Hotcoin Investment and Financing Weekly Report (07.27-08.02)｜A Total of 20 Public Investment and Financing Events, Financing Data Declined Compared to Last Week

From July 27 to August 2, a total of 20 investment and financing events occurred in the crypto market, including 9 in DeFi, 2 in infrastructure, 2 in DePIN, 1 in CeFi, 1 in gaming, 1 in payments, 1 in recruitment solutions, 1 in NFT tools, 1 in data & analytics, and 1 in reputation systems.

This week, there were 2 financing rounds exceeding 10 million USD: 

The decentralized lending protocol Morpho completed a $50 million financing round, with investors including Ribbit Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

The crypto payment API provider Layer2 Financial completed a $10.7 million Series A financing round, with investors including Galaxy Digital, Accomplice, and others.

The enthusiasm for investment and financing in the crypto market declined compared to last week, with 9 DeFi deals and 2 infrastructure deals. The decentralized lending protocol Morpho received the largest financing amount this week, totaling $50 million.

The investment and financing projects this week are sorted by financing amount as shown in the following chart:

DeFi

1. According to ROOTDATA investment data from 08-01, Chateau completed an undisclosed amount of Pre-seed round financing, with Hack VC as the investor. Chateau is a protocol that brings TradFi private equity and fund investments on-chain, providing DeFi participants access to these private markets. Chateau assets can be integrated with most DeFi protocols, supporting novel applications and other use cases based on on-chain RWA lending markets, leverage, rehypothecation, etc.

2. According to ROOTDATA investment data from 08-01, Morpho completed a $50 million financing round, with Ribbit Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and others as investors. Morpho is a lending protocol that combines the capital efficiency of the current liquidity pool model used in Compound or AAVE with the P2P matching engine used in order books. Morpho-Compound improves Compound by offering the same user experience, liquidity, and liquidation parameters but with higher APY due to peer-to-peer matching.

3. According to ROOTDATA investment data from 08-01, Rage Trade completed a $6 million public round of financing, with undisclosed investors. Rage Trade is building the most liquid and composable cross-chain ETH perpetual contract protocol (supported by UNI V3). Rage Trade's Delta Neutral Vaults allow users to provide liquidity on GMX in a delta-neutral manner while earning ETH rewards on GMX. This vault operates on-chain, minimizing ETH and BTC risk through shorting on Aave+Uniswap with the help of two separate risk vaults.

4. According to ROOTDATA investment data from 08-01, Pichi Finance completed a $2.5 million financing round, with Signum Capital, UOB Venture, and others as investors. Pichi Finance is a points trading protocol that enables users to trade points from their favorite protocols before TGE. Pichi significantly redesigns the points trading process by leveraging ERC-6551 accounts (also known as Tokenbound accounts). Users can create Michi Wallet NFTs and deposit earned token points into the associated ERC-6551 wallet. Once points accumulate in the wallet, users can withdraw the earned token points and sell the Michi Wallet NFT, effectively selling the accumulated points.

5. According to ROOTDATA investment data from 07-31, We.Rich completed a $2 million seed round financing, with Animoca Brands, Folius Ventures, and others as investors. We.Rich is a UGA (user-generated asset) platform that allows anyone to launch a memecoin without LP with a single click.

6. According to ROOTDATA investment data from 07-30, aPriori completed an undisclosed amount of strategic financing, with Binance Labs as the investor. aPriori is an MEV infrastructure and liquidity staking protocol designed for the era of parallel execution and built natively on Monad.

7. According to ROOTDATA investment data from 07-29, Liquorice completed a $1.2 million Pre-seed round financing, with Greenfield, L2IV, and others as investors. Liquorice is a DeFi protocol enabling auction-based price discovery and unilateral liquidity pools. Liquorice's primary mission is to provide professional trading firms with efficient inventory management tools and to easily connect with core DeFi protocols like 1inch and Uniswap X when settling trades with intent.

8. According to ROOTDATA investment data from 07-29, Agent Exchange completed a $1 million financing round, with Caladan, Larry Cermak, and others as investors. Agent is an all-in-one platform for creating, managing, earning, and trading Web3 sub-accounts. Agent provides Web3 users with maximum flexibility and control over their accounts and DeFi profit strategies by creating and intuitively managing multiple Web3 sub-accounts on its account platform. It allows seamless connections to various dApps in its app store and supports any EVM dApp, mainly focusing on applications with points, airdrops, and other “account-bound assets” (i.e., locked assets).

9. According to ROOTDATA investment data from 07-29, BlonkFi completed an undisclosed amount of Pre-seed round financing, with UOB Venture, Signum Capital, and others as investors. BlonkFi is a currency market and liquidity protocol on Solana. BlonkFi allows users to use memecoins as collateral and build positions with the liquidity of new tokens.

Infrastructure

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 08-01, Particle Network completed a round of financing with an undisclosed amount, with Binance Labs as the investor. Particle Network is a modular L1 blockchain that provides power for chain abstraction by creating a universal account, offering users a single address and interaction point across chains, while extracting gas and unifying liquidity. This enables existing L1 and L2 to seamlessly coordinate across ecosystems.

2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 07-30, Hyperbolic completed a $7 million seed round of financing, with investors including Polychain and Faction. Hyperbolic is building an AI cloud to enable open access to AI. It achieves this goal by addressing three main issues: 1. System: building a scalable system to aggregate global GPU computing and develop AI services to maximize the performance of any type of GPU; 2. Verification: ensuring that outputs from the network run on the correct AI models; 3. Privacy: protecting user data privacy even when requests are processed by random third-party nodes.

DePin

1. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 07-31, Daylight completed a $9 million Series A financing round, with investors including a16z and Framework Ventures. Daylight is a distributed energy protocol based on Base, allowing users to connect their energy devices, such as thermostats, batteries, electric vehicles, and solar inverters, to its application and receive rewards. Users can also join the Daylight marketplace to obtain energy upgrades for their homes or buildings, such as solar panels, EV chargers, heat pumps, and water heaters.

2. According to ROOTDATA investment and financing data on 07-30, Raad Labs completed a $2.25 million seed round, with investors including CoinFund and Tribe Capital. Raad Labs is building an incentive network to modernize the data management and collection processes for local, regional, and large-scale weather data and intelligence. The project aims to establish a DePIN network to incentivize distributed personalized weather stations and other atmospheric sensors to improve model accuracy and provide incremental new data to meet the needs of managing weather risks and quantifying emissions.

Others

1. According to ROOTDATA's investment and financing data on 07-31, Breakout completed a $4.5 million seed round, with investors including RockawayX and Mechanism Capital. Breakout is a cryptocurrency proprietary trading company providing a friendly environment for cryptocurrency, forex, and index traders. With direct integration with primary cryptocurrency exchanges, Breakout focuses on tight spreads, robust risk management, and superior liquidity, aiming to redefine the standards of the proprietary trading industry.

2. According to ROOTDATA's investment and financing data on 08-02, Destiny Of Gods completed a $500,000 funding round, with investors including PurpleSky Capital. Destiny of Gods is a turn-based digital card game where players build decks, upgrade equipment, and participate in PvE and PvP battles. The game offers various modes, dungeons, cards, and equipment, allowing players to enjoy themselves while earning additional income.

3. According to ROOTDATA's investment and financing data on 07-31, Layer2 Financial completed a $10.7 million Series A round, with investors including Galaxy Digital and Accomplice. Layer2 Financial is a provider of payment and banking-as-a-service solutions, aiming to offer fully compliant multi-currency payments, banking, and digital asset wallets for fintech companies and their customers. With just one API, clients can seamlessly and easily access all these services.

4. According to ROOTDATA's investment and financing data on 07-31, Icebreaker completed a $5 million seed round, with investors including CoinFund and Accomplice. Icebreaker is a Web3 career network where users can instantly verify their credentials and provide verifiable recommendations for people in their network. By using blockchain technology, it allows users to transfer their existing professional profiles and networks to a verified channel.

5. According to ROOTDATA's investment and financing data on 07-30, Mintify completed a $3.4 million funding round, with investors including Arca and Master Ventures. Mintify is an NFT terminal for professional traders. With Mintify, users can discover and analyze new NFT collections with a range of powerful features: early whitelist, direct contract minting, team research, asset management, project statistics, market arbitrage, predictive analytics, and early trait sniping, providing historical and real-time data for long-term holders and emerging NFT quants.

6. According to ROOTDATA's investment and financing data on 08-01, Lukka completed an undisclosed amount of strategic financing, with investors including Animoca Brands. Lukka is a crypto asset data and software company bridging the gap between the complexities of blockchain data and traditional business needs. Lukka’s products enable forensic accounting for crypto assets. Their clients include traditional and crypto asset exchanges and trading desks, CPAs and accounting firms, fund and financial auditors, fund administrators, miners, protocols, individuals, and any other enterprises interacting with crypto assets.

7. According to ROOTDATA's investment and financing data on 07-31, Jokerace completed a $3 million funding round, with investors including Maven11 and ABCDE Capital. Jokerace is an on-chain reputation governance platform aiming to solve governance-related issues by using on-chain reputation to assess who should have more say in governance processes. It allows projects to launch competitions and hackathons, distribute grants, and incentivize on-chain community members.