Weekly Recap

Despite liquid crypto prices rising, private market funding remains lackluster thus far in Q4. Aggregate funding fell 29% week-over-week, decreasing from $155 million to $109 million, while deal count fell by over 31% from 22 to 15. Infrastructure was the leading category from both a financing and deal count perspective and included our Deal of the Week, Noble. The largest deal was Monkey Tilt, which raised $30 million in a Series A round, bringing their YTD funding total to $51 million. Apart from Monkey Tilt, there were two other Series A rounds totaling $21 million, making Series A rounds the most funded deal stage, representing 47% of the funding total. Pre-seed and Seed rounds made up the remainder of deals with disclosed deal stages, respectively tallying one and four deals.

Funding by Category

Funding by Stage

Deal of the Week

Noble, an RWA and stablecoin issuance platform, raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Paradigm, with participation from Polychain Capital, Foresight Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, and Informal Systems. The fresh funding brings Noble’s total financing to $18.3 million and will be used to accelerate the development of the Noble blockchain and build a vibrant ecosystem with deep stablecoin and RWA liquidity.

Noble is a Cosmos purpose-built blockchain for native asset issuance. Noble provides the underlying infrastructure for firms to issue assets on-chain and make them interoperable across dozens of blockchain applications. Other appchains can connect permissionlessly to Noble via the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, a universal interoperability protocol allowing for data transportation and authentication between two blockchains.

Why Is This Deal of the Week?

Noble recognized the inefficiencies of a fragmented crypto ecosystem where different chains and applications constantly compete for liquidity, and users deal with the complexities of cross-chain navigation. Noble is striving to solve these bottlenecks with their highly performant network featuring one-click architecture, one-second block times, and the incorporation of stablecoins like USDC for gas fees. Noble’s approach prioritizes developer sovereignty and delightful UX. Noble’s minimalistic design has simplified application development, using only eight software modules compared to the average IBC chain’s sixteen modules. Noble integrations remove the need for custodial bridging across networks, making the appchain thesis more practical and improving the usability of on-chain RWAs.

Noble has over 45 IBC connections and six asset issuers, including Circle, Ondo, Hashnote, Frax, Progmat, and Monerium. Noble has facilitated over $5 billion in volume in its first year and has issued over $500 million in assets. Noble is also the leader in IBC transfer volume in the last 30 days, facilitating over $700 million in transfers. The next phase of Noble will involve new applications, including the launch of Noble Dollar, a stablecoin built in conjunction with M^0, one of our former Selected Deals. Noble ultimately wants to provide liquidity across all different ecosystems, including Cosmos, EVM, Celestica, and Move.

Figure: Noble IBC Transfer Map

Selected Deals

Monkey Tilt, a web3 gambling platform, raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Pantera Capital with participation from Polychain Capital, PokerGO, Hack VC, Mirana Ventures, and others. Monkey Tilt combines entertainment with gambling, where users can enjoy a social aspect akin to going to the casino with friends. Monkey Tilt’s growth strategy includes partnering with prominent celebrities and influencers in the gambling industry, relying on their content to drive new users to the platform. They recently partnered with professional boxer Ryan Garcia to serve as CTO, aka Chief Trolling Officer.  Monkey Tilt includes an integrated chat function where users can communicate and donate a portion of their winnings to users who are interacting during their gambling journey. Monkey Tilt has seen its monthly betting volumes grow past $200 million across its sports betting, roulette, blackjack, and slots games. Monkey Tilt is adding poker with crypto payment infrastructure in the coming weeks. The funding will be used for marketing and to expand its technology team as platform usage grows.

Deblock, a crypto wallet and current account, raised $16.8 million in a Seed round led by Headline, 20VC, Chalfen Ventures, and Hoxton Ventures. Deblock is a new type of account that combines a bank account and a non-custodial crypto wallet. It was founded by former executives from Revolut and Ledger. Users get their own International Bank Account Number (IBAN), which is used to identify bank accounts across countries to enable cross-border transfers. Similarly, users get a debit card typically associated with bank accounts. Lastly, Deblock users can hold crypto assets non-custodial and easily convert them between fiat and crypto. The Deblock app is currently only available in France, where it is regulated as an e-money institution and virtual asset service provider (VASP), making it one of the few companies with both distinctions.

Shinami, a Sui and Aptos development company, raised $5.6 million in a seed round from Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Mysten Labs, Movement Foundation, Aptos, 6thMan Ventures, and others. Shinami’s products attempt to make developers’ lives easier while improving the end-user experience on-chain. An example of Shinami’s products includes a “gas station” that developers can integrate into their applications to allow consumers to skip the need for holding gas tokens for transactions. Other products include node services and integrated wallet services. Shinami is committed to furthering Move-based chains and recognizes the lack of developer tooling in the current market. Shinami hopes to empower builders to use the latest technology and produce better consumer experiences.