The 13th Week of 2023 Financing Highlights, Bitcoin Eco DEX Receives $2.5 Million in Strategic Financing
According to BlockBeats statistics, the total number of financing last week was 18, a decrease from last week, with a total amount of about 65.4 million US dollars. The average financing amount is approximately US$9.34 million. Among them, NFT/digital fashion occupies the main body, Metaverse/GameFi has relatively more financing, infrastructure and social/creator economy financing have decreased, and asset management/payment has less financing. The picture below shows the financing ratio of each sector last week:
Metaverse/GameFi
A total of 3 financings in the Metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount of more than 16 million US dollars, accounting for 24.46% of the total financing last week.
Jungle
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Reason for attention: For the Latin American market, the mobile shooting chain game will be released within this year.
BlockBeats news, on March 13, Web3 game studio Jungle completed a $6 million seed round of financing, led by Bitkraft and Framework Ventures, Delphi Digital, Karatage, Fourth Revolution Capital, Monoceros, 32bit Ventures, Stateless Ventures, Snackclub, and Norte Ventures participated. This round of financing will be used to build the team, market and publish the games it produces.
Jungle says its first game, a Web3 shooter, will be released this year at Launched on mobile devices, Web3 elements will be optional in its first game. At present, Jungle has not disclosed which blockchain it will build its products on.
Jungle's core vision is to create chain games for Latin American users, in addition to language localization , Jungle's games will also be optimized for hardware devices and internet speeds typical in Latin America. The founder of Jungle said that it will pay extra attention to the people who use low-end Android devices, and is committed to making its games easy to play for the target group at a low cost.
Bravo Ready
Reason for attention: P2E "chicken eating" game of "paying entry, eliminating gold"
Block Beats news , On March 17, NFT game company Bravo Ready received a strategic investment from Aptos Labs, which will be used to jointly launch the game project "Aptos Arena" and the future integration of Aptos and BR1: INFINITE.
BR1: INFINITE is a P2E "eating Chicken" game. Players can pay an entry fee of $0.25, $1, or $5 to enter different servers according to their skill level, and the more competitive the more the more profitable it will be. In the game, eliminating a player can be rewarded with an "entry fee" or "10% of the eliminated person's wallet balance" (whichever is greater). All eliminated players will suffer a -15% loss of wallet balance. According to previous news from BlockBeats, on September 14, 2022, Bravo Ready completed a financing of US$3.5 million, with Sino Global Capital participating.
Moxy
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Reason for attention: E-sports combines blockchain to realize the popularization of games, not only for professional players.
BlockBeats news, on March 13, Flow-based Web3 e-sports platform Moxy completed $10 million in financing, Shima Capital, Polygon, MetaTope and GSR Markets participated in the investment. The Moxy platform already includes 23 games including Super Squad, BattleRise, and Sociable Soccer. In the future, Moxy plans to hold a "Battle of the Influencers" celebrity e-sports tournament.
NFT/Digital Fashion
A total of 3 financings in the field of NFT/digital fashion, with a total amount of 21 million US dollars, accounting for 32.11% of the total financing last week.
Nuqtah
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Reason for attention: The first NFT market in Saudi Arabia.
BlockBeats news, on March 16, Nuqtah, the NFT market in Saudi Arabia, announced the completion of the latest round of financing, led by Animoca Brands, Polygon and local A group of investors participated in the investment, but the specific financing amount has not yet been disclosed. Last year, Nuqtah had completed a seed round led by Shorooq Partners. The company will use the new funds to expand its operations in product development, marketing, talent acquisition and other areas of the business over the next 12 months. Nuqtah is the first NFT marketplace licensed by the Saudi Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Ministry of Investment. , business and user empowerment to unlock the Web3 market and open new opportunities for the region.
The remaining financing in the NFT/digital fashion field includes:
BlockBeats news, on March 14, digital fashion company DressX completed a US$15 million Series A financing, led by crypto venture capital firm Greenfield. The round, which closed at the end of February, also included participation from Slow Ventures, The Artemis Fund, Red Dao and Warner Music. The funding will be used in part to improve the interoperability of its digital fashion assets, as well as improve the performance of its app and NFT marketplace. DressX, which focuses on off-chain digital fashion pieces that can be showcased on platforms like Roblox and Instagram, launched its NFT marketplace and partnership with Crypto.com last March. NFTs sold on its marketplace can be digitally worn in augmented reality through the DressX app.
BlockBeats news, on March 15th, NFT social platform Metalink completed a $6 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by Social Capital, Arrington Capital, Sound Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund, Dapper Labs' venture capital arm BallerVC and Genies. Human Ventures and others participated in the investment. Angel investors include MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright, The Sandbox founder Sebastien Borget, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and others. Additionally, Metalink announced the launch of its mobile application where NFT collectors can interact, aggregate information announcements and track their portfolio performance. The app also plans to launch a trading feature later this year so users can buy, sell and exchange digital assets.
DeFi
A total of 4 financings in the DeFi field, with a total amount of 15 million US dollars , accounting for 22.94% of the total financing last week.
CNHC Group
Reason for attention: Provide multi-currency stable currency services other than the US dollar, and USDC issuer Circle participated in the investment.
BlockBeats news, on March 15, CNHC Group, a stablecoin issuer, completed a US$10 million A+ round of financing, which was funded by KuCoin Ventures Leading the round, with participation from Circle and IDG Capital. The CNHC stablecoin will reportedly launch in 2021 for use cases such as money transfers and cross-border trade settlements. According to its co-founder Joy Cham, CNHC is currently issued on the Ethereum and Conflux blockchains. This round of financing will primarily be used to expand CNHC's adoption in the Asia-Pacific region. To that end, the company is moving its headquarters from the Cayman Islands to Hong Kong.
Alex
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Reason for attention: Bitcoin ecological DeFi project, team members have Wall Street quantitative trading background.
BlockBeats news, on March 14, Bitcoin ecological DEX Alex completed a strategic round of financing of 2.5 million US dollars, Trust Machines and Gossamer Capital participated cast. Funds raised this time will be used to continue building decentralized finance within the Bitcoin ecosystem and grow the user community. Alex was co-founded by former Wall Street quantitative analysts Chiente Hsu and Rachel Yu. Alex completed a $5.8 million seed round in 2021 led by White Star Capital, with other backers including Cultur3 and SeaX. In addition to the centralized trading platform business, Alex also provides staking, yield mining and Launchpad services.
Alex team said that there are more than 500 billion US dollars of potential capital that can be deployed in Bitcoin DeFi In the App, Alex will further promote the mass adoption of Bitcoin by building fairer, safer and more efficient financial services.
Remaining financing in the DeFi field includes:
BlockBeats news, on March 14, Web3 startup Nealthy completed a pre-seed round of financing of US$1.3 million, with DonGeraldo and others participating. It is reported that Nealthy provides index Token, which replicates the structure of classic trading platform trading funds (ETFs) by storing multiple digital assets on the chain, aiming to provide accessible and diversified digital asset exposure, such as reflecting NFT blue chips (market capitalization Top ten NFT series) index Token NFTS.
BlockBeats news, March 17th , Composable Corp, the development company behind the DeFi strategy protocol Blueberry Protocol, completed a $1.2 million seed round of financing, with investors including Ashbury Ventures, Alchemix, Multisig Ventures, Pirata Capital, etc. Composable key members said the funds will be used to grow the team and infrastructure. BlockBeats previously reported that the DeFi strategy protocol Blueberry Protocol was launched on the testnet on January 17.
Social/creator economy
A total of 1 financing in the social field , with a total amount of US$4.8 million, accounting for 7.34% of the total financing last week.
GigaStar
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Reason for attention: The updated incentive method for content creators turns fans into investors.
BlockBeats news, on March 17, creator economy startup GigaStar completed a $4.8 million seed round of financing, DV Crypto VC, Tomsic Holdings, Nameless Ventures and Belvedere Strategic Capital Participate in voting. It is reported that GigaStar uses blockchain technology to allow creators to obtain more innovative ways of interaction, including fan incentives, potential long-term royalties, etc. Currently, GigaStar mainly supports YouTube creators and helps channels earn income by launching channel income tokens.
Infrastructure
A total of 3 financings in the field of infrastructure, with a total amount of more than 5.6 million US dollars, accounting for 8.56% of the total financing last week.
Smooth Labs
Reason for attention: It can increase the TPS of Layer 2 and Appchain by up to five times.
BlockBeats news, on March 14, blockchain infrastructure developer Smooth Labs completed a $2 million seed round of financing led by NGC Ventures cast. Cogitent Ventures, ArkStream Capital and Ian Balina's Token Metrics participated in the round. Smooth Labs was founded in Singapore in July by Wei, a former early-stage researcher at Celestia, and Lucie Chen, a former founding partner at cryptocurrency investment firm LCC Ventures. Smooth is building blockchain infrastructure focused on parallel execution of transactions. Parallel execution allows transactions to be processed simultaneously, significantly increasing transaction speed and reducing waiting times.
Smooth is a high-performance module that integrates Layer 2 networking and application-specific Up to a fivefold increase in transactions per second or TPS for a blockchain or Lisk, and while the concept of parallel transactions is not new, Smooth is the first project to leverage the concept of Layer 2 and Lisk. At the same time, Smooth is also compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Get all the possibilities of parallel transactions through DAG, while taking into account factors such as Blockhash, intermediate variables, etc., providing a flexible development framework for existing layer 2 and upcoming chains.
Smooth team believes in 2021 that the second layer network of Ethereum is not enough to solve block The scalability problem of the chain, so the idea of a general parallel transaction middleware was proposed at that time, and it will continue to be perfected throughout 2022. Financier NGC hailed the team behind Smooth as some of the youngest, most innovative entrepreneurs they had ever seen. The Smooth network is currently under development, with a testnet launch expected in Q3. With the financing, Smooth hopes to grow its 12-member team by hiring into engineering and business development functions.
Staging Labs
Reason for attention: 24/7 active and automatic scanning of transactions, and protection of wallets through spending limits.
BlockBeats news, on March 15, Staging Labs, a provider of encryption transaction security solutions, announced the completion of a $1.1 million Pre seed round of financing. The round of financing was participated by The General Partnership, Flourish Ventures, NGC Ventures, AlphaGrep, Gangels, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, and ConsensSys, Coinbase, Anchorage Digital, Chainalysis, Quicknode, Merkle Science, etc.
The original goal of Staging Labs was to create an "SOS button" for crypto transactions, similar to a credit card Freeze option. But the team quickly realized the limitations of this approach — it wouldn’t help if users were far away from their devices — so the team reiterated the concept and came up with a more advanced version called Saferoot, which can be proactive 24/7 Transactions are scanned automatically.
In a malicious attack, Saferoot works by automatically removing digital assets from vulnerable The wallet is transferred to a backup safe. This is done by intercepting the transaction after the user hits "send" but just before the funds go through. Blockchain technology is considered immutable, or it cannot be changed after clicking "Confirm". This is technically incorrect because transactions are pending or processed for a short period of time. So this is how Saferoot steps in.
Saferoot itself does not predict or detect malicious attacks. Instead, it sends an alert when a transaction exceeds a user-defined limit, similar to how people protect their credit cards by customizing spending limits. However, the risk monitoring part will get "smarter" over time. Once Saferoot spots a suspicious transaction, it shoots it down and sends another transaction to move assets before hackers steal the funds. The stage Staging Labs is currently involved in is known as the "in-flight" portion of the deal. Longer term, the startup also plans to target pre-flight, which is before a user initiates a transaction, and post-flight, which typically involves recovery of funds and may require law enforcement intervention. The company is already in talks with partners to develop capabilities for the latter two phases.
Although Saferoot appears to be a SaaS solution, its monetization path varies different. Recognizing that fund protection is an important part of asset transfers, the company plans to charge users a subscription fee and a percentage of successfully recovered assets.
Remaining financing in the infrastructure sector includes:
BlockBeats news, on March 17, asset cross-chain protocol TeleportDAO announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed round of financing, led by AppWorks and DefinanceX, Quantstamp, Coinlist , Candaq Fintech Group, SNZ Holding Limited and Gate Labs participated in the investment. This round of financing will be used for product development and expanding the team. Founded in February 2022, TeleportDAO is a decentralized infrastructure that connects blockchains together, helping developers build cross-chain applications. Currently, it has created a fully decentralized Bitcoin wrapper teleBTC and a trading platform TeleSwap on Polygon. TeleportDAO aims to scale to multiple EVM and non-EVM chains to become a trusted infrastructure for secure cross-chain interactions.
Digital asset management/payment
In digital assets There are a total of 5 financings in the field of management/payment, with a total amount of more than 3 million US dollars, accounting for 4.59% of the total financing last week.
Capsule
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Reason for attention: a16z invests, and in the future it will be possible to create a wallet that can interact with each application.
BlockBeats news, on March 15, encrypted wallet infrastructure startup Capsule completed a new round of financing, the financing amount has not yet been disclosed, Andreessen Horowitz (via its accelerator Crypto Startup School) and Geometry co-led the round, with participation from Spice Capital, Anchorage co-founders Diogo Monica and Nathan McCauley, Celo co-founders Rene Reinsberg and Marek Olszewski, and Sommelier Finance co-founder Zaki Manian, among others. a16z’s CSS Accelerator program typically invests $500,000 in participating startups in exchange for a 7% equity stake. Capsule, founded last year by Nitya Subramanian, former product lead at Layer 1 blockchain Celo, aims to help developers create wallets with interoperable transactions. It currently has four employees, and Subramanian is looking to add some engineers.
Soul Wallet
Reason to watch: ERC-4337 self-hosted Ethereum wallet
Block Beats news , On March 16, Soul Wallet, a self-hosted wallet, announced the completion of a $3 million seed round of financing. Soul Wallet has a team of twelve people, located in the United States, Japan, Thailand and China. Its co-founder is Jiajun Zeng, who was previously the product manager of ByteDance and Meituan, and is also an active member of the Ethereum community.
Soul Wallet is a self-hosted Ethereum wallet based on ERC-4337, which is currently in progress Internal testing for users to create, use and conduct social recovery through plug-in extensions and mobile apps. Soul Wallet is currently undergoing internal testing and plans to release it in Q3 or Q4 after going through a series of rigorous audits.
The advantage of Soul Wallet is that it allows users to self-custody their own cryptocurrency without the need Rely on centralized service providers. Soul Wallet also allows users to recover lost private keys through social networks without needing to remember complicated mnemonic phrases. Soul Wallet also offers some unique tools, such as "Best Fit", which can help users find the best credit card for them based on their individual needs and preferences.
Founder Zeng believes that Ethereum is driving smart contract wallets as the future of Ethereum, so dApp developers will be motivated to switch. Soul Wallet is targeting the next billion cryptocurrency adopters, not trying to steal users from companies like MetaMask. They believe that in developing countries such as South America and Africa, people are using cryptocurrencies to hedge against currency inflation, so the market depends on the popularity of encryption technology in these regions, while for developed countries, the market depends on the development of dApps and NFTs way and direction of development.
Remaining financing in the field of digital asset management/payment includes:
BlockBeats news, on March 14, DeFiance Capital completed the first round of "eight-figure" funds for its new liquidity token fund round of financing and will start investing this month. While that could mean anywhere between $10 million and $99 million, the source said the initial funding was less than $50 million last year. BlockBeats previously reported that Arthur Cheong, founder of DeFiance Capital, plans to raise $100 million for the new fund, and has already received nearly half of the amount of funding commitments.
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