DeFi Funding Makes a Comeback

Jul 1, 2022 • 3 Min Read

After a surprisingly large amount of funding last week, total deals dropped from 32 last week to 28 this week, and total funding decreased from $1,506M to $519M. Most sectors have declined since last week, with CeFi having the sharpest decrease of $956M to $47M. NFTs decreased from $155M to $5M, and Metaverse/Gaming fell from $103M to $12M. Despite these sector declines, DeFi had its highest funded week in months at $212M, an increase of over 5x since last week. There were four DeFi deals this week, with the majority of funding coming from a $200M round for Unizen. This “CeDeFi” exchange ecosystem combines the elements of centralized and decentralized exchanges to enable a hybrid platform with deep liquidity and minimal slippage.

Most deals were in the early stages. This week, 16.7% were Pre-Seed, 55.6% were Seed, and 16.7% were Series A. Just two deals occurred at stages later than Series A – one Series B deal and one Series C deal.

DeFi Funding Makes a Comeback
DeFi Funding Makes a Comeback

Deal of The Week:

WeatherXM, a weather data economy that uses crypto incentives to improve the accuracy of forecasts, has raised $5M in a seed funding round led by Placeholder VC. Other investors in the round included Metaplanet, ConsenSys Mesh, Protocol Labs, and Border Capital, among others. WeatherXM users can purchase a personal weather station for $420 and use the station to earn rewards in the form of the WXM token for collecting and validating weather data.

Why Is This the Deal of The Week?

WeatherXM is an example of one of the potential ways crypto incentives could be used to disrupt an existing industry. The WeatherXM team believes that using these incentives in a decentralized internet of things model will increase forecast accuracy for areas that lack weather infrastructure. WeatherXM CEO Manolis Nikiforakis stated, “The current weather data collection and forecasting model is mostly designed, funded, and operated by governments… We all take advantage of it every day, but it’s far from perfect as data collection requirements are completely different per use case, and often government priorities are not aligned with people’s needs.” WeatherXM bases rewards for sharing local weather data on a unique algorithm that rewards rural locations more than densely populated ones to ensure weather data is collected in as many places as possible. Weather data will also be validated against nearby stations, third-party reanalysis & satellite data to ensure that the data quality is high.

Selected Deals

Unizen, a CeDeFi exchange that combines the functionality of centralized and decentralized exchanges to meet the needs of traders, has raised $200M in a funding round led by GEM (Global Emerging Markets).

MoHash, a DeFi solution that taps into real-world yields, has raised $6M in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital India and Quona Capital, with participation from Ledger Prime, Jump Crypto, and Hashed Ventures, among others. MoHash is a DeFi protocol that provides investors access to yields backed by real-world assets. The protocol issues a fungible token (MoH) that reflects a claim on a diversified pool of debt instruments that are financially regulated.

Kaiko, a digital assets data provider for institutions, has just completed a $53M Series B funding round. The round was led by Eight Roads, an affiliate of Fidelity Investments, with participation from Revaia and Alven.

PolySign, an infrastructure provider for digital assets, has raised $53M in a Series B funding round to expand its staff. Investors such as Cowen Digital, Brevan Howard, GSR participated.

Flowdesk, a French provider of crypto-trading infrastructure for over 70 centralized and decentralized exchanges, has raised $30M in a Series A fundraising round. Eurazeo and Aglae Ventures led the round with participation from Coinbase, Speedinvest, and over 20 angel investors. Flowdesk plans on using the funds to grow and scale its platform as it expands to the U.S.

Dynamic, a multi-chain wallet-based authentication and authorization platform, raised $7M in a seed funding round led by Andreesen Horowitz with participation from VCs Circle Ventures, Solana Ventures, and Chapter One.

DeFi Funding Makes a Comeback
DeFi Funding Makes a Comeback

Reports you may have missed

No reports found.

Get invaluable analysis of the market and stocks. Cancel at any time. Start Free Trial

Articles Read 1/1

🎁 Unlock 1 extra article by joining our Community!

You are reading the last free article for this month.

Already have an account? Sign In