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*The dollar sign in this article refers to US dollars.
According to MEXC Research, from October 17 to October 23, 2022, 34 projects in the Web3 space raised a total of $347.25 million. Among them, Metaverse, NFT and GameFi projects have raised $166.8million; DeFi and Web 3 projects have raised $50million; The infrastructure projects raised $130.45 million financing.
Last week, there were several events worth noting:
- MEXC listed APT, a Layer 1 public chain project initiated by the former team members of the Meta, with the highest gain of 2850%.
- MEXC listed DIE and THE,both are meme tokens posted by Vitalik on twitter, with the highest gain of 434% and 600%.
Metaverse & NFT & GameFi
- Stability AI Raises $101 million Seed Round,led by Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners
Metaverse and digital media tool development company Stability AI announced the completion of a $101 million seed round led by Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Stability AI has built ‘Stable Diffusion’, an AI tool that makes digital art, can design apps in the metaverse, and possibly create PowerPoint presentations.
- NFT marketplace Mintify raises $1.6 million, led by Arca
NFT marketplace Mintify announced the completion of a $1.6 million funding round led by Arca, with participation from Endeavour Fund, Alchemy Ventures, Psalion, and companies including GSR and Fasanara.
Where traditional NFT trading markets are often limited in functionality, real-time data, and scope, Mintify aims to be a Bloomberg-like trading terminal built specifically for NFTs.
- Crypto gaming startup Stardust raises $30 million ,led by Framework Ventures
Stardust, a platform company that provides developer tools for chain games, has completed a $30 million Series A financing, led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Acrew Capital, Blockchain Capital, and Distributed Global.
- Delysium raised $10 million in a strategic round,led by Anthos Capital
Delysium, an AI-powered open world with diverse Free-to-Own universes, announced its $10 million strategic funding round led by LA-based VC Anthos Capital with participation from Immutable, GSR, Blockchain Coinvestors, Leonis Capital, Plancker DAO, Antalpha Ventures(Bitmain’s venture arm), Perion and Formless Capital.
The strategic funding will be used primarily to develop the content, enable unique AI-powered experiences, and build out the Delysium Multiverse, an open-source & decentralized publishing structure for web3 games.
- Solana-based gaming platform Arcade2Earn raises $3.2 million,led by Crypto.com
Arcade2Earn, a play-to-earn gaming platform built on the Solana blockchain, has raised $3.2 million in a seed funding round led by Crypto.com Capital.
Other investors included Solana Ventures, Shima Capital, KuCoin Labs and GSR, Arcade announced. The funding was realized via a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT), Arcade co-founder Jale.
DeFi & Web 3
- Polkadot synthetic asset protocol Tapio raises $4 million from Polychain
Tapio Protocol raised $4 million in a seed round led by Polychain, Hypersphere and Arrington, in an effort to bring a unified liquidity standard to Polkadot.
Others investors in the round included Spartan, LongHash, 0xVentures, CMS, D1 Ventures, 11-11 DG Partners, Genblock, Valhalla, PAKA, and Double Peak, according to an announcement.
- DeFi credit startup Carapace raises $2.5 million, led by NFX
DeFi credit startup Carapace closes $2.5 million round led by NFX with participation from Tribe Capital, Ledger Prime and GSR.
Carapace provides default risk protection for low or unsecured loans in the crypto market, designed to connect buyers and sellers to protect against credit default risk.
- Web3 startup Spindl completes $7 million financing, led by DragonFly Capital
Web3 startup Spindl announced the completion of $7 million in financing, led by DragonFly Capital and Chapter 1, with participation from Polygon Ventures, Tribe Capital, Multicoin, Solana Ventures, and others. The new funds will be used to expand recruitment.
- OpenSea Ventures among backers for $7M around for crypto security startup Web3 Builders
Web3 Builders Inc, a new smart contract and non-fungible token (NFT) security startup, raised $7 million in seed funding with backers that included Road Capital and the venture capital arm of NFT marketplace OpenSea. The funding will help build out the products, add new artificial intelligence and machine learning methods, and expand the team.
- Web3 fashion and lifestyle platform YoloYolo raises $3.5 million, led by ParaFi Capital
YoloYolo, a new platform that connects NFT owners with brands to sell merchandise, has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round from backers that included crypto-focused investment firm ParaFi Capital, Mirana Ventures and Morningstar Ventures.
The capital will be used to help hire more employees and bring new brands onboard.
Other participants in the funding round were Avalanche Ventures, UOB Venture, Signum Capital, Genblock Capital, Yolo Investments. Individual investors included Neil Cunha-Gomes of SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Nicole Zhang, a former partner at crypto exchange Binance and Mike Dudas, founder and former CEO of The Block.
Infrastructure
- Celestia raises $55M,led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital
The Celestia Foundation is announcing that it has raised $55 million in support from rounds led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital with participation from Placeholder, Galaxy, Delphi Digital, Blockchain Capital, NFX, Protocol Labs, Figment, Maven 11, Spartan Group, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, and select angels including Balaji Srinivasan, Eric Wall and Jutta Steiner.
Celestia introduces modular blockchain architecture to solve the challenge of deploying and scaling blockchains. These specialized chains are less constrained and break the rigidity of monolithic chains into flexible components, promising greater scale, security, and decentralization.
- ChainSafe raises $18.75 Million in series A funding,led by Round13
ChainSafe Systems, one of the world’s top blockchain infrastructure firms, announced today that it has secured $18.75 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round. The investment was led by Round13 with participation from new investors NGC Ventures, HashKey Capital, Sfermion, Jsquare, and returning investors Digital Finance Group, and Fenbushi Capital. Concurrent with the funding round, Khaled Verjee, Managing Partner of Round13’s Digital Asset Fund, is joining ChainSafe’s board of directors alongside founding members and current board member Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys Mesh – a long time investor and supporter of ChainSafe.
- Shardeum completes a seed round of financing of $18.2 million, led by Spartan Group
The public chain project Shardeum completed a seed round of $18.2 million, co-led by Jane Street, Struck Crypto, Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, Foresight Ventures, Coingecko Ventures, WeMade, ZebPay, JSquare, Nestcoin, Veris Ventures , Tupix Capital, Mapleblock Capital and NetZero Capital . Also individual investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, and Mayur Gupta, CMO of Kraken, participated in the investment.
The funds raised will be used to strengthen the company’s marketing as well as develop the development team to further strengthen Shardeum’s dynamic sharding technology and ecosystem development.
- Privacy project Light Protocol closes $4.5 million seed round, led by Polychain Capital
Solana’s ecological privacy project Light Protocol announced the completion of a $4.5 million seed round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Solana Ventures, Hypersphere, dao5, Asymmetric, Balaji Srinivasan, Algod, The Crypto Dog and others.
Light Protocol says it will soon launch Light V3, which will enable ultra-efficient privacy and universal ZK on Solana.
- L2 protocol Milkomeda closes $3.1 million financing, led by Archetype
Milkomeda, a layer-2 network protocol that provides EVM functions for non-EVM-compatible chains, completed $3.1 million in financing, led by Archetype, with participation from Sora Ventures, Algorand Foundation, Arrington Capital, SOSV, Circle Ventures, Borderless Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.
- Solana’s on-chain crypto app Ottr Finance closes $3.1 million financing, led by Race Capital
Ottr Finance, Solana’s on-chain crypto app, announced the completion of a $3.1 million Pre-Seed round led by early-stage venture fund Race Capital, with participation from Circle Ventures, Slow Ventures, and Kamal Ravikant.
Ottr Finance is using the funds to expand its business to more than 100 countries and will release Ottr NFTs in November.
- Helius raises $3.1M,led by Reciprocal Ventures and Chapter One
Solana infrastructure startup Helius announced that it raised a $3.1 million seed round co-led by Reciprocal Ventures and Chapter One, in an effort to provide the tools to help developers build Web3 applications in less time and for less money.
Co-founded by engineers formerly of Coinbase and Amazon Web Services, Helius raised funds from a number of notable VCs, including Solana Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Big Brain Ventures, and Propel VC, among other firms, along with angels like Magic Eden co-founder Zhuoxun Yin and Squads co-founder Stepan Simkin.
Hot News
- Public chainAptos officially launches mainnet Aptos Autumn
The public chain project Aptos announced the official launch of the main network Aptos Autumn. Technological innovations of the Aptos blockchain include pipelined and modular approaches to transaction processing, new smart contract parallel execution engine Block-STM, AptosBFT consensus, decentralized state synchronization flexibility, etc.The current Aptos blockchain utilizes the latest iteration of Aptos BFT (version 4), development of Aptos BFT version 5 is already underway and will be released in a future upgrade.
- StarkWare native token is expected to be released in October
StarkWare’s president Eli Ben-Sasson said StarkWare native token is expected to be released in October. But the project will not provide users with free tokens , because all tokens will be locked immediately after release, in preparation for the long-term development of the team.
- Optimism publishes the next evolution of its scalability architecture, the OP Stack
Optimism, the Layer2 expansion solution of Ethereum, introduces the next evolution of its scalability architecture, OP Stack.The OP Stack is a modular, open-source blueprint for highly scalable, highly interoperable blockchains of all kinds.The future of OP Stack is neither multi-chain nor mono-chain, but an emerging structure formed by highly integrated chains, that is, a superchain.
- zkSync announces End-to-End Prover is now live on testnet and mainnet will go live on October 28
zkSync announced that they have successfully completed Milestone 3: Proof Merging. With the integration of validity proofs, zkSync 2.0 is now officially a fully working end-to-end zkEVM running on a public testnet. ZkSync mainnet will go live on October 28.
- Hong Kong Mulls Letting Retail Investors Trade Crypto, Removing ‘Professional Investor-Only Requirement’
The director of licensing and head of the fintech unit of Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has confirmed that the regulator is considering allowing retail investors to invest directly in crypto assets.
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