Weekly Recap
Private funding was suppressed as we enter the summer season, with total funding dropping 43% week-over-week to $66 million and deal count decreasing 52% to 15 deals. Infrastructure still took the top spot from a funding perspective, totaling $31 million across three deals, including Sonic, our Deal of the Week. DeFi tallied the most deals (6) and had the second most funding across categories ($24m). CeFi had its second consecutive week without any deal flow.
Series A rounds continue to impress thus far in 2024, with another two this week totaling $27 million. 2023 saw 94 Series A deals with an average deal size of $17 million. Just about halfway through 2024, there have been 61 Series A rounds averaging about $29 million per deal.
Funding by Category
Funding by Stage
Deal of the Week
Sonic, a gaming-focused Solana L2, raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Bitkraft Ventures, with participation from Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, and others. The round was structured as equity with token warrants and valued Sonic at an FDV of $100 million. The new capital brings Sonic’s total funding to $16 million.
Why is This Deal of the Week?
Solana has become a clear favorite among crypto incumbents due to its high throughput and low gas fees. Its adoption metrics have been impressive over the last year with daily transactions approaching 40 million on busy days, and daily active addresses ranging between 1-2 million in recent months.
Although Solana has higher throughput compared to other L1s like Ethereum, it still struggles to keep pace with demand, especially when TPS exceeds 4000, which has historically dropped the transaction success rate between 70-85%. Just as Ethereum has offloaded transactions to various rollups, the need for Solana to adopt the same approach is increasing.
Sonic is a gaming focused Solana L2 developed by Mirror World Labs (MWL) and supported by its proprietary HyperGrid Framework, a scaling technology enabling horizontal rollups on Solana. Sonic claims to support 50,000 TPS per Grid and be 10x faster than Solana mainnet, which can serve as the solution to reducing mainnet congestion. Sonic is also built using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), allowing developers to easily port Ethereum dapps to Solana.
Sonic just finished its devnet stage where five gaming studios were testing the technology. The incentivized testnet launched on Wednesday, enabling users to play games and send transactions on Sonic in return for “rings.” Rings are Sonic’s equivalent to points, but Sonic’s CEO stated that they will not be directly convertible into Sonic tokens. He clarified that users will be rewarded in some form for interacting with the protocol. Sonic’s mainnet and token are expected to launch sometime in Q3, and the funding should help Sonic shore up its core development team in preparation for launch.
Selected Deals
Particle Network, modular abstraction layer, raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Spartan Capital and Gumi Crypto with participation from SevenX Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, Hashkey Capital, and others. Particle Network wants to create a Universal Account, solving issues with web3 user and liquidity fragmentation. With its universal gas and liquidity, users can spend balances on any chain and pay for gas with any token, removing bridging requirements and needing the proper gas token across different networks. Particle Network hopes to vastly improve the user-experience and create a seamless cross-chain ecosystem. Particle Network is currently in its testnet phase 1 with its mainnet launch scheduled for Q3, along with its native token PARTI.
Wasabi, a memecoin and NFT leverage trading platform, raised $3 million in a Seed funding round led by Electric Capital, with support from Alliance DAO, Canonical Crypto and others. Wasabi offers long, short, and earn positions on long tail assets such as memecoins and NFTs. Unlike traditional perpetual decentralized exchanges like Aevo and Hyperliquid, which depend on market makers to retain synthetic price feeds aligned with on-chain asset prices, Wasabi offers on-chain perpetual futures where all trades are asset-backed, thereby removing counterparty risk. Wasabihas accumulated over $115 million in total value locked with over 66,000 liquidity providers. The fresh capital will be used to enhance trading experiences for users and offer innovative features in NFT perp market.
Renzo Protocol, a restaking project built on the EigenLayer, raised $17 million in a Series A led by Galaxy Digital and Brevan Howard Digital, with participation from ConsenSys, Maven 11 Capital, SevenX Ventures, Figment Capital and others. Renzo is a liquid derivative platform built on EigenLayer. Users can either deposit their ether (ETH) or staked ETH as collateral, and repurpose it to secure additional networks, known as Actively Validated Services. There is fierce competition between restaking protocols, and Renzo has claimed the second largest spot, with a TVL of $3.77 billion, behind Ether.fi with $6.68 billion. The funding will be used to help Renzo integrate ERC-20 tokens into its protocol, improve its technology infrastructure, and expand its integration with other DeFi protocols and user base.
