Web3 Takes The Lead

Funding for this week has seen a dramatic decrease compared to last week. Total funding fell 53% to $154 million compared to $328 million last week. Web3 was the winning category of funding deals representing 75% of all capital raised, breaking the pattern of infrastructure being the dominant category over the prior two weeks. Horizon Blockchain Games tied for the largest deal this week, raising $40 million in a Series-A deal. Horizon is a blockchain game developer best known for its game Skyweaver and plans to use the funds to grow its product offerings and scale operations. 

It was another strong week for crypto funds & ecosystem raises. $820 million was raised across two deals, with the lion’s share coming from a $720 million fundraise by NYDIG for its Institutional Bitcoin Fund. 59 investors contributed to the raise, and NYDIG plans to continue its goal of making “Bitcoin a universal option for billions of people worldwide.”

Seed-round deals accounted for almost half of all deals this week. The percentage of seed-round deals has increased steadily since the week of 9/23. Although there was a large uptick in strategic deals last week, there were zero strategic deals this week. 

Deal of the Week:

Golden, a large-scale canonical knowledge graph, raised $40 million in a Series B round led by a16z crypto with participation from OpenSea Ventures, Protocol Labs, Raj Gokal (Founder of Solana), and FalconX, among others. Golden aims to create the “world’s knowledge engine” and make it easy for users to find highly accurate information on nearly any topic. To accomplish this, Golden is building a permissionless, open-source protocol that financially incentivizes collecting and verifying information. 

Why is this Deal of the Week?

Finding reliable information online can be challenging. Not only is there a sea of noise, misinformation, and censorship, but dependable information is highly fragmented across different sites and databases. Golden looks to provide a solution to this by offering a single place where people can discover, contribute, and verify knowledge. Golden hopes to execute this at scale using web3 mechanics to align incentives. With tokenization, the Golden protocol will financially reward those who provide correct data and disincentive those who provide incorrect data. All transactions are recorded on the blockchain and eventually, user-verified data will be recorded as well. Golden summarizes the protocol by stating, “in a nutshell, the protocol is a game theoretic system designed to provide incentives for agents (individual humans, AI or people harnessing AI) to converge on truth.” 

Golden is currently in its testnet phase on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet with 35,000 users participating in its Discord and dApp. The protocol is planning to launch its mainnet phase in Q2 of 2023.

Selected Deals:

Blackbird is a Web3-based hospitality platform aiming to provide its users with the ability to connect directly with restaurants. Created by Ben Leventhal, the founder of Resy and Eater, the platform plans to offer loyalty and membership services concentrating on the consumer experience. The company has secured $11M in funding through its seed round, co-led by Shine Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Multicoin Capital. In addition, the funding round also included investor participation from Circle Ventures, Variant, and others. 

Horizon is a Web3-based development platform aiming to increase adoption for both developers and users. The company has secured $40M in funding through its Series A round led by Morgan Creek Digital and Brevan Howard Digital. In addition, the funding round also included investor participation from Polygon, Ubisoft, CMT Digital, and others. Horizon plans to use the capital raised for product, ecosystem, and workforce expansion.  

Exponential is a DeFi-based platform aiming to make the space more approachable. The platform plans to accomplish this by assisting its users through identifying safe investments and effectively managing risk. The company has secured $14M in funding through its seed round led by Paradigm. In addition, the funding round also included investor participation from Polygon, FTX Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and others. 

MynaSwap is a Web3-based trading platform aiming to digitize and vault collectible items such as sneakers, watches, and trading cards. Once the physical item is verified, it can be traded with low transaction fees. In addition, the NFT of the collectible can be redeemed for the real-world equivalent. The company has raised $6M in funding at a $50M valuation with investor participation from Spartan Capital, Wave Financial, Odell Beckham Jr., and Kyler Murray. MynaSwap plans to use the capital raised to expand its workforce and vault locations globally.