Blasting L2 & Infrastructure
Weekly Recap
After last week’s surge, funding and deal count fell to robust levels despite the short holiday week. Funding totaled $98 million in 13 deals announced, with the majority again raised by infrastructure. Companies tackling privacy, data, and wallet or L1 scalability improvements continue to get funded as investors remain confident that multiple winners can emerge from already competitive verticals. Our deal of the week, Blast, is another example of a start-up getting funded in a highly competitive category (L2s). Yet teams are getting bolder in their go-to-market tactics, with Blast gaining over $200 million in TVL days after launching through innovative incentive structures. Metaverse & Gaming was the second most active category, with three deals closed. Gaming tokens have been some of the best performers in the liquid market’s recent uptick, and this bullishness has also extended to private markets. Given extended development timelines for gaming projects, many projects that raised in the last bull market are just getting to production-ready releases. The mainstream success of a blockchain-based game will likely catalyze further investment into the space.