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 developers and designers as well as fund community efforts for self-custodial Bitcoin projects. Part of the community outreach efforts involve a partnership with Summer of Bitcoin and Bitcoin4India to educate crypto-curious developers who can drive open-source community innovation. (Hexa Wallet’s Fundraising Crosses $1 Million, Funds To Be Used For Bitcoin Self-Custody Solutions)
Magic Eden is a Solana-based NFT marketplace with over 7.5 million SOL in transactions over the past 6 months and 90% of secondary-trading market share for NFT games. The project closed a $27 million Series A led by Paradigm that saw participation from Sequoia and Solana Ventures. Magic Eden will be using the funds to create a dedicated gaming vertical in the company and launching a new mobile app for trading and minting NFTs. Though Solana’s NFT ecosystem is a far cry from Ethereum markets like OpenSea, Ethereum’s NFT market share has been on the decline, sitting at 80% now compared to 95% a year ago. (Solana-Based NFT Marketplace Magic Eden Raises $27M Series A)
TravelX is a blockchain decentralization project for airlines and travel suppliers to tokenize their inventory for new methods of distribution and use cases. The company raised a $10 million seed funding round led by Borderless Capital with participants including Algorand, Draper Cygnus, Myelin Capital, and Monday Capital. TravelX is an example of understanding the broader technological opportunities that blockchain affords people and companies in order to reconfigure and improve operational procedures across a wide variety of spaces. The company is currently working on expanding its team and launching its first product, TravelX CEO. (TravelX Raises $10M to Launch Multichain Distribution Protocol)
Gauntlet is a crypto financial modeling platform that allows DeFi projects to run stress tests and simulation tools to find optimal lending and collateral setpoints for their products. The company raised $23.8 million in a Series B led by Ribbit Capital that valued the company at $1 billion. Other participants in the round included Paradigm and Polychain Capital. The funding will help Gauntlet expand its analyst, engineering, and development teams in order to build products for more crypto verticals, specifically mentioning gaming as one of their next projects. (Crypto quant firm Gauntlet valued at $1B following Series B)
Swell is an Ethereum staking protocol that so far has helped investors stake over 10 million ETH ($26 billion today) on the Ethereum 2.0 test chain. The startup closed a $3.75 million seed round led by Framework, IOSG Ventures, and Apollo Capital. When Ethereum switches to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, validators will need to stake at least 32 ETH, around $82 thousand today. Swell is lowering the barrier to entry by allowing users to stake just 1 ETH in exchange for interest-bearing tokens that will yield the equivalent validator staking yield, along with other perks to gain an advantage over other ETH staking projects with lower minimum deposit requirements. (Ethereum Staking Protocol Swell Raises $3.75M as Locked ETH Tops $26B)
Metaverse Game Studios is a blockchain game developer that created the popular turn-based strategy game, Angelic. The company raised $10 million in a funding round led by Pantera Capital, Solana Ventures, Animoca Brands, and Everyrealm with participation from OKX Blockdream Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, and Shima Capital, among others. The venture capital firms believe that Angelic and Metaverse Game Studios might be able to elevate some blockchain games to the same quality and popularity as AAA game titles. (Pantera, Animoca Brands Co-Lead $10M Investment in Metaverse Game Studios)
Treehouse is a DeFi analytics firm that sources data and builds tools for retail investors to research and learn more about the DeFi space to build their own strategies. The company closed an $18 million seed round led by an undisclosed investor with participation from Binance, Lightspeed Ventures, and Jump Capital, among many others. The main tool that Treehouse offers is Harvest, which will quantify a user’s risk and track profitability and historical trends just from connecting wallets. The team is currently looking to expand their retail and institutional product offering beyond Harvest as well as build out coverage of more DeFi protocols. (DeFi Analytics Firm Treehouse Raises $18M Seed Funding)
Aptos is the rebranded version of Facebook’s defunct stablecoin project, Diem. The project, run by former Meta employees in charge of the Diem project, raised $200 million in a strategic funding round led by a16z with participation from Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Paxos, and Coinbase Ventures. The funding will be used to launch their mannet in Q3 this year as well as sourcing and supporting startups that are willing to work with Aptos to develop and launch their projects, already having hinted that several NFT, DeFi, Web3, and social media projects are already being built. (Diem team members raise $200M to launch blockchain derived from it)
Hex Trust is a crypto custody service provider that is currently working with big names like Algorand, Terra, Tezos, and IBM’s digital assets division. The company raised $88 million in a Series B led by Animoca Brands and Liberty City Ventures with participation from Ripple, Terraform Labs, and Morgan Creek, among many others. The goal with the new capital is to create a platform for providing custody services tailored to blockchain gaming and GameFi projects. (Hex Trust Raises $88M for Crypto Custody Focused on the Gaming Sector)
Oxio is a Latin American telecom-as-a-service platform to tokenize mobile data for companies to purchase and use mobile internet services via blockchain. The company raised $40 million in a Series B round led by ParaFi Capital that also saw participation from Ascend, Leydon, and DCG, among others. At the moment, Oxio currently only operates in Mexico, but is planning to use the new funds to expand into the US and Brazil, with infrastructure integration already started in the US. (Oxio Raises $40M to Bring Tokenized Telco Model to US and Brazil)
Lava Labs is a British blockchain gaming studio with Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins as an advisor. The company closed a $10 million Series A that valued the company at $100 million. The round was led by Dialectic, with Dragonfly, Animoca Brands, and Dapper Labs participating, among many others. Lava Labs is currently developing its first game, AFAR, an arcade platformer where players compete against each other through an obstacle course. On top of game development, the company is raising funds through a virtual land sale of 10 thousand plots for owners to play mini-games leading into AFAR’s launch. (Gaming startup Lava Labs’ valuation tops $100 million in Series A raise)
Token Sales
Zebec ($ZBC) is a Solana-based payments application that allows for payrolls to be “streamed” such that workers can be paid in USDC by the second, minute, hour, etc. in place of the weekly or bi-weekly check. The project raised $28 million in a combined public and private token sale. The private sale, which raised $21 million, included Circle, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Ventures, and Alameda Research, among others. Both token sales were done at the same price of $0.021 per token. The tokens will be used for governance votes in the Zebec DAO, with a staking reward system on the near-term roadmap. (Solana Payroll Protocol Zebec Raises $28M in Token Sales)
New Venture Capital Funds, Ecosystem Funds, and Alliances
Curated is an investment group that exclusively focuses on acquiring NFTs. The fund raised $30 million from some of the biggest names in crypto, including Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Alexis Ohanian. Other participants in the fund raising include Electric Capital, Pantera, and Lattice Capital. Following 2021, a year that saw over $21 billion in NFT sales, Curated is looking to invest in blue-chip NFTs as well as support projects that build tools and help creators to keep the NFT space growing. (Andreessen, Alexis Ohanian Back $30M Crypto Fund—That Only Invests in NFTs)
The Stellar Development Foundation is a fund dedicated to supporting development on the Stellar blockchain. The foundation is dedicating $30 million to a matching fund that will be used to match investments up to $500 thousand. The goal of the fund is to broaden the scope of the foundation’s investments and use its funds faster in order to accelerate and broaden the development of the Stellar ecosystem. Four projects have already received partial funding from the matching fund: Trace Finance (LatAm stablecoin services), Bitwage (LatAm payroll services), Atriex (African remittances), and FanVestor (NFT crowdfunding). (Stellar Development Foundation Launches $30M Investment Fund)
Luno Expeditions is a new investing arm for DCG’s subsidiary crypto exchange, Luno. The company is launching the fund with an expectation to invest $15 to $75 million per year in 200 to 300 companies with a focus on seed and pre-seed funding rounds. The fund will be completely self-funded in order to maximize flexibility on investments and opportunities to create evergreen capital options for startups that show strong and lasting potential. (Luno Spins Out Investment Arm to Pump $15M to $75M a Year Into Crypto Companies)
Deal of the Week
ConsenSys Software Inc. is an Ethereum software and incubator company most notably known for its Ethereum ecosystem wallet, MetaMask, which currently has over 30 million monthly active users. The company closed a $450 million Series D led by Parafi Capital. Other participants in the round include Temasek, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Microsoft, and Third Point Ventures. The round brought ConsenSys’ valuation up to $7 billion. In the funding announcement, ConsenSys noted that the entire $450 million raised will be directly converted to ETH.
Why is this a Big Deal
ConsenSys is one of the largest and most impactful crypto development companies, especially in regards to the Ethereum network. Its flagship products, MetaMask and Infura, have both become behemoths in their respective fields of blockchain infrastructure. MetaMask is an easy-to-use, highly adaptible multi-chain wallet that allows users to easily connect to almost any EVM-compatible layer 1s, DeFi, NFT, or Web3 projects, and has been instrumental in building the Ethereum network into the largest crypto network by TVL ($111 billion as of writing). Infura is by far the largest Ethereum-based application development platform with over 430,000 active developers using it to transfer over $1 trillion in annualized on-chain transaction volume. With the massive success of its main products, the company was able to more than double its valuation within 5 months, a significant feat for companies that have already achieved unicorn status. The new funding will help ConsenSys continue to develop and launch new products that continue the adoption of the Ethereum blockchain among investors, app developers, and Web3 app users. Among current fields of interest on the company’s product roadmap are more developer tooling, wallets, security audits, DeFi, NFT, DAO, and layer 2 scaling infrastructure projects. Joseph Lubin, the founder and CEO of ConsenSys, also was a major contributor to the creation of Ethereum. One of his major goals with the new funding is to rebuild certain, established products like MetaMask into decentralized projects governed by DAOs in keeping with his vision of a decentralized world that drove him to help create Ethereum and ConsenSys.