Financing Highlights | Binance invests in decentralized multi-chain trading platform UXUY; Electric leads investment in Web3 social application Kiosk

According to BlockBeats statistics, the total number of financings last week was 26, which is less than before, with a total amount of about 157.7 million US dollars and an average financing amount of 6.0654 million US dollars. Among them, the infrastructure field occupies the majority, the Metaverse/GameFi field and DeFi field are relatively more, the digital asset management/payment field has increased, and the NFT/digital fashion field and Web3.0+AI field are relatively less. The following figure shows the proportion of financing in each sector last week:

Metaverse/GameFi

A total of 4 financings were raised in the Metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount of 22.5 million US dollars, accounting for 14.27% of the total financing last week.

Seeds Labs

On May 9, according to Cointelegraph, Web3 game developer Seeds Labs announced the completion of a $12 million seed round of financing, with participation from Avalanche's Blizzard Fund, Solana Foundation, Krust, Hashkey Capital, UOB Ventures, Signum Capital, IVC and Emoote.

Founded in 2021, Seeds Labs is a developer focused on games and game infrastructure, with an average of more than 15 years of experience in the game industry on its core team. Seeds Labs is committed to exploring new game business models, aiming to build a more democratic, fair and transparent economic system. Their goal is to ensure that developers can earn enough income to continue investing in high-quality game development without putting tremendous pressure on players. This approach is intended to ease the growing tension between players and developers in recent years.

It is reported that Solana ecosystem game infrastructure developer Seeds Labs was founded in 2021. Its Web3 game Bladerite is scheduled to be released this month and will be available on Apple and Google app stores. This investment enables Seeds Labs to create the "hack-and-slash" fighting game "Bladerite" and its derivative game asset market, and to create a stable and sustainable open economic system in "Bladerite".

BAC Games

On May 10, BAC Games, a Web3 game in the Blast ecosystem, completed a $1.5 million seed round of financing, with participation from Hash Global, Matr1x, GateLabs, Stratified Capital, W Labs, Nothing Research, etc. Individual investors include: Ash, BTCdayu, Joseph A.C. Lloyd (Head of Gaming Research at Delphi Digital), Laobai (ABCDE InvestmentResearch Partner), Piers Kicks (Founding Partner of Delphi Ventures), Saku (Co-founderCEO Matr1x), Victor (Head of WEB3 at GGV).

BAC Games is a WEB3 project that has launched a series of casual games built on the Blast blockchain. Blast Auto Club (BAC) is the first game in the series and is a racing club game that, unlike traditional games, emphasizes social interaction and teamwork to earn money ("Group to Earn"). All games launched by BAC Games will use $BAC tokens.

The BAC V1 version will focus on PVE mode. Each Role NFT holder needs to work together to build a car and run it in different cities to earn $BAC tokens. Only after enough Role NFT holders join the club and work together to obtain three props can a racing car be built. The racing car belongs to the club, earning $BAC tokens and distributing them to each club member as a reward for the member's contribution.

The rest of the financing in the Metaverse/GameFi field includes:

On May 8, the Web3 community-driven game ecosystem SlingShot DAO officially announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$3 million, with Alphabit Fund participating. SlingShot DAO is a community-driven gaming ecosystem platform where members can collaborate to transform ideas into gaming experiences through the SlingShot application. SlingShot DAO focuses on promoting the values of “community first” and an action-oriented approach, and is committed to establishing a new competitive environment in the gaming industry.

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On May 11, Hong Kong Web3 music startup Star Nest announced that it had completed a $6 million Pre-A round of financing, led by Chuangqi International Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hong Kong Stock Exchange-listed Guofu Innovation Co., Ltd. Star Nest will work with Armonia Meta Chain to develop the metaverse game Star Nest SpaceStar, which includes music, role-playing and social functions, and plans to list the project token NEST in the third quarter of 2024. Star Nest will build a more complete music industry token economy system through the NEST token, which will be widely used in purchasing performance tickets, chain game cooperation, metaverse consumption, governance voting and other links.

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NFT/Digital Fashion

A total of 1 financing in the NFT/digital fashion field, with a total amount of over 10 million US dollars, accounting for 6.34% of the total financing last week.

Galaxis

On May 7, Singapore Web3 platform Galaxis announced that it had completed US$10 million in financing before its token issuance. Participants in this round of financing include Chainlink, ENS, Rarestone Capital, Taisu Ventures, and ENS co-founder Nick Johnson.

Galaxis is a no-code, out-of-the-box NFT toolkit for creating decentralized communities. It provides creators with the advantages of smart contract technology in a simple, non-technical user interface, enabling them to design and deploy a set of utility-driven NFTs, providing a safe space for members to interact and exchange value. Galaxis provides a framework to build and manage communities and create personalized membership cards for any community, and users can be artists, athletes, communities, or companies of any size.

Galaxis calls itself a "post-hype NFT utility platform" and has previously launched NFT series for celebrities such as DJ Steve Aoki and actor Val Kilmer. The platform has sold more than 225,000 NFTs, generating more than 32,000 ETH (about $100 million) in sales in the secondary market, and is currently preparing for "mass distribution."

DeFi

A total of 4 financings in the DeFi field, with a total amount of more than $25 million, accounting for 15.98% of the total financing last week.

UXUY

On May 9, the decentralized multi-chain trading platform UXUY announced the completion of a $7 million Pre-A round of financing in Hong Kong. Since its establishment, its total financing amount has exceeded $10 million. UXUY received investment from Binance Labs, JDI Ventures, UTXO Management (Bitcoin Magazine), Bixin Ventures, SWC Global, Comma3 Ventures, CMS Holdings, Matrix Partners, Satoshi Labs, Dewhales Capital, YBB Capital, GBV Capital, Web3 Vision, Pentos Ventures, Absoluta Digital, PAKA, DefinanceX, Dreamlabs, Greythorn Asset Management, NGC Ventures, Longrun Capital, Metalpha, GSR and other well-known institutions from Asia, North America and Europe.

The funds raised in this round of UXUY will be used for the construction of Bitcoin ecological infrastructure, and will be committed to promoting efficient and low-cost transactions of assets such as Lightning Network Taproot Assets, Ordinals BRC-20, and Runes.

The UXUY protocol is a cross-chain interoperability solution that enables Web3 projects and users to seamlessly exchange tokens across multiple chains. The protocol is built on a stablecoin bridge that obtains liquidity from various decentralized exchanges to provide fast transactions with smaller slippage. The UXUY Swap product suite aims to change the current situation where liquidity in the DeFi ecosystem is fragmented and users have a poor trading experience. The project provides cross-chain exchange products and APIs to provide users with a convenient and fast cross-chain exchange process.

Lagrange Labs

On May 8, according to Coindesk, crypto startup Lagrange Labs completed a $13.2 million financing round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with participation from Archetype Ventures, 1kx, Maven11, Fenbushi Capital, Volt Capital, CMT Digital, Mantle and Ecosystem.

Lagrange is a crypto startup project based on Ethereum's re-staking platform EigenLayer, focusing on research specifically on zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. Lagrange provides cross-chain state proofs, which enable trustless non-interactive and aggregatable verification of cross-chain states without the need for intermediate bridges or messaging protocols. The project supports any use case from cross-chain identity to cross-chain asset ownership to cross-chain social networking.

Lagrange’s work could attract more users to decentralized finance (DeFi) by allowing developers to build decentralized applications (dApps) that can run on different blockchains simultaneously while mitigating the security threats this may bring

Other financing in the DeFi field includes:

Xswap recently announced the completion of a strategic round of financing on the X platform. The specific amount of financing has not been disclosed. The institutions and investors involved in the investment include P2 Ventures, MH Ventures, Maven Capital, OIG Capital, Cogitent Ventures, WWVentures, ZBS Capital, Pragma Ventures, Zephyrus Capital, Ivan Liljeqvist, Ash Crypto, Gainzy, Satoshi Stacker and Michael Gu. It is reported that XSwap is a cross-chain DEX based on Chainlink CCIP.

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On May 9, Solana Ecosystem Tokenization Platform AgriDex completed a $5 million financing, led by Endeavor Ventures, with African Crops Limited, Oldenburg Vineyards, and former Goldman Sachs and Citadel executive Hank Oberoi participating in this round of financing. AgriDex expects to launch its platform and token AGRI in the third quarter of this year. AgriDex is a Solana-based platform that tokenizes agricultural products and supports the trading of these tokenized commodities. Every transaction on AgriDex is represented by the minting of a non-fungible token (NFT), which permanently records all products, pricing, payments, and other details.

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Social/Creator Economy

A total of 1 financing was raised in the social/creator economy field, with a total amount of US$10 million, accounting for 6.34% of the total financing last week.

Kiosk

On May 6, Kiosk, a Web3 social application based on Farcaster that integrates blockchain and e-commerce, announced the completion of a $10 million financing round led by Electric Capital, with participation from a16z Crypto, USV, and Variant Fund.

Kiosk is a new Farcaster client that combines social and on-chain. It allows users to conduct on-chain transactions while socializing on-chain. With Kiosk, users can easily convert pictures into NFTs, discover and purchase assets collected by friends, and gather like-minded collectors and community members in token-driven channels or group chats.

Kiosk aims to break down the barriers between on-chain social and on-chain transactions, allowing users to trade and interact on social media more seamlessly, thereby driving the development of decentralized social media. Kiosk believes that on-chain assets are fundamentally social. Social media clients that create a feedback loop between assets and the communities that support them will improve web3 for everyone and bring in the next wave of major users.

Infrastructure

A total of 11 financings in the infrastructure field, with a total amount of over US$54 million, accounting for 34.31% of the total financing last week.

Botanix Labs

On May 7, Botanix Labs, a startup dedicated to Bitcoin development, announced today that it has completed a total of US$11.5 million in financing. This round of financing was participated in by Polychain Capital, Placeholder Capital, Valor Equity Partners, ABCDE, well-known angel investors Andrew Kang, Fiskantes, Dan Held, The Crypto Dog, Charlie Spears, Altcoin Sherpa, Dovey Wan, Jebus, Icebergy, Crypto ISO, Davis (aka "KarbonBased") Walt Smith, and Domo, the creator of the BRC-20 token standard, which participated in the $8.5 million seed round that closed in April.

The funds will be used to build Spiderchain, the first Layer2 network on Bitcoin with full EVM equivalent. Since 2022, Botanix Labs has been working on building a decentralized financial system native to Bitcoin. They launched an early testnet version of the EVM second-layer protocol in November 2023, attracting more than 200,000 active addresses and 10,000 experimental token launches. Spiderchain's first mainnet version is expected to be released in early summer 2024.

Leveraging Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) as the underlying settlement and decentralized layer 1, Botanix will use a Proof of Stake consensus model where stake (represented by Bitcoin) is securely stored in a decentralized multi-signature secured by a random subset of participants on the distributed network Spiderchain. Anyone can stake their Bitcoin on the chain.

BitTap

On May 6, according to official news, Taproot Assets infrastructure construction project BitTap has completed a pre-seed round of financing, led by Waterdrip Capital. The funds raised will be used to develop a decentralized trading platform and non-custodial wallet based on the Taproot Assets protocol.

As the first decentralized wallet in the field of Taproot Assets protocol, the Alpha version of BitTap plugin wallet is expected to be launched in May. The team is committed to building the Taproot Assets ecosystem, promoting compatibility with Bitcoin's Lightning Network and Bitcoin main network, and has received official support from Lightning Labs. Currently, BitTap has started a seed round of financing, aiming to achieve one-click issuance and management of Bitcoin native assets based on the Taproot Assets protocol.

Arcium

On May 9, Arcium, the Solana ecosystem zero-knowledge privacy protocol, announced the completion of a $5.5 million strategic financing, led by Greenfield Capital. Coinbase, Heartcore Capital, Longhash VC, L2 Iterative Ventures, Stake Facilities, Smape Capital and Everstake, as well as well-known angel investors such as Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Monad co-founder Keone Han participated in the investment. Arcium plans to use this round of financing to provide a trust-minimized and configurable encrypted computing framework for developers and blockchain applications.

Arcium is a decentralized physical infrastructure network for confidential computing. The Arcium network adopts a distributed architecture and consists of multiple nodes capable of performing multi-party computation (MPC) tasks. These nodes work together to process encrypted data, ensuring that the integrity and confidentiality of the data remain unchanged throughout the computation process. Each node can participate in computing tasks without having access to the full data set, thereby preventing any single point of failure and ensuring strong data security against potential cyber threats.

The main features of the Arcium Network include its flexible configuration options, allowing users to customize their MPC settings according to specific security needs and trust levels. This configurability extends to the choice of nodes, the selection of MPC schemes, and detailed execution protocols, making the Arcium Network adaptable to a wide range of applications. From secure collaborative AI model training to confidential medical data analysis, the Arcium Network promotes a new paradigm for data utilization that prioritizes privacy, security, and collaboration without the need for centralized trust, revolutionizing the way sensitive data is handled across sectors.

The rest of the infrastructure financing includes:

On May 7, the Lava Foundation, the non-profit development organization of the modular blockchain project Lava, announced that it had completed $11 million in token financing before its mainnet and token airdrop. Investors in this round of financing include Animoca Brands, Gate.io Ventures, Coingecko Ventures, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, etc. This is the first public appearance of the Lava Foundation. Previously, Lava development company MagmaDevs completed a $15 million seed round in February. As a modular blockchain focused on providing data access through RPC, Lava has now entered the testnet stage and has provided more than 20 billion RPC request services for multiple blockchains. Multiple projects such as NEAR, Evmos and Axelar are using Lava's services.

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On May 7, ZKM, the Ethereum scaling solution, completed a $5 million Pre-A round of financing, led by OKX Ventures, with participation from Amber, Metis Foundation, Crypto.com, etc. ZKM plans to launch a Layer 2 network based on Bitcoin.

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On May 8, Ambient, a decentralized environmental data network project based on Solana, announced the completion of a $2 million seed round of financing, led by Borderless Capital, with participation from Solana Ventures, Parami Investors, Sonic Boom Ventures, Primal Capital and others. Ambient was founded in January this year and acquired PlanetWatch, an environmental data project based on Algorand, in March and decided to migrate to Solana. Ambient plans to go live on the Solana testnet this summer and then launch its own tokens to incentivize users to contribute data. Currently, Ambient has deployed more than 25,000 sensors in more than 20 countries around the world, collecting data every 5 minutes and generating more than 10.7 billion data streams.

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On May 8, Web3 incubation service provider BlockBooster announced the completion of a $1.5 million seed round of financing, led by OKX Ventures, with participation from Conflux Network, Neighbor Capital Series, IceRiver Venture and Bitcoin Lab. It is reported that Blockbooster is a venture capital studio focusing on Asia, dedicated to incubating and investing in high-quality projects in the infrastructure, social, and gaming sectors of Web3, and organizing a series of activities around industry builders.

On May 8, Owlto Finance, an intent-centered cross-chain interoperability protocol, announced the completion of a strategic round of financing of US$8 million. This round of financing was jointly led by Bixin Ventures and CE Innovation Capital, and participated by Presto, SNZ Capital, BESTO, Kroma, Coinseeker.co, GSR, ChainCatcher, etc. Owlto is a cross-chain bridge that started on ETH Layer2. It has grown into the top three cross-chain bridges in the Ethereum ecosystem only about half a year after its launch. It accounts for more than 75% of the third-party cross-chain volume in some ETH Layer2s, and has recently become the cross-chain bridge with the largest number of cross-chain transactions in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This round of financing is mainly used to accelerate the upgrade of AI intent cross-chain products, the development of modular cross-chain interoperability protocols, global operations and marketing, full-chain liquidity solution V2, and capitalized market operations.

On May 8, Electron labs completed a $1 million seed round of financing to build a universal ZK proof aggregation layer for Ethereum. Investors include Polygon founder @sandeepnailwal, Gnosis co-founder @koeppelmann, former Polygon founder @jdkanani, and Avail founder @anuragarjun.

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On May 8, NuLink, a zk-provable data encryption solution focused on data security protection, raised $1.6 million in its new round of strategic financing. The company will use the funds to advance technology, expand capabilities, and education and training. This round of financing was led by DWF Labs, Poolz, and ViaBTC, with participation from CheckPush, MNST Platform, and Aza Ventures, joining NuLink's impressive list of investors, which includes Binance Labs, OIG, Maven Crypto, and Chateau Crypto, which participated in previous rounds of financing. To date, NuLink has raised a total of $11.4 million, positioning it as a leader in the development and enhancement of secure Web3 applications.

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On May 10, Bitcoin native application platform Arch completed a $7 million seed round of financing, led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Portal Ventures, OKX Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, CMS Holdings and Tangent. Arch co-founder Mudano said the structure of the round was a simple future equity agreement (SAFE) with token warrants, but declined to comment on the valuation. It is reported that Arch is the first Bitcoin native application platform to introduce "bridgeless" transactions directly into the Bitcoin blockchain.

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Digital asset management/payment

In the field of digital asset management/payment, there were 2 financings with a total amount of US$31 million, accounting for 19.66% of the total financing last week.

DwellFi

According to Accesswire, institutional-grade tokenization solution DwellFi announced the completion of a $3 million seed round of financing, with participation from E1 Ventures, Stanford Blockchain, Hustle Fund, Blockchain Coinvestors and Fortified Ventures.

DwellFi mainly uses artificial intelligence, blockchain and tokenization technology to help its customers manage assets, ensuring that its cutting-edge solutions not only meet current regulatory standards, and its customers mainly include PE/RE/VC funds, hedge funds, fund managers and limited partners.

Arbelos

On May 8, according to Fortune, Arbelos completed a $28 million financing round led by Dragonfly, with participation from FalcolnX, Circle, Paxos, Polygon and Deribit. Arbelos Markets will focus primarily on derivatives and over-the-counter transactions for institutional participants, providing trading liquidity for companies such as hedge funds and venture capital firms as counterparties for popular products such as options and futures. This round of financing ended in mid-2023.

It is reported that both co-founders Lim and Tang started their careers in traditional finance before turning to cryptocurrency. Lim served as vice president of Circle's trading business and was responsible for the trading strategy of Galaxy Digital, a commercial bank founded by Mike Novogratz, before becoming head of derivatives at Genesis Global Trading. Since 2017, Tang has served as the chief investment officer and managing partner of LedgerPrime, a cryptocurrency hedge fund acquired by FTX.

Web3+AI

A total of 2 financings in the Web3+AI field, with a total amount of more than US$4 million, accounting for 3.11% of the total financing last week. Including:

On May 8, Web3 infrastructure startup Hemera announced the completion of a $2.6 million seed round of financing, led by LIF Capital and Nomad Capital, and participated by SNZ, Chainlink, Sending Labs, and ZetaChain founder and Microsoft senior vice president and artificial intelligence expert Harry Shum. According to reports, the company is building its decentralized protocol, which uses artificial intelligence to solve the on-chain data query problem that plagues the multi-chain ecosystem. After the completion of this round of financing, Hemera also announced the launch of a public beta version of the Hemera protocol to support developers in creating Web3 large-scale language model operating systems.

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On May 9, the decentralized AI project Inference Labs announced the completion of a $2.3 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Digital Asset Capital Management, Delphi Ventures and Mechanism Capital, with participation from Big Brain Holdings, BitScale Capital, Edessa Capital, ID Theory and Metropolis DAO. It is reported that Inference Labs is using the transformative potential of Web3 to create a decentralized, transparent and secure environment for artificial intelligence to flourish. The company is committed to making artificial intelligence more decentralized, democratic and autonomous.

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Other financing

Other financing totals 1, the total amount has not been disclosed. Including:

On May 7, the Web3 talent network project Bondex announced the completion of a new round of strategic round of financing, with DEXT Force Ventures, an ecological investment institution under DEXTools.io, participating in the investment. The specific amount of financing has not been disclosed. DEXT Force Ventures will provide marketing and business development guidance to Bondex, and provide access to its DEXTools platform. Bondex is mainly aimed at Web3 professionals, enterprises and recruiters, allowing users to connect and collaborate with each other, while also being rewarded through operational activities such as profile updates, verification and referrals.

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