Highlights of this episode
According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 21 investment and financing events in the global blockchain sector last week (May 18-24), with a total funding amount exceeding $467 million . The funds were highly concentrated in trading and financial infrastructure, as summarized below:
- Five investment and financing events were announced in the DeFi sector, including Perp DEX and PopDEX completing a $30 million financing round led by Foresight Ventures;
- In the Web3+AI sector, two investment and financing events were announced. Among them, AI-native bank Catena Labs completed a $30 million Series A financing and applied for a US trust banking license.
- The Infrastructure & Tools sector announced six investment and financing events, including American Fortress, a privacy-focused blockchain startup, completing an $8 million seed round.
- Five investment and financing events were announced in the centralized finance sector, including JPYC, the issuer of the Japanese yen stablecoin, which raised approximately 5 billion yen in its Series B financing.
- Market Direction announced two investment and financing events, including Kalshi raising an additional $200 million from Baillie Gifford and Layer Global.
DeFi
Decentralized derivatives trading protocol Variational announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures. This follows a $10.3 million seed round led by Bain Capital Crypto. Headquartered in the Cayman Islands, Variational aggregates liquidity from major crypto exchanges and traditional financial market makers to provide on-chain derivatives trading, including real-world assets (RWAs) such as oil and commodities, aiming to compete with traditional markets like the CME. The project currently operates on a zero-fee, brokerage-like model. Its retail applications, Omni and OLP (Omni Liquidity Provider) liquidity pools, remain invitation-only, but will gradually open to the public in select jurisdictions. The project also plans to expand its tradable assets and liquidity partners.
Perp DEX and PopDEX have raised $30 million in funding, led by Foresight Ventures.
PopDEX, a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform, has announced the completion of a $30 million funding round led by Foresight Ventures. The team stated that the funding will be used to inject initial liquidity into the project, improve trading depth and capital efficiency, accelerate product development, and expand the team and market reach. PopDEX is described as a trader-centric decentralized perpetual contract trading platform that focuses on capital efficiency, trading experience, and value distribution mechanisms, aiming to build an on-chain derivatives trading platform driven by real trading contributions. PopDEX is currently in internal testing.
TownSquare completes Pre-A round of financing, raising a total of $16.25 million.
TownSquare, an RWA yield protocol, announced the completion of its Pre-A round of financing, bringing its total funding to approximately $16.25 million. The funds will be used to advance yield products based on an institutional strategy and cross-chain brokerage business. The protocol focuses on bringing yields from institutionally backed on-chain assets to ordinary users. Currently, the scale of institutionally backed assets on-chain is approximately $36 billion, with yields exceeding the traditional 3%–5% level of US Treasury bonds. TownSquare will build a yield vault around the stablecoin USD1, tokenized gold, USDC, cbBTC, and other RWA assets, and is advancing a USD100 million pipeline plan with partners such as World Liberty Financial.
Cycles, a multilateral clearing startup founded by Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman, has raised $6.4 million in a new funding round led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Compound VC, Primitive Ventures, and others, bringing its total funding to $8.7 million. Cycles aims to create an open clearing protocol that uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), trusted execution environments (TEEs), and graph algorithms to clear more transactions between multiple parties with less capital. Lynq and FalconX, as the first partners of Cycles Prime, will participate in testnet pilots with market makers, prime brokers, exchanges, and several leading trading institutions. The company also launched Cycles Pay, a stablecoin pegged to its clearing engine.
Temple Digital Group, a digital asset trading platform, has completed a private equity funding round, led by SBI Group.
Digital asset trading platform Temple Digital Group has completed a private funding round, led by SBI Group. The specific amount raised was not disclosed. Temple is expanding its product portfolio with the new capital and plans to list on a regulated market in the second half of 2026. Temple Digital Group operates a compliant trading, liquidity, and asset issuance platform on the Canton Network, supporting privacy and enabling blockchain-based digital asset trading. It previously completed a $5 million seed funding round last October, led by Paper Ventures.
AI
Catena Labs, an "AI-native bank" founded by Sean Neville, co-founder of stablecoin issuer Circle, has completed a $30 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Apryw Capital and a16z crypto, with participation from Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, QED, and others. Catena Labs is providing tools for AI agents to securely execute financial transactions and has applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a national trust bank license in New York to handle payments and custody of client funds. Currently, the platform is invitation-only and supports setting risk control rules for AI agents, including spending limits, recipient scope, and account balance caps. Neville stated that the company is still expanding its human team.
AI-powered agent settlement layer AEON completes $8 million pre-seed funding round, led by YZi Labs.
AEON, focusing on the settlement layer of the "agentic economy," has completed an $8 million pre-seed funding round, led by YZi Labs, with participation from IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, Oak Grove Ventures, and others. Specific valuation and round structure were not disclosed. AEON stated that it will use this funding to build a settlement infrastructure supporting value exchange between AI agents, and launched its first AI payment product in May, supporting AI agents connecting over 50 million physical merchants globally. The project has also partnered with BNB Chain to launch the native product x402 Facilitator, providing service providers within the BNB ecosystem with verifiable transactions, on-chain settlement, and tamper-proof credentials, and plans to deepen cooperation with partners such as Coinbase and BNB Chain.
Infrastructure & Tools
Privacy-focused blockchain startup AmericanFortress raises $8 million in seed funding.
Privacy-focused blockchain startup AmericanFortress has raised $8 million in seed funding, co-led by SAVA Digital Asset Fund, Moon Pursuit Capital, and 0G Labs. The company also launched a patent-pending post-quantum signature scheme designed to protect existing crypto assets from future quantum attacks without requiring large-scale fund migrations.
This plan can protect approximately 1.1 million Bitcoins held by Satoshi Nakamoto, as well as nearly 5 million Bitcoins in dormant accounts, with a total value of approximately $400 billion. The plan uses a backward-compatible soft fork and zero-knowledge proofs to freeze and protect vulnerable Pre-BIP32 Bitcoin addresses. The community can then decide how to handle the frozen assets through governance. The plan has a negligible impact on the performance of major blockchains, requiring only node and wallet software updates. The quantum-safe plan is expected to be ready for discussion in the coming weeks and officially launched in Paris on June 2nd.
Stablecoin infrastructure company Checker raises $8 million in funding.
Stablecoin infrastructure startup Checker has raised a total of $8 million in Pre-Seed and Seed rounds, with investors including Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures, Framework Ventures, as well as Bitso, Airtm, DFS Lab, Onigiri Capital, SNZ Capital, and Velocity. Checker provides a single API to institutions, helping B2B cross-border payment and other financial institutions access stablecoin liquidity, accounts, and compliance capabilities. It currently serves over 30 licensed institutions globally, processing over $3 billion in stablecoin transactions in the past 12 months, representing approximately 1% of the global annual B2B stablecoin payment transaction volume. The company plans to use the new funding to expand into the Brazilian, Kenyan, Hong Kong, and US markets, and launch embedded lending (settlement financing) and AI-powered agent tools for account opening, compliance auditing, and fund management.
Bitcoin hardware wallet maker Foundation raises $6.4 million in funding, led by Fulgur Ventures.
Bitcoin hardware wallet provider Foundation has raised $6.4 million in a new funding round, led by Fulgur Ventures with participation from Arche Capital and others. The funds will be used to expand from self-custodied Bitcoin wallets to applications in identity, multi-factor authentication, and AI agent authorization. This round brings the company's total funding to $16.5 million. Valuation and round structure were not disclosed. Foundation also announced that its flagship device, Passport Prime, is now available to all users. Passport Prime integrates a Bitcoin hardware wallet, FIDO security keys, 2FA storage, a confidential information vault, and 50GB of encrypted storage, emphasizing "human authorization" through dedicated hardware. Furthermore, the company is expanding the KeyOS developer platform and plans to launch the KeyOS app store by the end of Q2, with Cake Wallet among the initial partners.
Cross-chain infrastructure platform Squid has raised $6 million in strategic funding to launch a new consumer-facing product. The round was led by North Island Ventures, with participation from Ripple, Dialectic, and Borderless. Angel investors including Georgios Vlachos, co-founder and former director of Axelar, Connor Howe, founder of Enso Finance, and Dan Lynch, founder of Constructive, also participated. This new funding brings Squid's total funding to $13.5 million, following a $3.5 million seed round in 2023 and a $4 million strategic round in 2024.
Tether and Gnosis co-led a $4.4 million seed funding round for Sorted Wallet, a lightweight mobile crypto wallet. $3.4 million of the funding was equity, with participation from individual angel investors including Movement, Angel Invest Group, and the founder of RWA.io. An additional $1 million came from strategic support from Vox Solutions. Launched in 2022, Sorted Wallet has an installation package of only 10MB, making it one of the lightest crypto wallets available. It has been downloaded 500,000 times, with its fastest-growing markets including Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Bangladesh, and Madagascar.
Tether announces investment in cross-border financial platform LemFi
Tether announced an investment in LemFi, a cross-border financial platform, to promote the use of stablecoins in remittance scenarios in emerging markets and expand the reach of its borderless financial infrastructure. LemFi primarily serves cross-border users living and working in the UK, US, Canada, and Europe, providing financial services for remittances to Africa and Asia. Tether stated that this investment will support LemFi in introducing USD₮ as a settlement layer in major cross-border channels, replacing the traditional SWIFT multi-day settlement process and enabling lower-cost, near-instant cross-border transfers.
The two parties also plan to further expand the stablecoin infrastructure, gradually integrating USD₮ into LemFi's broader product portfolio to provide more stable, transparent, and convenient financial services. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that the company hopes to promote global financial inclusion by supporting scalable financial solutions and believes that cross-border payments should place greater emphasis on speed, cost, and transparency.
Centralized Finance
HashKey Capital completes $40 million strategic investment in options trading platform SignalPlus.
HashKey Capital announced a $40 million strategic investment in options trading platform SignalPlus, including a $20 million cash contribution from HashKey Group. SignalPlus focuses on options trading systems, automated market making, and structured product solutions, and is a leading institutional-grade crypto derivatives platform in Asia, holding a significant share of the mainstream options market. This investment follows HashKey Capital's continued investment in SignalPlus since its seed round, and the two companies will deepen their strategic partnership to jointly drive product innovation and global institutional business expansion.
JPYC Corporation, the issuer of the Japanese yen stablecoin, announced the completion of its Series B funding round, raising a total of ¥5 billion (approximately US$31.4 million) through its first and second rounds of financing. Four new investors joined the round: Life Design Fund, IHD STRATEGY FUND, Awagin Future Creation Investment Limited Partnership, and Meiji Yasuda Future Co-creation Investment Limited Partnership. The funds raised will be used to expand the ecosystem in the financial and Web3 sectors, further accelerating the adoption of the JPYC stablecoin.
Eisen raises $10 million in Series A funding, led by MissionOG.
Eisen announced the completion of a $10 million Series A funding round, led by MissionOG, bringing its total funding to $18.5 million. Previously, the company completed an undisclosed $8.5 million seed round, led by Index Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Homebrew, and Restive Ventures.
Paris-based cryptocurrency exchange Ouinex announced the completion of a new $3.5 million equity funding round, bringing its total funding to $9 million. All funding came from its more than 10,000 retail and professional traders, with no venture capital participation. Founded in 2022 by former FXCM executive Ilies Larbi, Ouinex's core selling point is its departure from the traditional CLOB (Central Limit Order Book) model. Instead, it adopts a forex and CFD market architecture: market makers only quote bid and ask prices to the platform, without seeing retail orders or placing orders in the order book. Ouinex selects the best quote plus a spread and provides clients with a one-sided quote, claiming to "compete only with the market, not with users." The platform has already obtained licenses in South Africa, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Australia, and Poland, and operates a single matching engine with KYC verification.
Fintech company Jia has raised $3 million in seed funding, with investors including Coinbase Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, and A100x. TCG and Hashed Emergent also participated in the round, bringing the total funding to $7.3 million. The new funds will be used to expand its comprehensive financial platform to over 1 million SMEs in the Philippines. Jia provides Philippine SMEs with an integrated financial operating system encompassing working capital, corporate banking, and cash flow instruments. Through its proprietary AI credit model, Ossicone, trained on Southeast Asian SME data, businesses can convert unpaid invoices into cash within 24 hours, without collateral or weeks of approval.
Prediction Market
Prediction market Kalshi raises an additional $200 million from Baillie Gifford and Layer Global.
According to Bloomberg, sources familiar with the matter revealed that prediction market Kalshi has raised an additional $200 million from two new investors, Baillie Gifford and Layer Global, extending its previous $1 billion funding round led by Coatue Management. The company's valuation remains unchanged at $22 billion.
Earlier this month, Kalshi announced the completion of a $1 billion Series F funding round led by Coatue Management, valuing the company at $22 billion. Other participants included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley, and ARK Invest. Kalshi's monthly trading volume exceeded $14 billion in April, with annualized revenue exceeding $1.5 billion.
BNB Chain's perpetual contract and prediction market protocol, IOTrader, has completed a $3.8 million strategic funding round. Investors include Animoca Brands, ViaBTC Capital, Everwood Capital, CANDAQ, WAGMI Ventures, Credit Scend, and Web3 Labs. Over the past 11 months, the protocol has integrated perpetual futures, prediction markets, custom event markets, and AI-assisted trading into a single wallet experience, achieving a cumulative trading volume exceeding $1 billion and tens of thousands of monthly active traders. The IOI token has not yet been launched, but the smart contracts have completed a third-party security audit, and the white paper has been submitted to the Central Bank of Ireland in accordance with the EU's MiCA framework.
other
Tomoland raises $2 million, led by Sky9 Capital.
Mobile UGC game platform Tomoland has raised $2 million in funding. The round was led by Sky9 Capital, with participation from WAGMI Ventures and Aureus Dealers. Tomoland positions itself as a mobile user-generated content (UGC) game platform, allowing users to create and edit game worlds, further expanding the integration of blockchain games and the creator economy.
Acquisition
MoonPay announced its acquisition of cross-chain routing and liquidity company Decent.xyz in an eight-figure USD deal, according to sources. The acquisition also launched MoonPay Trade, an institutional-grade unified API product that integrates Decent's cross-chain routing algorithm, bridging infrastructure, and liquidity layer with MoonPay's existing fiat currency deposit/withdrawal and compliance system. This provides one-click execution, settlement, exchange, and payment capabilities for over 200 chains and protocols, and provides underlying execution layer support for MoonPay Institutional's asset tokenization business. MoonPay has recently acquired infrastructure projects such as DFlow, Dawn, and Sodot, building an end-to-end crypto-fiat infrastructure stack.
Zama acquires TokenOps to advance crypto token distribution.
FHE privacy technology company Zama has acquired TokenOps, an enterprise-grade token lifecycle management platform, to apply Fully Homomorphic Encryption to scenarios such as token vesting, airdrops, and equity table management. TokenOps claims to have processed over $2 billion in token distributions. Through this acquisition, token issuers can encrypt key information such as token allocation, release curves, and receiving addresses on-chain under the ERC-7984 confidential token standard, reducing the risk of signal leakage and front-running due to on-chain transparency. This technology has already been implemented in institutional partnerships with the RWA protocol KAIO, and Zama's own ZAMA token team and investor distributions also use TokenOps' encrypted vesting solution. The TokenOps brand will maintain independent operation and open its confidential tools to more issuers.
Standard Chartered plans to acquire the crypto custody business of its subsidiary Zodia Custody, with its non-binding offer already accepted by Zodia shareholders and creditors. Upon completion of the transaction, Zodia's digital asset custody business will be integrated into Standard Chartered's existing system, paving the way for providing custody services in new markets such as the UK and Australia. Zodia's infrastructure business will be spun off into an independent SaaS company, Zodia Solutions, operated by current Zodia Custody CEO Julian Sawyer and controlled by Standard Chartered's venture capital arm. Whether existing Zodia investors, including Northern Trust, Emirates NBD, National Australia Bank, and SBI Holdings, will remain with Zodia Solutions is still under negotiation.
