According to BlockBeats statistics, there were a total of 8 financing deals last week, which is significantly lower than before. The total amount raised was approximately 18.95 million US dollars, with an average financing amount of 236.88 thousand US dollars. Other industries dominated the financing, with relatively more in the NFT/digital fashion sector and an increase in the DeFi sector. The infrastructure and social/creator economy sectors had fewer deals, while the digital asset management/payment and metaverse/GameFi sectors had none. The following chart shows the financing distribution across different sectors last week:

NFT/Digital Fashion

There were a total of 1 financing in the NFT/digital fashion field, with a total amount exceeding 3.75 million US dollars, accounting for 19.79% of the total financing amount last week.

FirstMate

On August 28th, NFT marketplace FirstMate announced the completion of a $3.75 million financing round, led by Dragonfly Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures and NextView.

FirstMate was founded in 2022 by former Instagram and Walmart employees. It is a startup company that aims to provide digital storefronts for NFT creators, with the goal of refocusing the NFT market on creators. According to the announcement, FirstMate's focus is on creators rather than the market. This is reflected in allowing artists to centralize all of their works on one platform, regardless of where they were created, and giving them full control over royalties.

FirstMate provides users with their own aggregator, which retrieves orders from Opensea, LooksRare, x2y2, Foundation, and more. Users can get a link to their own page's Discord bot to view analysis of their collectors, minted derivatives, and more. FirstMate does not charge fees for market transactions during this process. FirstMate uses decentralized protocols such as Arweave, Seaport, and Reservoir, whose transaction volumes have reached billions of dollars.

FirstMate has so far represented Bankless, Gmoney's 9dcc, FELT Zine, Sound.xyz and other markets. Its market currently supports over a thousand series, covering various fields from generative art to luxury clothing. FirstMate has also launched a beta version of its market website builder, collaborating with another startup in the NFT field, Manifold.

DeFi

There were a total of 1 financing in the DeFi field, with a total amount exceeding 3.5 million US dollars, accounting for 18.47% of the total financing amount last week.

Stroom Network

On August 31st, Stroom Network, a Bitcoin Lightning Network liquidity collateral project, completed a $3.5 million seed round of financing. Greenfield led the investment, with strategic support from Ankr's Mission Street venture capital department, as well as participation from Lemniscap, No Limit Holdings, Cogitent Ventures, and several other venture capital firms and angel investors. Stroom DAO is a financial protocol between the Bitcoin Lightning Network and EVM-based blockchains (such as Ethereum). Stroom Network provides users with the ability to use Bitcoin on both the Lightning Network (LN) and Ethereum without trust through a liquidity collateral mechanism. Stroom's goal is to build a bridge between the Lightning Network and DeFi ecosystems on all EVM-compatible chains, starting with Ethereum, to alleviate the technical burden of depositing Bitcoin into the Lightning Network and enable users to earn profits in EVM-compatible DeFi ecosystems.

This protocol effectively allocates BTC deposits within the Lightning Network to generate routing fees, while also generating its equivalent packaged BTC (wBTC) at a 1:1 ratio, called lnBTC, and plans to integrate lnBTC into blue-chip DeFi protocols throughout the ecosystem. This setup is similar to using wBTC, allowing users to pursue yield opportunities on Ethereum. Stroom also turns to a DAO-like structure using a multi-signature computing mechanism to manage funds allocated to payment channels as liquidity. Stroom states that this structure will be able to establish and modify user incentive measures, upgrade protocols, form and use treasuries, and participate in and make decisions related to fee collection.

Social/Creative Economy

There were a total of 2 financing rounds in the social/creator economy sector, with a total amount exceeding 2 million US dollars, accounting for 10.55% of the total financing amount last week.

Tako Protocol

On September 1st, Web3 social protocol Tako Protocol completed a $2 million Pre-Seed round of financing. The round was participated by UOB Venture, DWF Ventures under DWF Labs, Mask Network, Signum Capital, AC Capital, SmrtiLab, HashBrown Research, RSS3, and some angel investors. Tako Protocol is an open recommendation protocol designed to build an open social recommendation infrastructure protocol for Web3 social networks. The protocol aims to address centralization issues through peer-to-peer and value-matching recommendation models. Developers can use Tako to more effectively create dApps with recommendation algorithms, advertising systems, curation mechanisms, and recommendation economies. This helps users participate in decentralized social networks, enabling them to generate, share, discover, and match value.

Compared with the centralized model, this method provides content creators with a more personalized and effective way to reach target audiences and profit through user-targeted advertising. The shift from "platform as curator" to "user as curator" allows all participants to contribute to the recommendation economy and receive rewards, with the value directly passed on to users, promoting the flow of content value in Web3 Social.

According to the TaKo official website, TaKo's network development is divided into seven stages, and it has currently progressed to the third stage. It is expected to launch the main network in the fourth quarter of 2023 and establish a community ecosystem. Tako Protocol has established strategic partnerships with major Web3 social networks such as Lens protocol and Farcaster. Tako will collaborate with these social networks to launch product testing next month.

Other financing for social/creator economy includes:

On August 29th, Lyvely, a social network and content monetization platform in the UAE, completed its seed round of financing with Cypher Capital as the lead investor. More investment details have not yet been disclosed. Lyvely will develop a token seamlessly integrated into the platform, allowing anyone to profit from online content or services.

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Infrastructure

In the infrastructure field, a total of 2 financings were completed with a total amount of over 3.1 million US dollars, accounting for 16.36% of the total financing amount last week.

IronMill

On August 30th, IronMill, a web3 infrastructure startup based in California, announced the completion of a $2.6 million Pre-Seed round of financing. The round was led by gumi Cryptos Capital, with participation from Blockchain Builders Fund, Superscrypt, LongHash, Kestrel 0x1, and SevenX. IronMill is currently building a verifiable internet, including privacy protection technology, fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and blockchain integrity tools, allowing them to seamlessly integrate zero-knowledge (ZK) technology into new applications and bridge the gap between zero-knowledge proofs and internet-scale systems.

IronMill provides tools for circuit selection, integration into popular on-chain and off-chain programming environments, and optimized deployment across multiple infrastructure platforms to build integrated solutions for software developers who want to deploy zero-knowledge systems. By providing developers with the necessary tools and simplified integration processes, IronMill paves the way for enhanced privacy and security solutions across various platforms.

IronMill's flagship project Oxide is a user-friendly zero-knowledge circuit (zk circuit) package manager that breaks through the boundaries of cryptographic technology advancement. It aims to promote the rapid development and experimentation of zk applications, in line with IronMill's broader goal of creating an infrastructure suite that supports the concept of a verifiable internet. This reflects IronMill's commitment to maximizing the potential of this advanced encryption technology. IronMill's strategic focus makes it a promising player in advancing web3 infrastructure and the field of cryptographic applications.

Infrastructure's remaining financing includes:

On August 31st, decentralized GPU resource network GPU.Net completed a $500,000 financing round with participation from Momentum 6 and Alphablockz. The company has also received support from Nvidia and Taanga Studios, and is expected to launch the GPU.Net testnet next month. GPU.Net aims to meet the computing power needs of new technologies such as generative AI, Web3 metaverse, cryptocurrency mining, and high-end graphics rendering by providing decentralized GPU infrastructure.

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Other Financing

Other financing totaled 2 transactions, with a total amount of 6.6 million US dollars, accounting for 34.84% of the total financing amount last week. Including:

On August 31st, Web3 marketing company DeForm completed a $4.6 million seed round of financing, led by Kindred Ventures with participation from Elad Gil and Scalar Capital. DeForm provides blockchain-based tools for marketers to expand their digital marketing efforts. Marketers can use the DeForm platform to understand users based on their wallet transaction history and token ownership, in order to provide tailored marketing plans. The platform itself is not related to blockchain, but is built on the Layer 1 network Alchemy.

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On August 28th, Web3 talent and project network BuidlerDAO announced the completion of a $2 million angel round of financing, led by Sequoia China Seed Fund and SevenX Ventures, with participation from Bing Ventures, M77 Ventures, DRK Lab, Gate Labs, MirrorWorld, Conflux, and others. BuidlerDAO is a project from the YUÈ01 period of Sequoia China's startup accelerator and has also received invitations to join Hong Kong Science Park and Cyberport. BuidlerDAO was founded in June 2022 and received a $500,000 investment from Panda Capital in its seed round. BuidlerDAO brings together Web3 practitioners in investment research, technology, operations, and other fields to organize content output and product practice in a DAO manner, building a global network for Buidler connection and collaboration.

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