Financing Highlights | OKX Ventures leads investment in NAVI Protocol, a liquidity protocol; Variant leads investment in Gevulot, a zero-knowledge proof blockchain.
According to BlockBeats statistics, there were a total of 24 financing deals last week, which is a decrease compared to previous weeks. The total amount raised was approximately $104.45 million, with an average financing amount of $4.35 million. The DeFi sector dominated, while there were relatively more deals in the infrastructure and digital asset management/payment sectors. The metaverse/GameFi and NFT/digital fashion sectors saw an increase, while there were fewer deals in the social/creator economy and Web3.0+AI sectors. No financing deals were reported in other sectors. The following chart shows the financing distribution across different sectors last week:
Metaverse/GameFi
There were a total of 2 financings in the Metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount of 8.5 million US dollars, accounting for 8.14% of the total financing amount last week.
Forgotten Playland
On January 30th, Web3 social game Forgotten Playland announced the successful completion of its first round of financing, raising a total of $7 million. This round of financing was participated by Merit Circle, Spartan Group, C2 Ventures, Paper Ventures, and others.
Forgotten Playland will be built on the Beam ecosystem, with Vermilion Studios as the development company led by industry veterans with decades of experience at companies such as EA and Ubisoft. The in-game economy, smart contract design, token, and NFT details will be handled by Merit Circle DAO. Forgotten Playland is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2024, including a series of mini-games. The confirmed games so far are Bump-A-Ball and Jungle Rumble, with more games currently in development.
Bump-A-Ball is a mini-game in Forgotten Playland, where 2 to 4 players try to knock each other off a shrinking wooden platform. As the saw blade cuts the platform, the space shrinks and the difficulty increases. Players must balance offense and defense to survive until the end. Additionally, the SOCIAL HUB in Forgotten Playland provides a place for players to interact socially. In Jungle Rumble, players navigate through a jungle-themed area, avoiding obstacles and becoming the last stuffed toy standing.
Yooldo
On February 1st, according to official sources, the blockchain gaming platform Yooldo announced that it had completed a $1.5 million financing round at a valuation of $13 million. The investors include Bedrock Ventures, Double jump.tokyo, Edimus, Hyperithm, Klaytn Foundation, Manta Network, Neopin, Planetarium, Presto Labs, and Vista Labs. In addition, Grant sponsors include Aptos Foundation, BNB Chain, Immutable X, and Oasys.
This round of financing will be used to improve technology, bring more games to the platform, and develop its community. It is reported that Yooldo has been included in the Consensys Scale Program and Google for Startups Program. The mission of the Yooldo Platform is to bridge the gap between web2 and web3 games, making web3 games and services easier for beginners.
According to Yoldo's official statement, Yoldo aims to ensure the core of gaming revolution and has released its first self-made game "Trouble Punk: Cyber Galz". The game offers cool gameplay, a user-friendly platform, and special rewards, and is committed to creating a persistent gaming world where users can enjoy fun, fair competition, and even create things.
NFT/Digital Fashion
There were a total of 1 financing in the NFT/digital fashion field, with a total amount exceeding 8 million US dollars, accounting for 7.66% of the total financing amount last week.
Pixelmon
On February 2nd, according to The Block, NFT project Pixelmon completed an $8 million seed round of financing, with participation from Foresight Ventures, Animoca Brands, Delphi Ventures, Amber Group, Bing Ventures, Bitscale Capital, Cypher Capital, Mechanism Capital, Sfermion, Spartan Labs, VistaLabs, and angel investors including Ray Chan, founder of 9GAG Inc., Kun Gao, founder and former CEO of Crunchyroll, Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable, Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games, and the founder of Web3 consulting firm Emfarsis, among others.
The funds raised in this round of financing will be used to continue developing its portfolio of casual and mid-core games, including Arena (PVP survival competition), Hunting Grounds (open-world RPG), Kevin the Adventurer (casual game), and PixelPals (casual game). In addition to games, Pixelmon also plans to empower its IP series through peripheral products, trading card games (TCG), animation series, comic books, and more.
Earlier this year, the development of Pixelmon was taken over by LiquidX, a Web3 VC studio that helps build NFT-based projects. According to a press release, LiquidX acquired 60% of the project's shares, and Giulio Xiloyannis, co-founder of LiquidX, will serve as Pixelmon's CEO.
DeFi
In the DeFi field, a total of 8 financings were completed with a total amount of over 50.2 million US dollars, accounting for 48.06% of the total financing amount last week.
NAVI Protocol
On January 31st, according to official sources, Sui's one-stop liquidity protocol NAVI Protocol announced the completion of a $2 million financing round, led by OKX Ventures, dao5, and Hashed, with participation from Mysten Labs, Comma3 Ventures, Mechanism Capital, GeekCartel Capital, Nomad Capital, Coin98 Ventures, Cetus Protocol, Maverick, Viabtc, Assembly Partners, Gate.io, Hailstone Labs, Benqi, and LBank Labs. NAVI Protocol will use the funds from this round of financing to expand its one-stop lending and LSDeFi platform.
NAVI is Sui's previous native one-stop liquidity protocol. It enables users to participate in the Sui ecosystem as liquidity providers or borrowers. Liquidity providers offer assets to the market and earn passive income through yield, while borrowers can flexibly obtain loans for different assets. Navi focuses on providing necessary DeFi infrastructure and aims to become a key player in the rapidly developing DeFi world in the Sui ecosystem.
The innovative features of this protocol, such as the automatic leverage vault and isolation mode, allow users to leverage their assets and gain new trading opportunities with minimal risk. NAVI's design provides support for digital assets of different risk levels, while its advanced security features ensure the protection of user funds and the mitigation of systemic risks. The name "NAVI" comes from an Indian language, meaning "to treat others well". This philosophy is reflected in the NAVI team's commitment to promoting the widespread adoption of DeFi by emphasizing the simplicity and security provided by the Move programming language.
Portal
On January 30th, Bitcoin cross-chain DEX project Portal completed a $34 million seed round of financing, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Arrington Capital, OKX Ventures, and Gate Ventures.
Portal is a cross-chain atomic swap protocol based on Bitcoin. Its two main products are DEX and wallet. Portal DEX supports L2 atomic swaps of cross-blockchain cryptocurrencies. Portal wallet is a "completely non-custodial" tool that integrates DEX, allowing users to send, receive, and store cryptocurrencies across blockchains. Chandra Duggirala, co-founder and CEO of Portal, said that the native token of Portal will depend on the validators of the Portal network. The network runs on the xport (proposed stock code) token, which is an ERC-20 token used to protect network security and reward validators for facilitating swaps.
Portal was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the coming months, Portal also plans to launch an AI-driven investment application to help users make "smart" investment decisions using AI technology. It is reported that the structure of this round of financing is a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) and a combination of convertible notes. Currently, the Portal product is in the form of a testnet. With new funds in place, Portal plans to launch its product on the mainnet and develop its ecosystem.
Squid
On February 1st, Squid, a cross-chain trading and liquidity routing protocol, announced the completion of a $4 million strategic financing round. Polychain Capital led the investment, with participation from Nomad Capital, North Island Ventures, Maelstrom, Chorus One, XYZ, Breed, Binary Builders, and Typhon Ventures.
Squid is a secure cross-chain router that enables interoperability between blockchains and applications. Squid supports one-click cross-chain operations such as token exchange, purchase, deposit, and staking. These contract calls can be integrated through its API, SDK, and frontend components. Developers can use Squid to attract users from any blockchain and create scalable, seamless user experiences for anyone with a crypto wallet. Squid applications support over 60 EVM and Cosmos chains, and with Squid Boost, users can complete interchain and cross-chain exchanges in just 20 seconds. Squid recently launched Squid NFT Checkout, which allows users to purchase NFTs directly on any chain or use the Buy Button chrome extension to do the same on OpenSea.
Squid serves as a cross-chain liquidity router in the Axelar network. Major wallet providers, including MetaMask, Trust Wallet, and Blockchain.com, have integrated the Squid protocol. The team is also working on integrating with more interoperable networks and plans to bring Squid into more blockchain ecosystems beyond Ethereum and Cosmos. The funds will be used to accelerate development for achieving more complex transaction sequence bundling and more efficient asset routing.
DeFi Other financing includes:
On February 3rd, Stride, a Cosmos ecosystem liquidity staking protocol, announced the completion of a $4 million strategic financing round. The round was led by DBA, with participation from 1confirmation, Road Capital, Modular Capital, Imperator, Chorus One, and others. The financing round aims to promote the development of Stride in the Celestia ecosystem.
On January 30th, derivative DEX protocol BBO announced the completion of a $2.7 million pre-seed round of financing. The round was led by Hashed and Arrington Capital, with participation from Consensys, CMS Holdings, Flow Traders, Manifold Trading, Mask Network, and Laser Digital, a subsidiary of Nomura Securities. It is reported that BBO's automated market maker model allows liquidity providers to "associate their price range with other assets, imitating the strategy of active market makers while maintaining the convenience of passive liquidity provision."
On February 1st, the encryption startup company Velar completed a $3.5 million financing round. The round was participated by Bitcoin Startup Lab, CMS Holdings, Black Edge Capital, GBV, Cypher Capital, Trust Machines SPV, Transform Capital, Maple Block, and Samara Asset Group. Velar will build a set of DeFi tools for the Bitcoin DeFi scene and plans to launch the first perpetual futures contract trading platform based on the Bitcoin network.
On January 29th, TProtocol, the first platform to integrate RWA on-chain, cross-chain, and asset aggregation, announced the completion of its angel round of financing. The specific amount has not been disclosed. This round of financing was participated by Summer Ventures (through its subsidiary, Summer Everest Ecological Fund), Matrixport Venture, and Spark Digital Capital.
TProtocol represents that this round of financing will accelerate TProtocol's transformation into a full-chain RWA asset aggregation platform. Currently, TProtocol has connected asset providers Matrixdock, Backed Finance, OpenTrade, and TrueFi, making it the largest on-chain RWA asset aggregation platform. There are more asset providers in the process of joining.
Social/Creative Economy
There have been a total of 1 undisclosed funding in the social/creator economy sector.
SoulLand
On February 2nd, SoulLand, a gamified social platform, announced on social media that it has completed its financing round. Participating institutions include Foresight Ventures, Redline DAO, Zonff Partners, MEXC, Mandala Ventures Limited, Stratified Capital, Basics Capital, and Onemax Capital.
SLT is part of the SoulLand application incentive system, and users can earn SLT by completing tasks, inviting registrations, and other methods. In addition, SoulLand has also launched the Spacefighter NFT series. The series is divided into five levels from high to low: A, B, C, D, and E. Each level of NFT is further divided into five different qualities, represented by the color of the NFT's border. The level and quality of the NFT determine its inherent combat attributes, that is, its combat ability in the game and its ability to generate $SLT in the game.
Infrastructure
Ithaca Finance
Ithaca Finance will launch on the Arbitrum testnet and only invite invitees to participate before launching the mainnet later this quarter. Ithaca's mission is to address various challenges by designing permissionless dedicated infrastructure, aggregate cross-chain liquidity, and achieve effective risk sharing between time and event horizons. It adopts an auction-based algorithmic market settlement framework, providing a solution that is resistant to maximizing available value (MEV). Through this framework, Ithaca can achieve instant deployment of any asset, including composable options and structured product markets.
Doubler Pro
On February 2nd, RGB protocol infrastructure Bitlight Labs completed its seed round financing, committed to promoting the development of the Lightning Network ecosystem. This round of financing was jointly led by well-known investment institutions Gate Ventures and HV Capital, with participation from MH Ventures, Fundamental Labs, Oak Grove Ventures, Waterdrip Capital, and others. Bitlight Labs has launched multiple product lines, with its core application Bitlight Wallet as the first non-custodial Lightning Network asset wallet in the RGB ecosystem. It will be the first to achieve compatibility between RGB assets and Bitcoin Lightning Network, building the RGB-LN ecosystem. It has now entered the Alpha Test phase and is expected to go live on the Bitcoin mainnet and Lightning Network in a few weeks.
Bitlight Labs will issue $BIT tokens based on the RGB20 standard, covering the entire Bitlight application ecosystem, to promote a sustainable token economy. By introducing tokens, Bitlight Labs will leverage RGB smart contracts to build Turing-complete native Bitcoin asset issuance and decentralized finance (DeFi) systems to drive the development of the Bitcoin Lightning Network ecosystem. It is reported that the $BIT token Season 1 Airdrop will be launched soon.
Gevulot
On January 29th, Gevulot, a zero-knowledge proof blockchain, completed a $6 million seed round of financing. The round was led by Variant, with participation from RockawayX, Volt Capital, Stake Facilities, as well as individual investors including Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, and Shumo Chu, founder of Manta Network.
The financing funds will be used for the launch of its Layer 1 blockchain, which enables developers to utilize ZK proofs and delegate computation tasks to advanced hardware operator networks. Gevulot is preparing to launch its developer-centric network, or devnet, which is a restricted test network. The network is collaborating with validator companies such as P2P.org, Supranational, Stake Facilities, and RockawayX Infrastructure to achieve staking validation.
On Gevulot, the deployed program will execute to generate proofs, which are then verified by the network. After verification, these proofs are integrated into blocks on the Gevulot blockchain. It is worth noting that blocks on the Gevulot blockchain are mainly composed of proofs, which is different from the traditional smart contract state transition observed in other Layer 1 blockchains.
Infrastructure's remaining financing includes:
On February 1st, Delegate Labs, the parent company of Ethereum infrastructure Delegate, completed a $9 million seed round of financing with participation from Electric Capital, Arca, Variant, and Arrington Capital. This round of financing will be used to fund the Web3 domain protocol Clusters.
On February 2nd, Doubler Pro, a blockchain financial strategy tool, completed its seed round of financing with Youbi Capital as the lead investor and participation from Bixin Ventures, Mask Network, Waterdrip Fund, DWF Ventures, Gate Labs, and Formless Capital. The specific amount has not been disclosed. Doubler Pro also announced the launch of its testnet and integration with the Blast Layer 2 network. The new funds will be used to accelerate user development and enhance user experience.
On February 1st, BlokID, a developer providing blockchain-based privacy protection solutions for the digital advertising industry, announced the completion of a $1.25 million seed round of financing this Wednesday, led by Ascend Vietnam Ventures (AVV) and AppWorks.
On February 1st, Hivello, a decentralized physical infrastructure network project under DePIN, announced the completion of a new round of financing of 1.5 million. Participants in the funding round included Blockchange, Cypher Capital, MH Ventures, Primal Capital, Contango Digital Assets, Candaq, NGC, Blockchain Founders Fund, and IDG. Hivello will use the new financing to expand its technical capabilities, accelerate product development, and consolidate its market position in the DePIN field.
Digital Asset Management/Payment
Cube.Exchange
On February 1st, according to The Block, Cube.Exchange, a trading platform that combines traditional finance with blockchain technology, has completed a $12 million Series A financing round. 6th Man Ventures led the round, with participation from GSR Markets, ParaFi Digital, Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, and Everstake Capital.
This round of financing will be used to expand the cross-functional team and plan to obtain licenses in more jurisdictions. Insiders said that the structure of this round of financing involves equity with token subscription rights, and the post-investment equity valuation is $100 million.
Web3+AI
On January 29th, Web3 distributed AI training network PublicAI completed a $2 million seed round of financing, with IOBC Capital, Foresight Ventures, Solana Foundation, Everstate Capital, and several well-known AI academic professors participating. The raised funds will be used to accelerate the launch and commercialization of its training network. PublicAI is committed to using blockchain technology to produce a large amount of high-quality training data at scale, to solve all the problems that artificial intelligence has faced so far, and to allow all of humanity to participate in the co-construction of artificial intelligence and share its benefits.
Welcome to join the official community of BlockBeats by LUDONG
Telegram subscription group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Twitter official account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
Related Articles
