Crypto Research

Venture funding slid lower this week, with the lowest weekly amount of money raised all year. There were 28 deals, raising a total of $410M. Despite general VC funding weakness, CeFi funding has been resilient and had made up roughly ~60% of funding for the week at $235M, an increase from last week's CeFi financing of $190M. DeFi came in second for the most funding and rose from $10M to...

MERGE UPDATE If you recall, several potential catalysts for this year were highlighted during our 2022 preview. A major one was the proposed transition of Ethereum from its current Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) architecture through a process colloquially termed the “Merge.” This is a catalyst that we felt the market was heavily discounting due to Ethereum developers’ track record of delays (Some thought this would take place five...

While liquid markets continued to chop this week, venture funding remained relatively robust with over 45 deals completed for a total of $574 million – a slight downtick from last week’s $600 million. Web3 projects raised $227 million, the most of any other category, with CeFi coming in second having raised $190 million. Metaverse/gaming projects were overlooked this week; however, Japanese game developer Akatsuki raised a $20 million fund that...

Recently, we have been quite cautious about cryptoasset prices in the immediate term, recommending that investors hedge to the downside. We still think this is appropriate given the relentless hawkish signaling from the Fed and lack of conclusive softening economic data. While we believe there are signs of inflation turning over, we find it difficult to rationalize anyone with near-term liquidity needs to bet the farm on cryptoassets. _Source: TradingView_...