Highlights of this issue
According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 17 blockchain investment and financing events around the world last week (1.27-2.2); the total funding amount exceeded US$236 million, which was a significant decrease compared to the previous week. The overview is as follows:
- DeFi announced four investment and financing events, among which Elastos announced a $20 million financing and plans to expand the Bitcoin DeFi protocol BeL2;
- The Web3 game track announced two investment and financing events, among which Web3 game studio Pixion Games completed a $12.4 million financing, led by Delphi Ventures;
- Two investment and financing events were announced in the AI+Web3 field. AI Web3 company Bluwhale completed a $100 million financing, with participation from Cointelegraph, SwissBorg and others.
- The Infrastructure & Tools sector announced 7 investment and financing events, among which Web3 domain name infrastructure company D3 Global announced the completion of a $25 million Series A financing round, led by Paradigm;
- Other categories announced one investment and financing event. Crypto accounting platform Cryptio completed a $15 million Series A extension financing, led by Alven.
- Centralized finance announced one investment and financing event. Payment company Cedar Money completed a $9.9 million seed round led by QED Investors.
DeFi
Elastos announces $20 million in funding, plans to expand Bitcoin DeFi protocol BeL2
Decentralized infrastructure provider Elastos has raised $20 million from private investment firm Rollman Management to expand its Bitcoin DeFi protocol BeL2 and promote its merged mining token ELA as a Bitcoin reserve asset. BeL2 allows Bitcoin holders to pledge BTC and access Ethereum smart contract services such as stablecoin minting and peer-to-peer lending. Elastos aims to leverage Bitcoin's nearly $2 trillion market capitalization to introduce richer DeFi applications to the BTC ecosystem to enhance liquidity and security, while making up for the shortcomings of the Bitcoin network in DeFi practicality.
Decentralized liquidity re-pledge protocol Inception announced the completion of a $3.5 million seed round of financing, with participation from London Real Ventures, Gallet Capital, Metazero Capital, Kinetic Kollective, Zephyrus Capital, DSRV, Dewhales, Connectico Capital, Unreal Capital, Absoluta Digital and others. The new funds intend to support its construction of a modular risk management framework, allowing users to choose reward-generating assets in order to maximize point rewards and liquidity staking token (LST) utility.
Pell Network, a Bitcoin re-staking network, announced on the X platform that it has completed a strategic round of financing of US$3.5 million, with participation from D11-Labs, Web3Port Foundation, ArkStream Capital, Taisu Ventures, Core Ventures, GoPlus Security, Astrarizon Ventures and Multiversᕽ. The new funds are intended to support its construction of an AI-driven decentralized finance (DeFAI) full-chain infrastructure to solve the complex cross-chain operations, data acquisition and verification difficulties, and multi-chain interaction security issues currently faced by AI agents.
DeFi staking service provider Amerany completes $2 million Series A financing
Amerany, a DeFi staking service provider, announced the completion of a $2 million Series A financing. The investor information has not been disclosed yet. The new funds are intended to be used to upgrade the infrastructure of its multi-chain staking platform, which currently supports more than 10 blockchains including Ethereum (ETH), Aptos (APT) and Optimism (OP). It is reported that Amerany has also launched a bug bounty program with a scale of $100,000.
Web3 Games
Web3 game studio Pixion Games completes $12.4 million financing, led by Delphi Ventures
Web3 game studio Pixion Games announced that it has completed US$12.4 million in financing, led by Delphi Ventures, with participation from Spartan Capital, Sky Mavis, L1D, Arete Capital, Animoca Brands, YGG and others. The new funds are intended to be used to create a seamless, mobile-first Web3 gaming experience.
Little Umbrella Completes $2 Million Seed Round with Participation from Workplay Ventures and Others
AI social gaming platform Little Umbrella has completed a $2 million seed round of financing, with participation from a16z SPEEDRUN, Workplay Ventures, Ubiquoss Investment, Disrupt.com, Breakpoint Ventures, GFR Fund, Virtual Reality Fund (VRF), etc. The game "Death by AI" launched by Little Umbrella supports cross-platform participation on Discord, web pages and iOS. The new funds are intended to be used to expand its online operations and accelerate the launch of its cross-platform social gaming suite Playroom.
AI
Cipher Mining receives $50 million investment from SoftBank to expand AI data center business
Cipher Mining has received a $50 million investment from SoftBank, which will purchase approximately 10.4 million common shares of the bitcoin miner. The financing was a public equity investment, and the funds will be used to support Cipher's high-performance computing (HPC) and AI data center infrastructure. Cipher signed an exclusive agreement with SoftBank for a month, ensuring that SoftBank cannot sell its 300-megawatt mine in Barber Lake, Texas or enter into an agreement with other parties during this period. "The addition of SoftBank as a major investor marks an important moment in Cipher's growth," said Tyler Page, Cipher CEO. SoftBank's investment is seen by analysts as a signal that bitcoin miners are diversifying into the AI field. Cipher Mine is the world's tenth largest publicly traded bitcoin miner with a market value of $1.6 billion and is seeking to diversify its business to mitigate the risks of bitcoin market fluctuations.
Bluwhale, an AI Web3 startup based in Silicon Valley, announced the completion of a total financing of $100 million, including $7 million in venture capital, $85 million in token purchase commitments, and $8 million in node sales and grant proceeds. Investors include Cointelegraph, SwissBorg, Awaken Finance, DWF Labs and many other institutions, as well as support from Arbitrum and Movement Labs.
It is reported that Bluwhale was co-founded by machine learning experts from Stanford and Berkeley and former members of the TikTok AI team, and is committed to empowering users to achieve data ownership and privacy protection through blockchain technology. The company plans to use the funds to expand its Web3 smart layer across multiple L1 and L2 blockchains. Bluwhale is also working with Caldera to build Oceanum, a zk-rollup-based L3 layer designed to optimize the privacy, speed and cost efficiency of AI applications, which will be deployed on Arbitrum in the initial stage. In addition, Bluwhale's technology allows users to run verification and data nodes on mobile devices, providing storage and computing resources for the AI layer, while receiving financial rewards through contributions.
Infrastructure & Tools
Web3 domain infrastructure D3 Global completes $25 million Series A financing, led by Paradigm
Web3 domain name infrastructure company D3 Global announced the completion of a $25 million Series A financing round led by Paradigm. Other investors include Coinbase Ventures, Polygon Labs co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah, and Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall. D3 Global is committed to transforming domain names into tokenized real-world assets and developing financial application tools such as domain name-based lending, decentralized ownership, and digital identity. The company plans to use this round of financing to launch the decentralized network Doma Protocol, which aims to connect traditional Web2 domain names (such as .com and .net) with Web3 domain names (such as .shib and .ape) to achieve cross-domain interoperability.
ZKP infrastructure startup Irreducible (formerly Ulvetanna) has completed a $24 million Series A financing round, led by Paradigm and Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Fenbushi Capital, L2 Iterative Ventures and Robot Ventures. It is reported that Irreducible started financing in August last year, identified the lead investor in September, and completed financing last month. The latest Series A financing structure is equity financing, but the company's co-founder and CEO Radisav Cojbasic declined to comment on the post-investment valuation.
Identity verification blockchain company Humanity Protocol announced Monday that it has reached a fully diluted valuation of $1.1 billion after raising $20 million in a round co-led by Pantera Capital and Jump Crypto.
The company is building a system that will use palm scans to verify that online accounts belong to real users. The company plans to use the funds to launch its products more widely in the coming months. Humanity Protocol is also about to launch its own crypto token, and its founder Terence Kwok said: "Final preparations are currently being made to ensure a smooth launch."
Yzi Labs announces $16 million investment in token distribution on-chain infrastructure Sign
Yzi Labs announced an investment of $16 million in Sign, an on-chain infrastructure for token distribution and credential verification. It is reported that Sign is aggregating verified credentials on the chain to build a larger network, thereby creating a more transparent and secure token distribution infrastructure.
Layer 1 network developer Pod completes $10 million seed round of financing, led by a16z CSX and 1kx
Layer 1 network developer Pod announced the completion of a $10 million seed round of financing, planning to build a "consensus-free" Layer 1 network with transaction speeds comparable to the response time of Google searches. This round of financing was led by a16z CSX and 1kx, with participation from Flashbots, Blockchain Builders Fund and Protagonist, as well as several angel investors from Celestia, Babylon and Axelar. Pod expects to launch a developer network (devnet) in the coming weeks, with a testnet to be launched in the third quarter of 2025 and the mainnet scheduled to be launched in the first quarter of 2026. It has not yet been decided whether tokens will be launched simultaneously. Pod's core team consists of 5 people and receives technical support from the Common Prefix team.
It is reported that Pod was incubated by Common Prefix, a blockchain consulting company, and aims to solve the delay problem caused by the reliance on consensus mechanisms in traditional blockchains. Pod adopts a "streaming" transaction design, which directly sends transactions to verification nodes for signature and timestamp processing without waiting for block generation, thereby achieving a transaction confirmation speed of about 200 milliseconds. Pod also launched the EVMx framework, allowing developers to continue to use the Solidity language and reduce migration costs. Pod plans to support decentralized applications in areas such as games, social networks, stablecoin payments, and decentralized exchanges, but DeFi applications that strictly rely on transaction order need to be adjusted to adapt to their network design.
Blockchain interoperability protocol Analog completed a $5 million financing round at a valuation of $300 million before its token issuance. Angel investors including Gate Ventures, BackerDAO, Foresight Ventures, Black Label Ventures, the venture capital arm of film production company Black Label Media, and Frax Finance founder Sam Kazemian, Black Label Media's three co-founders Molly Smith and twin brothers Thad and Trent Luckinbill participated in the investment.
Mevvy, the MEV execution platform, completes $2.8 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital
Mevvy, an MEV execution platform, announced the completion of a $2.8 million seed round of financing, led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Chapter One Ventures, Hypersphere, and several strategic angel investors. Investors include Nathan Allman, founder of Ondo, TN Lee, founder of Pendle, Guy Young, founder of Ethena, Georgios Vlachos, founder of Axelar, and Jeffrey Feng and Jay Jog of Sei Network. Mevvy is committed to simplifying the technical complexity in blockchain transaction sorting and execution, making MEV (maximum extractable value) easier for traders to use. Its platform supports Ethereum, Sui, and Sei, and provides an integrated development environment (IDE) with pre-loaded open source strategies to help traders focus on strategy optimization such as arbitrage, run-backs, and liquidations without maintaining complex infrastructure.
other
Accounting/Tax:
Crypto accounting platform Cryptio completes $15 million Series A extension financing, led by Alven
Crypto accounting platform Cryptio has completed a $15 million Series A extension financing, led by Alven, with participation from 1kx and Ledger Cathay Capital. Cryptio aims to provide backend operations and infrastructure for traditional financial (TradFI) entities, enabling them to offer digital asset products such as StableCoins, Crypto Bask Bass Bassed Loans, and Crypto Savings.
Centralized Finance
Stablecoin cross-border payment service provider completes $9.9 million seed round of financing
Payment company Cedar Money announced the completion of a $9.9 million seed round led by QED Investors, with participation from North Island Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, Lattice and Stellar. The funds will be used to accelerate the company's mission to leverage modern payment infrastructure to drive the transformation of stablecoin cross-border payments. Cedar Money aims to address the inefficiencies in the traditional correspondent banking system and use stablecoins to provide faster, more reliable and cost-effective cross-border payments.
