NFT Derivatives Trading is Here
Funding has remained consistent the past few weeks at about ~$230M per week. Infrastructure made up the bulk of the deals this week, with $80M in funding and 12 total deals. Infrastructure funding was led by Monad Labs, which raised $19M from Dragonfly Capital. Monad Labs is the team supporting the Monad blockchain, a blockchain looking to optimize execution and process 10,000 transactions per second. CeFi and Web3 & NFTS also received considerable funding, at $65M and $66M, respectively. The week’s largest deal, Taurus, is in the CeFi vertical and received $65M in funding in a Series B round led by Credit Suisse. Taurus aims to be the go-to digital asset platform for banks worldwide.
Interestingly, there were four acquisitions in the Web3 & NFTs vertical. This included hadeswap acquiring the popular Solana NFT collection, Solana Monkey Business, and Napster acquiring Web3 music startup Mint Songs. After a strong start to 2023, mining funding has cooled off, not receiving any funding in the past two weeks. DeFi and Metaverse and Gaming funding also lagged, at $15M and $1M.