November Crypto Industry Investment and Financing Summary: Monthly Transactions Hit Year-to-Date Low, Total Financing Approximately $1.272 Billion | Rootdata

Author: Gu Yu, Xi Angxiang

The recently passed November was the most turbulent period for the crypto market this year. Affected by the FTX incident, many mainstream venture capital institutions suffered huge losses, casting a shadow over an already declining crypto industry.

According to statistics from Rootdata, there were a total of 94 financing events publicly disclosed in the crypto primary market throughout November, involving an amount of approximately $1.272 billion. This is the first time this year that the monthly number of investment and financing events has fallen below 100. Due to the lag in the release of financing news for most projects, this downward trend is expected to become more pronounced in the coming months.

Compared to October, the number of investment and financing events in November decreased by 19, while the amount involved increased by $119 million, indicating a 16% decline in the number of events and an approximately 12% increase in the amount involved. The main reason is that several large financing events occurred during the month, offsetting the impact of the decrease in financing events.

Statistics show that there were 5 projects in November with financing amounts exceeding $50 million, namely Keyrock, TRM Labs, Ramp, Fenix Games, and Matter Labs, while there were only 3 in October.

In terms of specific sectors, infrastructure, CeFi, and gaming are the most favored areas by venture capital institutions, with financing amounts reaching $379 million, $302 million, and $206 million, respectively.

Additionally, there were 5 merger and acquisition events in the crypto market this month, 4 of which occurred in the CeFi sector, involving well-known companies such as Binance, CrossTower, and Bakkt. The other was the Helium Foundation's acquisition of the Solana NFT protocol Strata Protocol at the beginning of the month.

Below, this article will provide a detailed overview of the investment and financing market in November based on various sectors of the crypto industry.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure sector includes various fields such as Layer 1, Layer 2, developer platforms, and wallets, and has always been a key focus for venture capital institutions. This month, a total of 20 infrastructure projects received financing, with an amount reaching $404 million.

Among them, Matter Labs, the developer of zkSync, announced the completion of a $200 million Series C financing round, with venture capital institutions such as Dragonfly, a16z, and Lightspeed Venture doubling down on the zk narrative. Just a month ago, zkSync announced the launch of its 2.0 version mainnet, but it is expected to open to external projects only in December. According to statistics from the zkSync ecosystem's official website, over 100 projects have been deployed on the test network, including Aave V3 and Uniswap V3, making the future development of the zk ecosystem worth watching.

In the recently popular MPC wallet sector, Fordefi stood out by securing $18 million in seed round financing from well-known institutions such as Lightspeed Venture and Electric Capital. According to the introduction, Fordefi's MPC wallet platform and web3 gateway can help institutional users access more DeFi opportunities while ensuring asset security and connecting to various dApps across chains, enabling safe transactions, lending, investing, and voting in DeFi.

In the privacy direction, the multi-signature solution Nucleo completed a $4 million seed round financing. This project supports users in using multi-signatures while privately shielding and transferring assets. Notably, in addition to receiving investment from Bain Capital Crypto, the project also attracted investments from several privacy scaling solutions such as Aztec Network, Aleo, and Espresso Systems, and is expected to be one of the first ecosystem projects of these privacy networks.

Additionally, the smart contract hosting platform T3rn is also worth noting, as it provides innovative solutions for interoperable smart contract execution, with built-in fault safety mechanisms. Smart contracts stored in the t3rn registry can be used by anyone, and developers contributing smart contracts to the open-source repository can choose to be rewarded when their code is executed, offering a new vision for open-source development and fairly rewarding developers.

CeFi

Although CeFi is the sector most impacted by the FTX incident, with many CeFi projects facing significant crises this month, the financing amount for CeFi in November still ranked second among the nine sectors, with 14 financing events raising approximately $301 million.

On one hand, compliant CeFi projects remain favored. The CeFi projects that completed financing this month often possess various types of licenses, such as Archax, which has obtained FCA approval in the UK, ADDX, which has received licenses for digital securities issuance, custody, and secondary trading from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and Coinmetro, which is regulated by the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit.

On the other hand, the lag in financing news remains evident. Cryptocurrency market maker Keyrock and cryptocurrency exchange Lemon Cash both stated in their announcements that their financing was completed months ago, and the current disclosure is mainly to maintain market and user confidence.

Specific projects worth noting include Ejara, Apex Crypto, and Ramp. Ejara is a fintech company from Cameroon that offers an investment application allowing users to purchase cryptocurrencies and save through decentralized wallets. The company attracted $8 million in investment from well-known institutions such as Dragonfly, CoinShares, Circle Ventures, and HashKey Capital, reflecting the significant appeal of emerging markets to venture capital institutions.

Apex Crypto is a crypto investment solution that was acquired by Bakkt for $200 million at the beginning of November, making it the second-highest acquisition deal this year. The platform provides execution, clearing, custody, cost basis, and tax services for over 30 tokens, and any business can use its easy-to-integrate API to launch cryptocurrency products for customers.

Ramp is akin to "PayPal" in the crypto world and has launched cryptocurrency trading services in the US and Canada, allowing local residents to purchase BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies using fiat currency, debit cards, credit cards, bank transfers, and Apple Pay. The recent $70 million Series B financing round increased its valuation to $450 million.

DeFi

In November, there were 13 financing events in the DeFi sector, raising approximately $42 million, ranking fifth among the nine sectors.

From the perspective of public chain ecosystem distribution, the Near ecosystem was the most active this month, with decentralized derivatives trading protocol Veax, decentralized trading protocol Jumbo Exchange, and Orderly Network completing financing. Additionally, projects on Solana, Cardano, and Optimism also completed financing.

Projects worth noting include Veax, Lyra, and Avault. Veax is a native advanced unilateral liquidity management DEX on the Near blockchain, planning to launch features including a hybrid AMM DEX, adaptive liquidity pools, real margin leveraged trading, smart contract-based OTC trading, and smart contract-based illiquid token auctions.

Lyra is an options liquidity protocol built on Optimism, combining a top-tier dynamic volatility model and risk management framework to provide reasonably priced two-way options markets in DeFi. Avault is a one-stop full-chain yield platform based on the Layerzero ecosystem, aimed at lowering the threshold for users to use Web 3.0 DeFi Dapps. Users holding an asset on one chain will be able to interact with Dapps on other chains with one click, completing cross-chain compounding, staking, lending, and copy trading.

NFT

In November, there were 10 financing events in the NFT sector, raising approximately $32 million.

The NFT field is bursting with various innovations. Among the financing projects in November, the smart contract system NiftyApes can help NFT owners collateralize NFTs for instant liquidity, the NFT fraud detection network Yakoa can identify and track on-chain intellectual property infringements, and the NFT perpetual contract exchange nftperp can track the minimum prices of NFT collections, allowing users to go long and short on NFTs.

Additionally, there is a project that combines with offline life—Buk, which focuses on enabling hotels to create, manage, and distribute their rooms as NFTs. After booking is completed, guests receive NFTs representing each night of stay. These tokens can be traded for room bookings in the secondary market (distributors and guests) while maintaining complete visibility of price control and distribution channels.

Others

Daylight is a wallet information tracking platform where users can discover everything wallets can do: minting, airdrops, unlocking, voting, and more. This project has received support from institutions such as Framework Ventures and Chapter One.

Sepana is a Web3 indexing infrastructure that supports cross-chain and Web3 to easily discover content, transactions, NFTs, DAOs, and people, aiming to expand people's cognition by making Web3 content easily discoverable and accessible. Currently, Sepana has developed products such as Ask Mirror, Lens Search, and Cloutavista to help users conveniently query content from protocols like Mirror and Lens Protool. This project has received support from investors such as Hack VC, Protocol Labs, and Balaji Srinivasan.

Additionally, given the frequent occurrence of security incidents and compliance issues, related companies such as Beosin and TRM Labs have also completed new rounds of financing. Beosin is a blockchain security service provider covering smart contract auditing, recovery of stolen cryptocurrencies, risk monitoring, and alerts. TRM Labs is a blockchain analytics company primarily helping financial institutions, cryptocurrency businesses, and public agencies investigate crypto-related fraud and financial crimes, receiving investments from well-known institutions such as Goldman Sachs and PayPal Ventures.

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