direct price exposure to given assets, with the testnet version being Alp Large.
Other financing in the DeFi field includes:
On February 22nd, Optix, a multi-chain options protocol, announced the completion of a $1.8 million financing round. Skynet Trading led the investment, with participation from Ascensive Assets, Arrington Capital, LVT Capital, Morningstar Ventures, SkyVision Capital, Huobi Global, and Phemex. The Optix protocol has been launched on multiple chains and features token options, permissionless structured products, DeFi, and bulk trading capabilities. Its native token, OPTIX, is set to launch in Q2 2023.
Social/Creative Economy
In the social field, a total of 3 financing rounds were completed with a total amount of 25.5 million US dollars, accounting for 7.3% of the total financing amount last week.
Lifeform
Reasons to pay attention: The decentralized visual digital identity (DID) project, led by Binance, is the first Virtual DID solution to integrate Unreal Engine 5. The team's modeling director has worked for Marvel and Disney.
BlockBeats News, on February 25th, according to official sources, DID solution provider Lifeform completed its Series A financing with a valuation of $100 million. The round was led by Geek Cartel, with participation from KuCoin Labs, DHVC, SevenX Ventures, Foresight Ventures, K24 Ventures, and Another World. The specific amount of financing has not been disclosed yet.
Due to the expected airdrop, Lifeform has received high attention recently, and the number of Avatar holders has increased from 100,000 to 1 million within 4 days. BlockBeats noted that for more information about Lifeform, please read "What makes Lifeform, the DID project led by Binance, different?".
Towns
Reason for attention: a16z leads the investment, becoming another strong competitor in the social infrastructure track after Lens, Farcaster, and RSS3.
BlockBeats News, on February 23rd, Web3 social application Towns completed a $25.5 million financing round, led by a16z with participation from Benchmark, Framework Ventures, and others. Towns adopts the idea of a town square, combining community, NFTs, and games. The product is built on the Ethereum blockchain.
Towns consists of three parts: smart contracts, decentralized node network, and applications built on the Towns protocol. Developers can use Towns smart contracts to develop social applications, while Towns nodes run on a decentralized proof-of-stake network, with messages encrypted and stored as events in a replicated DAG. Verification and other high-value operations occur on the chain. Towns nodes are actually a node package, including a server, a database, and a node parser. The node package will be packaged as a Docker file for deployment. The node operator's guide will be provided in future versions of Towns.
In the future, the sample-app directory in the GitHub repository will contain application code. Developers will be able to gradually complete the README file to explore the Towns protocol and deploy local components and tools. They will also be able to adjust the sample application to meet the needs of their community, create their own use cases, and help develop the protocol.
Other financing in the social/creator economy sector includes:
On February 24th, Web3 social digital asset investment platform Bit.Store announced that it has received equity financing from cryptocurrency payment gateway Alchemy Pay. As part of the transaction, Alchemy Pay acquired 15% of Bit.Store's shares. It is reported that the funds will be used to improve Bit.Store's technology and research and development team efficiency, product optimization, and Bit.Store's expansion and marketing work in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States. At the same time, this financing will give Bit.Store the right to use advanced payment functions including Visa, Mastercard, Google Pay, and Apple Pay provided by Alchemy Pay, providing greater value to its users.
Infrastructure
There were a total of 11 financing deals in the infrastructure sector, with a total amount of over 146 million US dollars, accounting for 42.01% of the total financing amount last week.
OneKey
Reasons for attention: A high-quality hardware wallet that has been consistently receiving attention from the community.
BlockBeats News, on February 23, hardware wallet company OneKey announced that it has completed an A+ round of financing with a valuation of $85 million, led by IOSG Ventures. BlockBeats previously reported that on September 28, 2022, hardware wallet company OneKey announced the completion of approximately $20 million in Series A financing, led by Dragonfly and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Framework Ventures, Sky9 Capital, Folius Ventures, Ethereal Ventures, Coinbase, Santiago R Santos, and Liu Feng, the former editor-in-chief of Chain News. IOSG followed up with additional investment.
OneKey is a 100% open-source hardware wallet. OneKey's hardware wallet products include: OneKey Mini, OneKey Classic, and OneKey Touch. The hardware wallet supports thousands of cryptocurrencies from multiple public chains such as BTC, ETH, Polygon, Avalanche, FTM, Solana, Algorand, Near, STC, TRX, Cosmos, Aptos, and more.
BlockBeats Note: For more information about OneKey, please listen to "Conversation with OneKey Founder Wang Yishi: Building an Off-Road Vehicle to Cross the Web3 Dark Forest".
Blocto
Reason for attention: A rapidly expanding multi-chain wallet.
BlockBeats News, on February 22nd, according to The Block, multi-chain wallet Blocto completed its Series A financing with a valuation of $80 million. The round was participated by Mark Cuban, IPX, and 500 Global, and the specific amount of financing was not disclosed.
As of November last year, portto, the company behind Blocto, was still profitable, and the user data of Blocto wallet was very good, with a cumulative total of 1.6 million users. After expanding to the Aptos network recently, it immediately became the second largest wallet in its ecosystem, with over 400,000 users. The investors behind this round of financing are also very good, including Mark Cuban, IPX, and 500 Global. It is reported that Blocto currently supports Aptos, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Flow, and BNB Chain networks.
Polyhedra Network
Reasons for attention: With an impressive investment team, against the backdrop of the rising narrative of ZK, practical use cases are emerging that combine concepts such as DID and NFT with ZK infrastructure.
BlockBeats News, on February 21st, ZK infrastructure startup Polyhedra Network completed a $10 million financing round, led by Binance Labs and Polychain Capital, with participation from Animoca Brands and Dao5.
Polyhedra has developed various infrastructure products using zero-knowledge (ZK) proof technology, including the ZK bridge (zkBridge) solution for sending assets between Web2 and Web3 systems, the ZK decentralized identity solution (zkDID), and scaling solutions. Polyhedra uses a large-scale distributed proof generation network called ParaPlonk to accelerate ZK rollup, plans to integrate with more blockchains, and makes it easier for developers to access it through API and SDK tools. The company also plans to improve its ParaPlonk protocol to attract developers seeking efficient and decentralized ZK-rollup solutions.
Polyhedra has launched three products: zkBridge, ZK-DID, and ZK-NFT. The zkBridge testnet is now live, providing a trustless and efficient cross-chain infrastructure for L1 and L2 interoperability using the new distributed proof system deVirgo. ZK-DID is a verifiable credential system that is secure, interoperable, scalable, and easy to use, protecting user privacy with advanced zero-knowledge proofs that can be used in both Web2 and Web3 scenarios. ZK-NFT is a programmable NFT protocol with dynamic asset and data containers, achieving maximum interoperability. ZK-NFT is supported by zero-knowledge proofs with a stealth address model to protect the privacy of relevant assets.
Other financing in the infrastructure sector includes:
On February 23rd, privacy technology startup Beldex completed a $25 million financing round. Digital asset market maker and investment company DWF Labs invested and established a partnership with Beldex. These funds will help drive the development of the Beldex ecosystem, while DWF will serve as an advisor and help with marketing activities.
The Beldex ecosystem includes the private messaging application BChat, the decentralized virtual private network (VPN) BelNet, the Web3 browser Beldex, and the cross-chain privacy protocol Beldex, which enables anonymous cross-chain asset movement.
On February 22nd, Web3 database developer Polybase announced the completion of a $2 million Pre-Seed round of financing. The round was led by 6th Man Ventures, with participation from Protocol Labs, Orange DAO, Alumni Ventures, NGC Ventures, CMT Digital, and others.
On February 22nd, Den, a startup company specializing in developing multi-signature wallets, completed a $2.8 million financing round. The round was led by IDEO CoLab Ventures, with participation from Gnosis, Lemniscap, Spice Capital, and individual investors including former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. The funds from this round will be used to continue the development of multi-signature wallet products.
On February 22nd, Superchain, a blockchain index startup, completed a $4 million seed round of financing, which ended in December last year with Blockchain Capital as the lead investor. Superchain also raised $1.25 million in pre-seed financing in December 2021, with investors including Maven 11, KR1, Tokonomy, and Fasanara. The new funds will be used for product delivery, customer support, and recruitment. James Corbett, co-founder of Superchain, said that the recent financing used a financing structure of equity and token warrants. Superchain can quickly collect and customize blockchain data for developers to use, currently supporting indexing of any Ethereum EVM.
On February 21st, Web3 observability platform Sentio completed a seed round of financing worth $6.4 million at a valuation of $32 million. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Hashkey Capital, Canonical Crypto, Essence VC, and GSR Ventures. The company will use the funds to operate its existing infrastructure and expand its team.
Observability measures the current state of a system based on the data generated by the system. In cryptocurrency, applications are built on top of smart contracts, and there is currently no unified process for doing this, which means that many people either develop an internal solution, integrate disparate third-party tools together, or run without such monitoring. With Sentio's software development kit, users can collect metrics and event logs based on smart contract events, transactions, tracking, and status across blockchains, including Ethereum, Aptos, Polygon, and Avalanche. Sentio handles the indexing process for this information, but users can subsequently build dashboards to visualize such data. This enables them to monitor potential violations or issues and receive alerts for certain activities on the blockchain.
On February 21st, Web3 decentralized account management protocol Intu announced the completion of a $2 million Pre-Seed round of financing, with investors including CoinFund, Metaweb Ventures, Fantom Foundation, and others. Intu revealed that it will release a test version during ETHDenver (February 24th). Intu aims to provide a solution for encrypted wallets, providing developers with tools to create decentralized, recoverable, and autonomous Web3 accounts.
On February 20th, blockchain infrastructure provider Gateway.fm completed a $4.6 million financing round, led by Lemniscap, with participation from CMT Digital, LAO DAO, Very Early Ventures, Fantom Foundation, and Unstoppable Domain Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and drive marketing and recruitment efforts.
Gateway.fm aims to provide decentralized RPC solutions, allowing Web3 companies to not rely on centralized services such as Amazon Cloud and Google Cloud. The services provided by Gateway.fm include institutional staking service Gateway Grow, Web3 RPC node infrastructure solution Gateway Access, and Gateway Jumpstart, which enables blockchain protocols to accelerate their mainnet launch. According to the official website, its clients include NEAR, Fantom, Gnosis, and 1inch.
数字资产管理/支付
translates to
Digital Asset Management/Payment
There were a total of 8 financing deals in the digital asset management/payment field, with a total amount of over 97.37 million US dollars, accounting for 27.86% of the total financing amount last week.
TipLink
Reasons to pay attention: Strong financing background; able to complete the transfer of digital assets through links, with simple operation and reduced web3 threshold.
BlockBeats News, on February 21st, TipLink, a cryptocurrency payment platform based on Solana blockchain, announced the completion of a $6 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was jointly led by Sequoia Capital and Multicoin Capital, with participation from Solana Ventures, Circle Ventures, Paxos, and other companies. Angel investors including Vinny Lingham and Sarah Guo also supported this round of financing. TipLink plans to continue building link wallet functionality, improving its API, and expanding its engineering and business development teams.
TipLink is a lightweight wallet that provides both decentralization and self-custody, without the need to worry about mnemonic phrases, mysterious key management, applications, and browser extensions. TipLink's non-custodial wallet allows users to fully control their assets by connecting to their Gmail account or Solana wallet.
TipLink allows users to send cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and NFTs through links. The sender can connect to a Solana wallet and deposit the token or NFT they want to send to create a TipLink. Then, users can copy the TipLink URL or generate a QR code and send it to anyone. The recipient doesn't even need to have a crypto wallet and can receive the token through Gmail login or QR code. With its newly launched API, TipLink allows developers and companies to store digital assets and create TipLinks for their users.
TipLink aims to make transferring digital assets as simple as sending a link. It allows people who own cryptocurrency to create TipLinks and send them to anyone through any platform (text, Discord, email, etc.) to transfer digital assets.
Chaos Labs
Reasons to pay attention: Strong financing background; Provides secure practices for DeFi protocols, simulates specific attack strategies, and prevents malicious attacks.
BlockBeats News, on February 21st, blockchain security organization Chaos Labs announced the completion of a $20 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by PayPal Ventures and Galaxy Digital, with participation from Coinbase, Uniswap, Lightspeed, Bessemer, as well as angel investors Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant.
According to The Block's data, the total amount of funds lost due to DeFi exploit in 2022 reached $2.05 billion, an increase of 48% compared to 2021. More and more malicious actors are looking for vulnerabilities in on-chain protocols. To address malicious use of on-chain vulnerabilities and market manipulation, as well as to protect protocols and users from being affected, Chaos Labs has established a new security paradigm.
Chaos Labs is an automated risk management platform for encryption, running top-notch security practices, including powerful agent-based and scenario-based simulations, specifically designed to run worst-case simulations for decentralized financial trading platforms. It has 10 public clients, including well-known companies in the DeFi field such as Aave, Chainlink, and Uniswap.
Chaos Lab believes that every DeFi protocol must undergo regular and robust risk testing to verify and validate the security of its economic system, and to withstand hacker attacks and unexpected fluctuations. Therefore, Chaos Lab has established a team of professional security and infrastructure engineers. By simulating millions of economic scenarios on the chain, world-class security and risk practices are introduced to address this issue.
Chaos Labs' risk suite can help protect all types of DeFi protocols from malicious attacks through preventative measures and monitoring tools, including providing protocol-specific simulation models for teams and communities to simulate specific attack strategies, optimize risk and capital efficiency; focusing on smart contract audits for economic fragility, analyzing how market changes (such as liquidity, oracles, volatility, etc.) affect or disrupt the economic design of their protocols, and making simplified risk assessments; simulation engines help protocol teams strategically set incentive spending to maximize investment returns on a lower budget, optimizing spending.
Renegade
BlockBeats News, on February 20th, according to The Block, Renegade, a dark pool trading company, announced the completion of a $3.4 million seed round of financing, led by Dragonfly Capital and former AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant, with participation from angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, Lily Liu, Tarun Chitra (Robot Ventures), and Lev Livnev (Symbolic Capital Partners).
In traditional stock markets, dark pools allow institutional investors to buy and sell large amounts of stocks with relatively small price movements. However, in DeFi, all trading information is available for anyone to see. Therefore, Renegade is developing a new decentralized exchange (DEX) based on multi-party computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZK): an on-chain version of dark pools.
Renegade will provide users with comprehensive trading privacy through decentralized dark pool trading, preventing front-running, sandwich attacks, and statistical arbitrage to improve price execution in DeFi, allowing sophisticated traders to trade at better prices without drawing widespread market attention to their intentions.
It is reported that Renegade is functionally equivalent to CLOB-style DEX, but with an encrypted distributed order book. The matching between user orders is inferred through encrypted and secure multi-party computation. Once a match is found, the settlement of token exchange will be completed through zero-knowledge proof to hide all transaction information while maintaining system consistency. To implement this hybrid MPC-ZKP matching and settlement architecture, Renegade uses the collaborative SNARK framework of Ozdemir et al., which essentially generates and packages zero-knowledge proofs internally in MPC. Collaborative proof allows traders to trade while ensuring that no information is leaked to third parties. Renegade is currently in internal testing, and the public test network is scheduled to be released in Q2 2023.
Other financing in the field of digital asset management/payment includes:
On February 25th, Factor, a chain-based asset management platform on Arbitrum, successfully raised approximately $7.6 million during its public token offering from February 20th to February 24th. Users will be able to claim their purchased FCTR tokens on February 26th at 2:00 AM Beijing time, and the token will also begin trading on the decentralized exchange Camelot at the same time. If users decide to provide liquidity by staking their received tokens, they can also receive veFCTR, which allows them to participate in Factor governance and earn 50% of the protocol's generated fees.
On February 23rd, Web3 incubator and market maker iBLOXX announced the completion of a $5 million financing round, led by PrimeXM. The funds will be used to expand the company's game development department, iBLOXX Studios. This investment brings the post-investment valuation of its gaming department to $30 million. iBLOXX's gaming department, BLOXX Studios, focuses on building blockchain games using Unreal Engine and Unity, developing GameFi economic health and monitoring solutions, and creating blockchain applications related to trading.
On February 23rd, the Bitcoin mining consulting company Sabre56 completed a $35 million financing round to build hosting sites. Sabre56 is mainly engaged in mining facility development and mining machine operation business, with the goal of building a 150 MW mining site by the end of this year and providing hosting services to mining companies. Currently, two sites with a total capacity of 115 MW are under construction in Wyoming and Texas. It is expected that the construction of four sites will be completed this year.
On February 23, BCB Group, a cryptocurrency service company, is raising funds through convertible notes that will be converted into BCB Group's future Series B equity financing, with a maximum pre-financing valuation of $200 million. BCB Group's founder and CEO, Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie, confirmed that the company is raising funds, but declined to comment on the structure and valuation of this round of financing, stating that "BCB is raising more than $20 million and plans to end this round of financing before early March." Earlier, on January 25, BCB Group announced the completion of a $60 million Series A financing round, led by Foundation Capital (with another undisclosed co-lead investor), with participation from Circle, Backed VC, and North Island Ventures. This is the largest Series A investment in a UK blockchain startup to date.
On February 22nd, Web3 security company "KEKKAI" completed its Pre-seed round of financing. The amount raised in this round was 50 million Japanese yen (approximately 370,700 US dollars), with the investment coming from Japanese local VC Skyland Ventures.
Other Financing
On February 21st, Kaito AI, an AI-driven encryption search engine, announced the completion of a $5.3 million financing round, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Jane Street, AlphaLab Capital, and Mirana Ventures.
Kaito is a core AI startup dedicated to solving the problem of information fragmentation in the encryption field. The company stated in a press release that data and information are often scattered across multiple sources, such as Discord, Medium, Mirror, podcast transcripts, as well as news and research platforms. Kaito's AI-driven search engine consolidates this information in one place.
On February 21st, Web3 customer relationship management company 3RM completed a $3.5 million financing round, led by Distributed Global with participation from Shima Global, Big Brain Holdings, Metareal, and 3SE Holdings.
3RM focuses on building a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that centers around the development direction of the Web3 industry. According to the company's website, over 1,200 organizations have signed up to use 3RM's CRM tool, including Magic Eden, Fuel Labs, and Lens Protocol.
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