Crypto Research

This week, twenty-six crypto companies raised money through venture capital firms, totaling $622 million. NFT projects received over half of the pool at $319 million. In a relatively slow week for Infrastructure startups, they raised $125 million, followed by DeFi ($113 million), CeFi ($34 million), and lastly, Web3 ($33 million). Additionally, three new funds launched this week with a combined $1.375 billion, with Dragonfly Capital’s third crypto fund raising $650...

This week twenty-seven crypto companies raised capital totaling $1.46 billion, more than half of which went to two miners, Crusoe Energy Systems and Bit Digital. Web3 came in second, bringing in over $226 million, followed by CeFi ($137 million), NFTs ($129 million), Infrastructure ($92 million), and DeFi ($20 million). Additionally, four funds launched this week after raising a combined $610 million. Framework Ventures’ newest fund was the standout, raising $400...

VENTURE CAPITAL DEALS Swoops is an NFT-based fantasy basketball game where each basketball player is minted as an NFT that can be purchased, traded, staked, etc. The startup raised $3.5 million in a Series A led by Courtside Ventures and Alpaca VC. Other participants in the round included Slow Ventures, Red Beard Ventures, and a few individual investors like Jason Robins, the CEO of DraftKings. An important note, this game...

Venture capital is in its second straight week of infrastructure and NFT/metaverse funding in a week that saw $932 million in capital being invested in startups. As is typical, infrastructure projects continued to draw the most attention, with eight funding rounds raising $530 million. NFT/metaverse continued its revival trajectory to raise $180 million across three projects, DeFi only had one seed round to raise $5 million, and CeFi also had...

VENTURE CAPITAL DEALS zkLend is an Ethereum-based crypto money market similar to Aave and Compound, but will use zero-knowledge rollups to allow users to borrow and lend liquidity without broadcasting identifying information to the Ethereum chain. The project raised $5 million in a seed round led by Delphi Digital with participation from Starkware, Three Arrows Capital, and Alameda Research, among others. zkLend is working to launch its retail lending product,...

VENTURE CAPITAL DEALS Yuga Labs is an NFT/metaverse developer most widely known for creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, the largest NFT collection by market cap at over 1 million ETH (~$3 billion at the time of writing). Yuga raised $450 million in a funding round that valued the company at $4 billion. The round was led by a16z, with Sandbox, FTX Ventures, and MoonPay participating as well,...

VENTURE CAPITAL DEALS Hexa Wallet is a self-custody Bitcoin wallet that gives users the ability to control their own private keys without being a simple non-custodial wallet that isn’t as private as a custodial one. The fintech startup raised $1 million in pre-seed investments from Fulgur Ventures and Brad Mills with Bank To The Future and Plan B Ventures as crowdfunding partners. The fresh capital will help Hexa onboard more...

VENTURE CAPITAL DEALS Espresso Systems is a new layer 1 blockchain protocol that uses Proof-of-Stake consensus with zero-knowledge rollups in order to maintain user privacy while also improving transaction speed and costs. The project raised $32 million in a seed round led by Greylock Partners and Electric Capital, with Sequoia Capital, Blockchain Capital, and Slow Ventures also participating in the round. Espresso’s differentiator is its smart contract application that allows...

Venture capital investors took a breather heading into March after investing around $4 billion in the previous three weeks. CeFi projects continue to get a substantial portion of investments, raising $123 million this week. A DeFi project received $70 million in funding, and NFT/Metaverse investments totaled $52 million. Infrastructure was an unusual laggard in the venture space, raising $35 million. Most of this week’s capital flowed into two new venture...

The biggest news in venture capital this week was the $1 billion private token sale with Terra, which we wrote about in more detail in our Crypto Weekly report. Other than the Terra private sale, Centralized Finance projects took home the bacon, raising $475 million across just three projects. Infrastructure investments raised $103 million mostly in early-stage, low price tag funding rounds. Three gaming / NFT projects received $13 million....

Infrastructure remained the hottest sector in crypto this week, with Helium’s $200 million raise as the stand-out. NFT/metaverse projects also remain of interest to investors broadly. The sub-category of DAO tooling is gaining more traction with RabbitHole’s $18 million raise. Like last week, DeFi was relatively inactive, with only a few deals closed focusing on derivatives and cross-chain liquidity. Active investors this week include Multicoin Capital, Tiger Global, Alameda Research, Polychain...