Hotcoin Investment and Financing Weekly Report | A total of 33 public investment and financing events, DeFi begins to take the lead, with active financing in infrastructure and RWA-related projects

From April 13 to April 19, the crypto market saw a total of 33 financing events, including 7 in DeFi, 6 in infrastructure, 6 in RWA, 2 in gaming, 1 in Depin, 1 related to NFTs, 1 in SocialFi, 1 in AI, and 4 in other categories.

This week, there were 2 financing events exceeding ten million dollars:

Puffer Finance, a liquid staking protocol based on EigenLayer, completed a $18 million Series A funding round, with investors including Electric Capital and Brevan Howard Digital.

Centrifuge, a structured credit on-chain ecosystem, completed a $15 million Series A funding round, with investors including ParaFi Capital and Greenfield.

This week, the financing activity in the crypto market showed a relative rebound compared to last week, with 7 financing events in the decentralized finance sector, followed by infrastructure. RWA and other narratives attracted investor attention. The financing landscape this week was rich and diverse, concentrated in currently popular sectors. Puffer Finance, based on EigenLayer, secured the largest financing amount of the week.

DeFi

1. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 13, Black Panther completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Taureon and CSP DAO. Black Panther is an asset management protocol based on Injective and Terra. Its treasury strategy helps users earn returns through digital assets, with profits automatically compounded.

2. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 16, Crypto Valley Exchange completed a $7 million financing round, with investors including Fabric Ventures and FunFair Ventures. Crypto Valley Exchange is a decentralized futures and options trading platform for cryptocurrencies and commodities, offering various advantages, including high leverage (up to 1000x), VaR-based margin calculations, and a unique collateral system.

3. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 17, Aark Digital completed a $6 million seed round financing, with investors including HashKey Capital and Arrington Capital. Aark Digital is a permanent DEX for professional traders/limited partners on Arbitrum. It aims to incorporate all on-chain assets into a single liquidity pool to provide a seamless leveraged experience.

4. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 18, MerlinStarter completed a seed round financing with an unknown amount, with investors including Amber Group and Waterdrip Capital. Merlin Starter is the native launchpad platform on Merlin Chain and a Bitcoin Layer 2 accelerator. Leveraging strong technology and ecological compatibility, it focuses on the issuance of native assets on Merlin Chain.

5. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 18, Runes DEX completed a $2 million seed round financing, with investors including Kenetic Capital and Mechanism Capital. Runes DEX is an AMM platform on the Bitcoin network.

6. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 18, Thruster completed a $7.5 million seed round financing, with investors including Pantera Capital and OKX Ventures. Thruster is the native DEX of Blast, benefiting traders, LPs, and developers through Blast's native yield, customized liquidity solutions, and a more streamlined user interface/user experience.

7. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 18, Lambda Finance completed a $1.8 million financing round, with investors including DLC.Link and AladdinDAO. Lambda Finance is a Bitcoin-based USD stablecoin protocol that enables Bitcoin holders to leverage DEFI earning opportunities. Users can mint BTCUSD with their Bitcoin while maintaining long-term exposure and redeem BTCUSD at a 1:1 ratio as the underlying collateral at any time.

Infrastructure

1. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 15, Aligned Layer completed a $2.6 million seed round financing, with investors including Lemniscap and Bankless Ventures. Aligned Layer is a ZK verification layer developed on top of EigenLayer. This will make the verification of any SNARK proof cost-effective, leveraging the security of Ethereum validators without being constrained by Ethereum. As an Eigen Layer AVS, it promises affordable verification and multifunctional proof systems for L2 and bridges, addressing key needs in the blockchain ecosystem. The project is developed by Yet Another Company.

2. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 16, Saakuru completed a $2.4 million financing round, with investors including BasedVC and Kyber Ventures. Saakuru is a consumer-centric L2 protocol developed using OP Stack, featuring zero transaction fees and eliminating user gas fees through a delegation model, creating a frictionless experience for any applications built on Saakuru, enhanced by the Saakuru development kit, supporting the upgrade of complex digital products to Web3 within a day. The powerful and developer-friendly product suite centered around the Saakuru blockchain enables an economical and seamless connection from Web2 to Web3.

3. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 17, NEBRA completed a $4.5 million seed round financing, with investors including Nascent and Bankless Ventures. NEBRA is building a proof aggregation service on Ethereum that uses a generic ZK-ZK proof aggregation structure to aggregate ZKPs from various applications, including but not limited to privacy-preserving identities, storage proofs, ZKML, and zkEVM proofs.

4. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 17, Merlin Chain completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Spartan Group and Hailstone Labs. Merlin Chain is a Bitcoin Layer 2 supported by Bitmap, based on the native assets, protocols, and products of Bitcoin Layer 1, making Bitcoin interesting again. The goal of Merlin Chain is to amplify the asset potential of the overall Bitcoin ecosystem by empowering Layer 1 assets, protocols, and user ecology on Layer 2, such as building user-friendly metaverses based on Bitmap and DeFi protocols based on BRC-420 to maximize the release of its token duality.

5. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 18, Minke completed a merger financing, with investors including ZenGo. Minke is a non-custodial DeFi wallet that provides users with a way to save, lend, and invest in DeFi using a mobile interface.

6. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 19, Klaytn completed a financing round, with investors including DWF Labs. Klaytn is a highly optimized, BFT-based public blockchain designed to meet enterprise-level reliability, founded by the well-known Korean company Kakao. Since 2021, Klaytn has focused on the metaverse, GameFi, and creator economy, aiming to become a one-stop platform for metaverse builders.

RWA

1. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 15, RWA Inc. completed a $1.17 million financing round, with investors including Maven Capital and Duckdao. RWA is a tokenized ecosystem that allows anyone to easily convert real-world items into blockchain assets. The platform combines an intuitive interface with smart contract automation to lower the entry barrier and reduce technical hurdles.

2. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 16, Puffer Finance completed an $18 million Series A financing round, with investors including Electric Capital and Brevan Howard Digital. Puffer is a native liquidity re-staking platform built on Eigenlayer. It introduces native liquidity re-staking tokens (nLRT) that can accumulate PoS and re-staking rewards. Nodes in the protocol utilize Puffer's anti-reduction technology to lower risks and enhance capital efficiency while increasing their returns through native re-staking. Puffer's core mission is to maintain Ethereum's "trustworthy neutrality" and enhance and preserve Ethereum's decentralization.

3. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 17, Homium completed a $10 million Series A financing round, with investors including Blizzard Fund and Sorenson Impact Group. Homium is a tokenized protocol for home equity lines of credit (HELOC) based on Avalanche. By using Homium, homeowners can use a portion of their home's future appreciation as collateral for loans for maintenance and repairs, debt consolidation, or inheritance. Meanwhile, investors receive a tokenized asset that tracks the price appreciation of the shared home pool on the protocol.

4. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 17, Centrifuge completed a $15 million Series A financing round, with investors including ParaFi Capital and Greenfield. Centrifuge is a decentralized asset financing protocol that unlocks liquidity for real-world assets, allowing borrowers to finance their real-world assets without banks or other intermediaries. Centrifuge connects real-world assets to DeFi ("decentralized finance") to lower capital costs for SMEs and provide DeFi investors with a stable source of returns unrelated to volatile crypto assets.

5. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 17, Usual completed a $7 million financing round, with investors including IOSG Ventures and Kraken Ventures. Usual is a stablecoin protocol that launched USD, a permissionless and fully compliant stablecoin backed 1:1 by real-world assets (RWA). USUAL is a governance token that allows the community to guide the future development of the network. Usual addresses current stablecoin market issues by redistributing profits to the community and rewarding token holders with actual earnings generated from RWA.

6. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 19, Cspro completed a strategic financing round, with investors including Taisu Ventures. CSpro is one of the core business units of Gower Street Group, aiming to establish a multinational RWA tokenization, issuance, distribution, investment, and private financing platform covering major global financial markets, with a focus on establishing STOs.

Gaming

1. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 15, Avalon completed a $10 million financing round, with investors including Hashed and Bitkraft Ventures. Avalon is developing an interoperable digital world that empowers gamers, creators, and anyone to build worlds. Ultimately, this world will also include content related to education, training, simulation, health, and mental well-being.

2. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 18, Circle of Games completed a $1 million strategic financing round, with investors including Nazara Technologies and The Hashgraph Association. Circle of Games is a blockchain-based gaming platform owned and managed by COG-DAO.

Depin

1. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 16, GEODNET completed a $2 million strategic financing round, with investors including Pantera Capital and CoinFund. GEODNET's mission is to collect dense real-time geospatial data from the Earth and its atmosphere using new rooftop space weather stations. The use of blockchain will facilitate a robust and resilient network that provides secure and trustworthy geospatial data products for key economic sectors such as agriculture, transportation, and finance, as well as emerging applications in autonomy, AR/VR, and the Metaverse.

NFT-related

1. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 19, Superlogic completed a $7.6 million strategic financing round, with investors including Nima Capital and American Express Ventures. Superlogic is an enterprise-level loyalty platform whose technology is tailored for enterprise clients on a SaaS basis, seamlessly integrating with existing CRM, CDP, and traditional loyalty management systems. The core of Superlogic's unique "points and badges" hybrid system is to tokenize traditional reward points using blockchain and digitally represent redeemable products and experiences as "digital badges."

SocialFi

1. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 16, SendingNetwork completed a $7.5 million expansion seed round financing, with investors including Nomad Capital and Symbolic Capital. Sending.Network is a high-performance, open Web3 communication protocol where every component, from message data and user IDs to social graphs, is decentralized. It aims to help developers build decentralized social applications and assist communities in accessing encrypted decentralized chat platforms.

AI

1. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 15, Inference Labs completed a $2.3 million pre-seed financing round, with investors including Mechanism Capital and DACM. Inference Labs focuses on developing AI infrastructure and products on web3, emphasizing AI inference interoperability on the blockchain. Zero-knowledge proofs ensure privacy and security without compromising speed or efficiency. Users can verify the correctness of off-chain AI outputs without having to compute them themselves.

Others

1. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 16, Integral completed a financing round with an unknown amount, with investors including Henri Stern and Raj Gokal. Integral is a real-time Web3 accounting platform connected to all organizations' wallets, treasuries, exchanges, and custodians, providing rich financial data in real-time through a collaborative interface.

2. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 18, Multis completed a merger financing round, with investors including Safe. Multis is a Web3 financial management tool that provides a software layer to help Web3 organizations manage their crypto finances, supporting bulk payments, multi-signature wallets, fiat channels, and more. Multis also plans to integrate all financial workflows typical in organizations into its product, including more accounting and HR integrations, access to decentralized exchanges, invoicing features, popular DeFi protocols, and more.

3. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 19, HQLA completed a Series C financing round, with investors including HSBC and BNY Mellon. HQLAᵡ is a platform providing distributed ledger technology (DLT) for collateral liquidity, primarily focusing on the securities lending sector. The platform enables clients to execute frictionless, precise, and real-time ownership transfers to meet various collateral obligations. It helps address collateral fragmentation by extending its connections to leading third-party agents, custodians, and market participants in the securities finance industry.

4. According to ROOTDATA's financing data on April 19, FilmChain completed a financing round of €2.8 million, with investors including Holt InterXion and Roca X. FilmChain is a payment platform for film and television based on the Ethereum blockchain, leveraging blockchain to enhance transaction transparency and auditability, and using blockchain to track ownership in payment architectures, injecting trust and accountability into payment transactions in the film, television, and gaming industries.