The 15th Week of 2023 Financing Highlights, Irene Zhao Social Platform Receives DWF Investment
According to BlockBeats statistics, the total number of financing last week was 20, a slight decrease from last week, with a total amount of about 163.3 million US dollars , with an average financing amount of US$8.16 million. Among them, financing in infrastructure and other fields occupies the main body, DeFi financing is relatively more, the amount of financing in asset management payment and social/creator economy fields has decreased, and Metaverse/Gamefi is less. The following picture shows the financing ratio of each sector last week:
Metaverse/GameFi
A total of 1 financing in the Metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount of 3 million US dollars, accounting for 1.84% of the total financing last week.
LandVault
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Reason for attention: The largest "Metaverse Land Developer" has cooperated with many top IRL brands such as Hershey's, Heineken, L'Oreal and MasterCard.
On March 28, Metaverse construction developer LandVault completed a US$3 million Series B extension round of financing, with participation from The Sandbox, Gemini Frontier Fund, HodlCo and hedge fund Kingsway Capital. BlockBeats reported last week that LandVault announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$37 million, led by The Sandbox, SoftBank and Kingsway Capital, with participation from HodlCo and Gemini Frontier Fund. LandVault previously completed a $25 million Series B round in November 2021.
LandVault was established in 2017. Over the past 2 years, LandVault has worked with many top IRL brands like Hershey's, Heineken, L'Oreal, and Mastercard, helping them build brand themed metaverses on Decentraland or The Sandbox. So far, the company has more than 300 metaverse projects, with a team size of more than 120 people.
NFT/Digital Fashion
A total of 3 financings in the field of NFT/digital fashion, with a total amount of more than 7 million US dollars, accounting for 4.29% of the total financing last week.
Muverse
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Reason for attention: With liquidity, can music NFT rise like PFP?
On March 30, Muverse, a music NFT exchange, announced the completion of a $6 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was funded by early investors Syndicate Capital, Knights Templar Capital, Zonff Partners, AvatarDAO, Sun Artland Ltd and BN Blue Fox Limited participated in the investment.
The funds from this seed round of financing will be used to expand the functions and services of the platform, accelerate user acquisition, and improve user experience. The platform is developing its second phase of products, which will include a music NFT exchange, NFT fragmentation functionality, and an AMM pool for its F-NFT/MCT transactions.
Muverse is a platform for global music NFT free trading, allowing music artists, investors and fans around the world to participate in frictionless transactions. The platform provides users with rich, gamified interaction, investment and income scenarios, including a rhythm game combined with a revenue model, and an NFT exchange that provides users with sufficient liquidity.
The remaining financing in the NFT/digital fashion field includes:
On March 30, music producer and Web3 enthusiast Daniel Allan announced that he has raised $1 million in seed rounds to build music NFT project Daniel Allan Entertainment, this round of financing was led by Coop Records, Palm Tree Crew Crypto, Noise DAO, Woodstock DAO and Fire Eyes DAO, as well as angel investors Adam Kornfield, Ante Hoathe and DegenDavinci participated in the investment. Daniel Allan said that the first music NFT will be produced in April 2021. Over the past year and a half, its NFTs have grossed 228 ETH in primary sales and 105 ETH in secondary sales.
DeFi
In There are a total of 3 financings in the DeFi field, with a total amount of 11.5 million US dollars, accounting for 7.04% of the total financing last week.
Davos Protocol
Reason for attention: The Polygon stablecoin project is built on the MakerDAO mechanism.
On March 27, Davos Protocol, an over-collateralized stablecoin project, announced that it has received investment from LD Capital. Davos Protocol currently supports mortgaging MATIC to mint the stablecoin DAVOS.
Davos Protocol aims to combine its stable currency DAVOS with an innovative liquidity staking mechanism to solve the problem of liquidity locking while maintaining a high price stability. Its mechanism is built on the MakerDAO architecture.
BlockBeats previously reported that on January 18, Davos announced the completion of a $500,000 pre-seed round of financing, with Polygon Ventures and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal participating.
Cega
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Reason for attention: Dragonfly Capital and Pantera Capital participated in the investment, DeFi derivatives created by professional traders.
On March 28, Cega, a DeFi derivatives protocol founded by former UBS derivatives trader Arisa Toyosaki, announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$5 million. This round of financing was funded by Dragonfly Capital Leading the round, with participation from Pantera Capital and Robot Ventures. Funding from this round will be used to launch new products including leveraged options on Ethereum, and existing products will continue to be available on Solana. Cega also plans to launch a new market-making entity called Tras Mobian next week, which will focus on both common and exotic cryptocurrency derivatives.
Prior to this, Cega also completed a $4.3 million seed round of financing in March last year, led by Dragonfly Capital, Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Solana Ventures and others participated in the investment.
Econia Labs
Reasons to watch: Aptos Hyperparallel Order Book, designed to be the Aptos DeFi settlement layer.
On March 29, Econia Labs, the Aptos ecological DeFi infrastructure protocol, completed a $6.5 million seed round financing, led by Dragonfly, Lightspeed Faction, Wintermute Ventures, Hudson River Trading, Aptos Labs and Flow Traders and others participated in the investment.
Econia Labs aims to develop a backend protocol that provides order book trading, for composability Designed to support integration with DeFi applications that offer a range of trading options, such as spot trading or leveraged derivatives, it aims to be Aptos' DeFi settlement layer. The Econia order book uses an ultra-parallel processing model to provide performance at the scale of the entire network.
Social/Creator Economy
A total of 2 financings in the social field, with a total amount of 5.5 million US dollars, accounting for 3.37% of the total financing last week.
SO-COL
Reason for attention: "Web3 internet celebrity" Irene Zhao and rising investment star DWF, what kind of sparks can they create?
On March 28, SO-COL, a Web3 social platform founded by Irene Zhao, completed a new round of financing of US$4.5 million, which was fully supported by DWF Labs.
BlockBeats previously reported that Web3 social platform SO-COL announced in February last year that it was completed by DeFiance Capital and A $1.75 million seed round led by Animoca Brands. The platform is a social platform that helps creators issue NFT, and is committed to creating a decentralized alternative to Discord, Snapshot and OnlyFans.
The rest of the social/creator economy funding includes:
On March 31, Ensemble, a Web3 art platform, announced the completion of a $1 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was led by Collab+Currency, and Lattice , Builder Capital participated in the investment, angel investors include Block0 co-founder Manu Andorra and individual investor Ben Roy. It is reported that Ensemble aims to provide a platform for artists to sell works in the process of creating manuscripts. Artists earn income by selling storyboards, art research, design drafts and sharing experiences with users in the process of creation.
Infrastructure
A total of 4 financings in the field of infrastructure, with a total amount of more than 74.5 million US dollars, accounting for 45.62% of the total financing last week.
EigenLabs
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Reason for attention: Ethereum Re-Pledge Association and Blockchain lead the investment
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On March 29th, the developer of EigenLayer, the Ethereum re-pledging protocol EigenLabs completed $50 million in Series A financing, led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Electric Capital, Polychain Capital, Hack VC, Finality Capital Partners, Coinbase Ventures, and IOSG Venture. EigenLabs has previously completed a $14.5 million seed round of financing, co-led by Polychain Capital and Ethereal Ventures.
EigenLayer is a re-staking mechanism designed to enable Ethereum stakers to use their stake $ETH to secure other networks, i.e. enhance network security with the same initial capital. The mechanism utilizes a series of smart contracts that allow $ETH stakeholders to contribute their computing resources and capital to middleware services. Middleware services provide a range of functions, such as message routing, data management, authentication, and security. These services enable different systems to communicate efficiently even if they use different programming languages/have different data formats.
Pooling security through re-staking This allows modules to pass re-staked ETH instead of their tokens for protection. Re-staking requirements vary by application, and stakers can support the services they want based on their own hardware capabilities. In exchange, re-stakers are rewarded from Ethereum fees and compensated from middleware services. The module imposes additional slashing conditions on $ETH staked by validators, and validators receive additional income for providing security and verification services.
Conduit
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Reason for attention: Paradigm leads the investment and helps developers transition to the Superchain chain
On March 28, encryption infrastructure startup Conduit Completed a $7 million seed round of financing led by Paradigm.
Conduit is a crypto-native infrastructure platform designed to empower and accelerate builders in the crypto space. Conduit's first product was created with Optimism (OP), allowing teams to spin up production-grade rollups based on the OP Stack in a fraction of the time, scaling their applications 100x. Conduit and the Optimism Foundation will work together to support developers launching applications on-chain and transitioning to their upcoming Superchain blockchain network.
Application-specific rollups on Conduit are started, maintained and extended by infrastructure professionals, So teams can focus on what matters most: building products that users love. DeFi protocols, gaming companies, NFT platforms, and other on-chain providers can use Conduit to quickly and easily scale their applications, provide a better user experience, and unlock new use cases that were previously impossible due to network congestion. The Conduit deployment includes a block explorer, auto-scalable RPC, metrics, and samsczun’s transaction tracker, all of which will run the same technology as the Optimism mainnet and will be secured by Ethereum.
Conduit's target customers include decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, gaming companies and non-fungible Token (NFT) platform, etc. Teams launching rollups using Conduit are eligible for certain fees and financial incentives.
Remaining financing in the infrastructure sector includes:
On March 27, JDI Global, a Web3 hardware manufacturer, announced the completion of a new round of financing, with participation from Dragonfly, Futuremoney, LinkVc, Lancer and other institutions. JDI said that this financing will help it further strengthen technology research and development, expand market share, and accelerate product landing.
Digital asset management/payment
A total of 3 financings in the field of digital asset management/payment, with a total amount of more than 3.8 million US dollars, accounting for 2.33% of the total financing last week.
Ledger
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3 月30 日，硬件Wallet Ledger closes €100 million ($109 million) funding round at a valuation of €1.3 billion, with new investors True Global Ventures, Cit Gestion SPV, Digital Finance Group and VaynerFund and existing investors 10T, Cap Horn, Morgan Creek and Cathay Innovation participated, with Goldman Sachs Bank Europe SE acting as sole placement agent and Jones Day serving as legal counsel.
The hardware wallet Ledger can cooperate with the Ledger Live application to protect, store and manage encrypted assets best solution. The Ledger Live app is a one-stop cryptocurrency shop. It can realize the buying, selling, swapping and growing assets of partners, and can protect, store and manage more than 1,800 encrypted assets, and the sales volume of hardware wallets exceeds 3 million.
Polytrade
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3 月30 日，基于Blockchain-based trade finance protocol Polytrade has raised $3.8 million in a seed round led by Alpha Wave, Matrix Partners, Polygon Ventures and CoinSwitch Ventures, with participation from Singularity Ventures and GTM Ventures. The company was previously backed by Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and QuickSwap co-founder Sameep Singhania, among others.
Polytrade's initial modules include a financing arm to bring real world benefits to Web3, the platform aims to provide working capital financing to SMEs and large enterprises and invoices. The company is open to the retail market, but it is primarily focused on institutional players and also hopes to expand in Latin American, US and European markets.
Remaining financing in the field of digital asset management/payment includes:
On March 30, Mobee, an Indonesian cryptocurrency trading platform, completed a new round of financing. The specific amount was not disclosed. 1982 Ventures led the investment, and several Indonesian family offices and individuals invested voters. It is reported that the funds raised by Mobee will be used to expand the business, launch new products, and hire more senior personnel from the financial services and digital asset industries.
Other financing
< p>A total of 4 other financings, with a total amount of 58 million US dollars, accounting for 35.52% of the total financing last week. Including:
On March 29, Fetch.ai, a Web3 protocol focused on artificial intelligence, won the DWF Labs invested $40 million, and this round of financing will be used to deploy decentralized machine learning, autonomous agents, and network infrastructure.
On March 29, FedML, a collaborative AI company, announced the completion of a $6 million seed round and Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Camford Capital, Plug and Play Ventures, AimTop Ventures, Acequia Capital, Investors including LDV Partners participated. The distributed MLOps platform launched by FedML supports the sharing of data, models, and computing resources in a manner that protects data privacy and security. Currently, 10 enterprise contracts have been signed, covering Web3 applications and more.
March 30, Real Estate District Blockchain startup Coadjute has raised £4 million ($5 million), led by Praetura Ventures, with participation from Reech Corporations Group and others. The funds will be used to expand its network in the real estate market. Coadjute, a blockchain-based workflow solution that enables transparency into the progress of property transactions, uses the Corda enterprise blockchain, following an $8 million funding round in late 2021.
On March 31, the digital trading platform TradeWindow completed 7 million US dollars in equity financing, and BSV protocol developer nChain participated in the investment. After the completion of this financing transaction, nChain will hold 19.99% of the company's shares and Join its board of directors. It is reported that TradeWindow, established in December 2018, is a software company listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX), providing digital solutions for exporters, importers, freight forwarders, etc. TradeWindow will improve the performance of its trading platform by adopting BSV.
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