According to BlockBeats statistics, there were a total of 13 financing deals last week, which is consistent with the previous week. The total amount raised was approximately 376 million US dollars, with an average financing amount of 28.9385 million US dollars. The majority of the financing deals were in the digital asset management/payment sector, with relatively more deals in the infrastructure and Web3+AI sectors. The DeFi sector saw an increase in financing deals, while the metaverse/GameFi, social/creator economy, and other sectors saw fewer financing deals. There were no financing deals in the NFT/digital fashion sector. The following chart shows the financing distribution across different sectors last week:

Metaverse/GameFi

There were a total of 1 financing in the Metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount of 1.9 million US dollars, accounting for 0.51% of the total financing amount last week.

Hungri Games

On August 23rd, Web3 game developer Hungri Games announced the completion of a $1.9 million seed round of financing with a valuation of $23 million. Bogazici Ventures led the investment, with participation from Roko Finance, Preston Labs, Triple Dragon, Erol Ozmandiraci, and Sebastien Borget, the COO and co-founder of The Sandbox. The new funds will be used to accelerate the development of the Web3 role-playing horse racing game "Metahorse Unity." (hackernoon)

Hungri Games was founded by Kagan Berk Kocak in 2019 and is a game studio consisting of over 30 team members. It is headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey and Belfast, Northern Ireland, specializing in Web3 games. It is known for its hybrid genres, such as racing RPGs and action strategy games.

Hungri Games combines horse racing with RPG elements and introduces a free-to-play business model as a monetization tool. Players will be able to train, breed, and race horses in a rich virtual world, participating in a strategy game that has the potential to redefine the genre. The creation of a secondary market will become one of the basic ecosystems for Metahorse Unity's retention and monetization, with multiple features supporting this creator and trader-based horse racing ecosystem. Hungri Games recently announced a partnership with Polygon.

DeFi

In the DeFi field, a total of 2 financings were completed with a total amount exceeding 5 million US dollars, accounting for 1.33% of the total financing amount last week.

LuminaDEX

On August 24th, LuminaDEX, a DEX in the Mina ecosystem of lightweight blockchain protocol, announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing. Investors include Mina Foundation, Jump Crypto, BigBrain Holdings, and Mina development team O(1) Labs. The amount of financing has not been disclosed.

LuminaDEX solves many challenges faced by traditional decentralized exchanges by allowing permissioned liquidity pools and compliant privacy supported by zkKYC and zkSNARKs. LuminaDEX is highly scalable and maintains user privacy while complying with KYC and AML regulations, and supports zkKYC for compliance, helping enterprise users migrate Web2 and traditional financial businesses to Web3. LuminaDEX can scale transaction throughput and achieve MEV resistance as users can submit transactions without revealing transaction data before trading, maintaining a fair and transparent trading environment for institutional and retail users.

According to the whitepaper, LuminaDEX's roadmap includes Protocol Governance, Global Exit, Liquid Staking, KYC zkOracle, Liquidity information, and P2P Networking.

This round of financing will enable LuminaDEX to more quickly meet the growing demand from enterprises and financial institutions for private and licensed DeFi solutions.

Maple Finance

On August 22nd, according to Decrypt, Maple Finance, a crypto lending protocol, completed a $5 million financing round with Tioga Capital and Blocktower Capital leading the investment and GSR Ventures, Cherry Ventures, Veris Ventures, and The Spartan Group participating. Maple Finance provides loans to institutional borrowers and offers fixed income opportunities to lenders. Maple is a capital market on the blockchain that focuses on providing high-quality loan opportunities to accredited investors, both institutional and individual, to meet their liquidity, risk control, and return requirements. On Maple, credit professionals manage a fast-moving loan business, pooling capital to lend to institutional borrowers and provide funding for business growth and operations. To date, the total amount of loans issued exceeds $2.6 billion, and the total amount of deposits exceeds $52.65 million.

This agreement is managed by Maple Token (MPL), which allows fund pool representatives and credit professionals to establish their own credit facilities on the blockchain and open their services to different borrowers to extract funds from their fund pools. For example, in 2021, Icebreaker Finance launched a $300 million loan pool on Maple to help Bitcoin miners who suffered losses during the bear market. Recently, the platform launched a new fund pool that allows qualified investors in the United States to invest in tokenized Treasury bills.

Although Maple's 20 employees are mainly distributed in Western Europe and North America, some of its major borrowers come from Hong Kong and Singapore. The new financing will be used for Maple's strategic expansion in the Asia-Pacific region (recently, Singapore and Hong Kong have relaxed their regulation on cryptocurrencies), as well as for the construction of its newly launched pure loan department, Maple Direct.

Social/Creative Economy

There were a total of 1 financing in the social/creator economy sector, with a total amount exceeding 600,000 US dollars, accounting for 0.16% of the total financing amount last week.

XShares

On August 22nd, Negentropy Capital and BitValue Capital announced a joint investment of $600,000 in the decentralized social project XShares seed round. XShares is committed to promoting the tokenization of personal social exchange value and leading innovation in the decentralized social field. XShares has launched a stock trading market where users can freely participate in ETH-based transactions according to their preferences. Users can freely purchase stocks of their favorite influencers or friends, and also profit by selling stocks. The platform charges a stock sales fee to protect shareholder rights and maintain liquidity.

XShares is a decentralized trading platform for KOL shares built on the X (formerly Twitter) social ecosystem. By introducing a personal social token model, the platform incentivizes users to participate in and create high-quality content. The platform's tipping mechanism allows creators to participate in pricing decisions and customize their own price curves. High-quality content will be converted into corresponding income, making XShares a potential way for users to earn substantial income. XShares will bring a new value exchange model to X.com's self-media KOLs and create more value for social platform users. The XShares project will soon issue a new social token, X Token, with a circulation of 100 billion.

The team was formed in July 2023 and is expected to release a beta version in September, inviting the first batch of users to experience it. The official version will be launched in October and will be available on both iOS and Android platforms.

Infrastructure

There were a total of 4 financing deals in the infrastructure sector, with a total amount of over 30.2 million US dollars, accounting for 8.03% of the total financing amount last week.

Nodal Power

On August 22nd, Nodal Power, an energy company that provides power for cryptocurrency mining, completed a $13 million seed round of financing. The investors have not been disclosed. Nodal Power stated that a large portion of the funds have been used for the construction and operation of two power plants within the United States.

The first power plant is located in the southeastern United States, which transmits electricity generated from landfill gas to the local power grid. Nodal has developed and implemented landfill gas power generation data center technology and systems, supported by Nodal Controllable Resources (NCR), to optimize energy sales and data center computing loads. NCR can maximize revenue per kilowatt hour through patented IP and proprietary software currently under application. The second power plant is located in the western mountainous region and has an off-grid Bitcoin mining data center that uses methane gas generated during the organic waste decomposition process in landfills to produce renewable power for supply.

With the help of off-grid (no grid connection) data centers and power systems, Nodal Power can quickly and effectively utilize wasted energy, generate income for landfills, reduce methane, and enable many projects to connect to the grid. The network of grid-connected and off-grid power plants collaborates with top domestic and international landfill owners or operators to provide the best beneficial use of landfill gas.

A data center is set up at the power plant site, which can provide a pricing bottom line for power generation. Bitcoin mining is an important source of computation that can be quickly started or stopped without the need for the continuous normal operation time required by traditional cloud providers' data centers. Bitcoin mining data centers can bring strong EBITDA profits and serve as profit centers for the project. Ultimately, it can enable the project to achieve profitability in the time-consuming interconnection process.

More than 50% of people expect the EBITDA profit margin to reach a certain scale, ensuring the ability to add renewable base load electricity to the grid and operate high computing data center workloads sustainably. Nodal Power plans to allocate additional funds for the development of the third power plant, which is scheduled to be completed in early 2024.

Cryptoworth

On August 25th, according to official sources, Cryptoworth, a cryptocurrency solution company, announced that it has completed a strategic investment. The specific amount of financing is unknown, with CMT Digital leading the investment and Kyber Ventures, Saison, Capital, ODA Capital, and Polygon Ventures participating. This round of financing will be used to accelerate the market expansion of Cryptoworth's enterprise digital asset accounting solution. Cryptoworth has obtained SOC 2 Type 2 certification and currently provides product services to more than 100 blockchain companies such as Axie Infinity, Solana Foundation, Celo Foundation, Avara Labs (Aave), Kava Labs, Big Brain Holdings, and The Moonbeam Foundation to ensure their Web3 enterprise financial compliance and audit readiness.

Cryptoworth, as a SOC 2 Type 2 certified solution provider, will become the gold standard tool for web3 finance, while creating a new category of digital asset financial operations tools for all systems behind it. Cryptoworth allows users to connect to all web3 digital asset data from over 1000 wallets, trading platforms, and NFT markets in seconds.

Cryptoworth fills a significant gap in the field of crypto accounting by simplifying the complex task of converting crypto transactions into comprehensive accounting and financial reports seamlessly integrated with mainstream accounting platforms. Cryptoworth's automation features streamline the coordination of all cryptocurrency data with popular small and medium-sized enterprise and enterprise accounting software such as Quickbooks, Xero, Netsuite, and SAP.

Infrastructure's remaining financing includes:

On August 24th, according to Crypto News, Web3 interactive platform Raleon announced the completion of a $3.8 million seed round of financing, with Blockchange, Play Ventures, Alliance DAO, and Portal Ventures participating. The funds will be used to continue building the platform and help with project and brand development. Raleon was founded in 2022, and its SaaS platform uses growth analytics, Web3 marketing automation, embedded tasks, and off-chain and on-chain data to optimize user retention and conversion for any Web3 project.

On August 23rd, Anytype, a decentralized local peer-to-peer open source tool, announced that it has completed a new round of funding of $13.4 million. Balderton Capital led the investment, with participation from Inflection, Square One, Script Capital, Protocol Labs, Connect Ventures, New Forge, Foreword VC, and a group of well-known angel investors in the Web3 field. Anytype's locally-centered peer-to-peer open source tool provides users with the initial expectation of network freedom, while protecting privacy, data autonomy, and control. By combining no-code tools with decentralized architecture, creators and communities can build networks in their own way.

Digital Asset Management/Payment

In the field of digital asset management/payment, a total of 2 financing deals were completed with a total amount exceeding 300 million US dollars, accounting for 79% of the total financing amount last week.

BitOasis

On August 25th, according to Bloomberg, BitOasis, a cryptocurrency trading platform in the Middle East and North Africa, completed a new round of financing. The specific transaction terms and valuation have not been disclosed. This round of financing was participated by Indian cryptocurrency trading platform CoinDCX, existing investor Wamda Capital, and Jump Capital. Previously, BlockBeats reported that on October 6th, 2021, BitOasis announced the completion of a $30 million Series B financing round, led by Jump Capital and Wamda, with participation from Alameda Research, Global Founders Capital, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, and NXMH.

Ramp

On August 23rd, according to TechCrunch, financial technology company Ramp announced that it had completed a $300 million financing at a post-investment valuation of $5.8 billion. Thrive Capital and Sands Capital led the investment, with General Catalyst, Founders Fund, and other existing supporters participating. The new funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand recruitment in the second half of this year. Ramp had previously notified cryptocurrency companies using its corporate card service that it would significantly reduce spending limits and enforce new requirements.

Web3+AI Field

Web3+AI has received a total of 2 rounds of funding, with a total amount of 38.5 million US dollars, accounting for 10.23% of last week's total funding. This includes:

On August 21st, according to Finsmes, AI digital identity provider Prins AI completed a $22 million A+ round of financing, with specific investors yet to be disclosed. Prior to this, Prins AI had raised $10 million in Series A financing, with notable investors including Base 10, Kleiner Perkins, and Paradigm. The company plans to use the new funds to advance deep learning technology, expand its team, strengthen product development capabilities, and improve the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts. Prins AI provides AI-driven digital character training products that enable enterprises, brands, celebrities, individuals, and others to establish unique digital identities and contribute to the creation of a comprehensive digital ecosystem. The platform uses blockchain technology and smart contracts to record the training and application records of AI digital characters, and uses cryptocurrency reward mechanisms to enable users to participate in AI digital character training programs. This technology has been applied in various scenarios such as broadcasting media, brand marketing, e-commerce live streaming/short videos, education and entertainment, AR/VR/AI, NFT/metaverse, etc.

On August 23rd, Ideogram AI, a generative AI tool, completed a $16.5 million seed round of financing. The round was led by a16z and Index Ventures, with participation from AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures, Two Small Fish Ventures, and others. Ideogram AI's mission is to help people become more creative through generative artificial intelligence. They are developing cutting-edge AI tools to make creative expression easier, more fun, and more efficient. BlockBeats notes that in March of this year, four top AI researchers left Google to create a startup called Mobius AI. Within about a week, a16z and Index Ventures had both made financing offers. At that time, Mobius AI was valued at about $100 million. It is unclear whether there is any connection between Mobius AI and Ideogram AI, although both companies have former Google AI researchers on their teams.

Other Financing

Other financing includes 1 undisclosed transaction.

On August 24th, according to TechCrunch, Irreverent Labs, an AI video generation startup founded by former Microsoft executive Rahul Sood, announced the completion of a new round of financing, led by Samsung Next, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics. The specific amount has not been disclosed. BlockBeats previously reported that Irreverent Labs completed a $5 million seed round of financing in November 2021, led by a16z. It is an NFT game company that is preparing to develop an "play-to-earn" game with AI characters that is easy to use, called MechaFightClub, a robot fighting game that uses non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

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