Week 31 of 2022 Funding Picks: $130 million injected into the asset management track

Author of the original article:0x137, BlockBeats

Last week, 26 deals raised more than $300 million, with an average of $13.67 million, according to BlockBeats. Of these, 9 deals raised more than $10 million, totaling about $250 million, accounting for 83.72% of last week's total. Excluding that, the average amount raised last week was $4.36 million.

The chart below shows the proportion of financing in each sector last week:

Yuan/GameFi universe

There were 7 rounds in the Metaverse /GameFi space for a total of $66.05 million, representing 21.97% of last week's total. Current GameFi development shows two paths: one is focused on "X2Earn" model development with Toekn model and variety exploration, and Earn model and variety exploration. The second is to focus on the development of a complete game industry chain, mainly in the field of e-sports. Three projects worth looking at last week covered these different paths.

ZEBEDEE

Pay attention to reason: Is Bitcoin-based Play2Earn more sustainable?

According to BlockBeats, on July 19, ZEBEDEE, a bitcoin game app, completed a $35 million Series B funding round led by Kingsway Capital, The Raine Group, Square Enix, Initial Capital and others participated in The investment.

ZEBEDEE is a financial payment service provider focused on games. It builds payment infrastructure based on Bitcoin Lightning network for game developers, aiming to change the income model of game players using blockchain technology and crypto assets. With ZEBEDEE, players can "Play 2 Earn Bitcoin" by killing an opponent in a CS:GO match or harvesting Bitcoin assets when picking up coins in Super Mario.

ZEBEDEE has created separate platforms for gamers and developers.

The main platforms for gamers are: mobile and web add-ons & NBSP;App, for discovering and playing Bitcoin games released on the App. The mobile version has a Bitcoin wallet and a "Gamertag" for receiving bitcoins, while the web version is compatible with Twitter, Twitch and other platforms and can be used as a standalone App.Infuse, a "Play2Earn" platform for FPS games like GS:GO;Streamer, a payment channel for game anchors, compatible with most game live streaming platforms.

The main platforms for developers are:DashboardFor game developers to manage the game's wallet and API interface, and analyze the game's revenue and expenditure data;API &   SDK, ZEBEDEE for the game development tools, support a variety of programming languages, developers can easily edit the game's bitcoin reward mechanism;Bot, a bot plugin for platforms like Discord and Telegram that allows users to transfer their Bitcoin assets directly from their chat pages when connected to gaming community channels.

ZEBEDEE chose to use Bitcoin as the underlying asset because the team felt that the current P2E Token would be difficult to really work with. In contrast, Bitcoin, as a high-consensus, highly liquid digital asset, seems to be a solution more suited to the needs of gamers and developers. Of course, ZEBEDEE's focus is not on Bitcoin payments, but on developing and playing games on them. Because of this, the project has also done well in user accumulation. According to ZEBEDEE's official blog, the number of users has increased by nearly 10 times since last year.

Aglet

Pay attention to reason: How Web3 shoe star Remakes' Move2Earn 'with co-branded bricks-and-mortar brands

According to BlockBeats, on July 21, virtual shoe travel app Aglet announced that its "Sneakverse" community has reached 3.5 million active users. Aglet recently closed another round of funding, bringing the total to $24 million, according to the company.

Founded by Ryan Mullins, former head of digital innovation at Adidas, Aglet is a virtual shoe meta-universe, similar to Pokemon Go, where players can use Aglet maps to explore the physical environment around them and find Aglet virtual shoes that are hidden everywhere. The game also converts the user's actual steps into in-game currency Aglets that can be used to buy and collect virtual shoes from New Balance, Adidas, Yeezy, and more.

In fact, for many fashion shoe lovers, Aglet is not a strange name, previously in many wechat groups can see Aglet game experience sharing comments. Aglet's design of virtual shoe attributes is very detailed, even the type of shoes worn in different weather conditions can affect the player's revenue, and the rare virtual shoes obtained through physical exploration can also give players a sense of accomplishment.

In addition, Aglet will give users a physical shoe as a reward. Those who successfully complete a particular collection will have the opportunity to receive a physical sneaker co-branded with Aglet. Aglet also has a marketplace where users can trade their sneaker collections. At present, Aglet has more than 2 million users worldwide. After another round of financing, Aglet's future development is worth paying attention to.

Fitchin

Pay attention to reason: Still targeting the highly potential Gaming market and building a traffic ecosystem around esports.

On July 19, Fitchin, a Web3 gaming ecosystem, announced that it has completed a $3.5 million seed round of funding from an undisclosed group of crypto investors, VCS, gaming personalities, and sports stars. Fitchin is an integrated Web3 gaming community ecosystem designed to connect esports teams, content creators, and fans. Users can join the game's team community, participate in tournaments and exclusive events, or purchase community and in-game NFT collections and receive rewards for contributing to the community.

Fitchin inks partnership agreements with esports teams and streamers around the world and gives them a suite of tools to grow their fan communities and attract sponsorship and partnership opportunities. It mainly includes:

aCompetitive platformSupport the latest and most popular competitive games, users can join their favorite esports community, and participate in competitions and challenges on behalf of them to obtain rewards; aA community centerTo issue NFT membership passes for esports teams and anchors for participating in governance voting, private events, and purchasing merchandise around; aThe digital marketFor players to trade NFT passes, event tickets, in-game NFTS, etc.FITCHIN MetaWorlds, the metasverse platform built by Fitchin, which provides a place for community fans to meet and participate in virtual events.

CHIN is Fitchin's governance Token to motivate community participants. CHIN allows users to pay for tournaments, buy NFT tokens, and trade digital assets across the ecosystem.

NFT/ Digital fashion

The NFT/ digital fashion segment received 3 funding deals for a total of $19.4 million, representing 6.45% of last week's total. As the market reaches a bottleneck, innovation in the field of NFT has gradually shifted to Utility, capital efficiency and Onboarding for off-board users. In addition, the development and maintenance of IP rights for NFT has recently taken off.

Optic

Pay attention to reasonThe development of the NFT market, especially the PFP market, has left a gap for NFT IP copyright, which also means potential opportunities.

Optic, an NFT smart certification company, completed an $11 million seed round funding on July 20, led by Pantera Capital and Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners, OpenSea, Circle, Polygon, and others participated.

Optic is a startup focused on NFT copyright identification, using an AI engine it developed to look for similarities between different NFT series, including code, image and color changes, to monitor potential IP infringement in markets, brands or media companies.

Optic was founded by Andrey Doronichev, a former product director at Google who led the development of ContentID, an anti-counterfeiting system for the YouTube platform. Optic's AI engine, which utilizes technologies such as NVIDIA's Triton inference server and PyTorch's machine learning framework, supports bulk and real-time identification of NFTS, which can identify millions of newly minted NFTS every day, according to Doronichev. And compare them to existing NFTS. Optic identification results were presented as percentage, with a higher ratio indicating lower originality.

Optic, of course, is not only providing NFT identification reports but also providing different customized services for NFT application developers, creators and collectors.

In view of the & have spentNFT application developerOptic can provide customized management interface around project operation process, and different applications can directly access project data through Optic's API interface. On this basis, applications can build a market system for NFT IP and authorization to ensure that the content on various NFT trading and application platforms will not be infringed.

In view of the & have spentNFT creatorOptic can provide infringement alert services to help creators keep their NFT works close on various strands. Optic will notify the creator of the NFT in time if the NFT work of the creator was copied by others or created on the basis of Optic. Optic can also serve as an intermediate platform to assist the two sides to reach effective cooperation for the innovation behavior.

In view of the & have spentNFT collectorsOptic can not only protect users from fraud to a great extent, but also recommend NFT series that users may like or have potential by analyzing the NFTS held by users. NFT series that obtained plateau innovation certificate after Optic identification will also be recommended by the platform.

NFT giant OpenSea has now started using Optic's Marketplace Moderation tool to combat piracy and fraud on its platforms. Optic will also provide API interfaces for developers in the near future and continue to unveil application tools aimed at NFT creators and collectors.

Cardinal

Pay attention to reason: Animoca Brands, Alameda Research and other companies participated in the project. The introduction of "conditional ownership" makes NFT more "user-friendly" and wider application scenarios.

BlockBeats news, on July 23, Cardinal, an ownership agreement for Solana Eco-NFT, announced the completion of a $4.4 million seed round of financing led by Protagonist and Solana Ventures, Animoca Brands, Alameda Research, Delphi Digital and CMS Holdings participated in the investment.

Cardinal is an NFT ownership agreement based on Solana Ecology. It aims to enhance the utility of Solana Ecology NFTS by enabling NFTS to achieve "conditional ownership", which enables NFTS to lease, subscribe and pledge properties.

Token Manager is the core program developed by Cardinal's team to programmatically manage NFTS issuance, ownership, and management. The Token Manager allows the NFT issuer to issue NFTS to third parties through an embedded mechanism so that the issued NFTS can be programmatically managed while they are in the third-party wallet.

The Token Manager uses a modular design, including several plug-in invalidator modules, approval modules, and transfer modules, each of which is a separate smart contract, allowing applications to customize their own designs based on on-chain data. Cardinal currently publicly offers two invalidator add-ons that support NFT expiration leases based on time and usage.

Of course, the module will support more forms of "conditional ownership" of NFTS in the future, including:

Manual due, the NFT issuer or owner may manually revoke ownership of the NFT that has been transferred to a third party at any time;Time to maturity, users can specify a fixed expiration date after which the Cardinal Agreement automatically revokes third-party NFT ownership;Expiration of service, this maturity mode is similar to the bill or membership card, automatically revoke the ownership after a certain number of times;Data dueCardinal can also trigger cancellation commands based on data input from the prophecy machine.Transfer of selectivityThrough the Cardinal protocol, users can restrict the list of third parties that can receive NFT ownership transfer;It is not transferable, a soul binding Token similar to Ethereum.

The above "conditional ownership" also brings different application scenarios for Cardinal and Solana Ecology's NFTS. For example, by releasing "non-durable NFTS" based on usage or time of day, games can enable item rental and lending between players, enabling in-game items and the in-game economy. Or one-time NFT tickets and membership cards for on-chain, off-chain events or communities.

Zharta

Pay attention to reasonImproving NFT funding efficiency remains an important issue in this field. People want to know, "How much is my NFT worth?"

According to BlockBeats, on July 20, NFT lending platform Zharta completed a $4 million seed round of funding, led by Greenfield One and joined by Shilling Capital, Possible Ventures and others.

Zharta is an NFT liquidity lending platform designed to address the illiquidity problems faced by NFT holders. The platform further optimizes liquidity by leveraging AI price discovery mechanisms and on-chain index funds that integrate multiple blue-chip NFTS. Through Zharta, NFT-holders have immediate access to loans and liquidity providers can earn Farming proceeds or bid on NFT assets facing liquidation.

After borrowers pledge their NFT assets, Zharta will help them select the corresponding assets to lend to. Or users choose which assets they want to lend or pledge, and the platform generates an amount that can be pledged and lent within a safe range based on the AI. In addition to choosing the type of collateral and lending assets, users can also choose how long they want to borrow. For the borrower, the longer the loan, the more profit he earns.

ZRT is Zharta's native Token, and the holder has access to the advanced features of the Zharta platform. In addition, users can also pledge ZRT to release more liquidity. It's important to note that the assets pledged on the Zharta platform are unmanaged, which means that users retain ownership and control of their NFTS when they borrow, thus reducing the potential risk of malicious attacks.

Zharta's funding round will initially be used for research and development, sales and marketing. The team hopes to use the funds to accelerate Zharta's market penetration and will add 20 new members to its current 12. The Zharta platform is expected to launch in late summer.

DeFi

In total, there were three fundraisings in DeFi for a total of $40.9 million, accounting for 13.6% of last week's total. Despite the market downturn, I can feel the "absolute love and loyalty" of organizations to the DeFi field. Once there is a strong team and novel model, top organizations will flock to the DeFi field, which is hard to see in other sectors.

Hashflow

Pay attention to reason: Can DeFi rising stars challenge the dominance of the AMM model?

Hashflow, A decentralized trading platform, announced A $25 million Series A funding round on July 21, Investors include Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital Partners, Ledger Prime, Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Fabric Ventures, along with angel investors Meltem Demirors, Anthony Sassano, and Jason Choi, reached a post-funding valuation of $400 million.

Hashflow is a cross-chain DEX platform designed to enable decentralized transactions with interoperability, zero slip points, and MEV resistance. It is also the latest hot DeFi star, almost a familiar name among DeFi players, attracting a lot of institutional attention and money.

At present, most DExes use AMM to complete asset trading. However, compared with traditional market makers, AMM is relatively low in capital efficiency, prone to sandwich attacks and volatile losses, and unable to price non-spot assets. Hashflow, on the other hand, uses the RFQ inquiry model to allow professional market makers to manage pools of liquid funds to address capital efficiency issues.

Unlike the "X *y= K" constant pricing formula commonly used in AMM, Hashflow allows market makers to take liquidity from anywhere and price assets using an off-chain pricing function that is cryptographically signed. By moving pricing down the chain, market makers can move from pricing assets more efficiently using more sophisticated pricing strategies that take into account historical prices, volatility, and other information from the physical world.

Liquidity providers, on the other hand, can just as easily deposit liquidity into liquidity pools as AMM, while reaping the higher returns of professional market makers. In addition, Hashflow allows LP to provide liquidity for only one asset, and with the help of market makers, Hashflow does not generate volatile losses by providing either unilateral or bilateral liquidity.

Traders can enjoy better quotes with Hashflow, while all quotes are executed at the displayed prices, with no slippage. The offer secured by an encrypted signature means that the MEV jump-start is no longer feasible and there is no "sandwich risk". In addition, Hashflow allows traders to seamlessly buy and sell assets across chains without using an external bridge.

This funding round will provide Hashflow with a strong capital position to continue to build and scale regardless of market conditions, enabling Hashflow to continue to provide users with a great decentralized trading experience.

XLD Finance

Pay attention to reason: Circle, Yield Guild Games, Onboard different users for multiple products.

BlockBeats news, on July 19, DeFi services company XLD Finance announced the completion of A 13 million pre-A series funding round led by Dragonfly Capital and Infinity Ventures Crypto, Circle, IDG Capital, Woo Network, Yield Guild Games and YOLO Ventures participated in the investment.

XLD is a borderless decentralized financial ecosystem dedicated to modernizing financial services and infrastructure, providing simple and reliable decentralized financial instruments to all users on and off the chain.

XLD currently contains 5 products, which are:

xSpend, an individual payment app that helps users recharge and pay bills in games and other specific platforms using Stabeloin and GameFi Tokens. The product is currently available;OmniX, enterprise payment application, providing convenient and secure payment platform for companies, game conferences and other organizations, assisting all kinds of organizations to manage cross-chain payment and transfer;xMoney, gold application, to provide users with a quick and convenient way to gold, encrypted Token into the deposit in the bank account;xWallet, wallet application, functions including mortgage, transaction, lending and cross-chain transfer;xMerchant, an e-commerce app that helps merchants settle with crypto assets.

The team continues to focus on developers, providing easy-to-use apis for enterprise and third-party applications that enable enterprises to access and use XLD products within hours. XLD is compatible with both EVM and non-EVM public chains. It currently supports Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, and Solana, and will soon support other public chains.

The funding round will be used to expand the size of XLD's product and engineering teams, as well as expand its network of authorized partner financial institutions, merchants, and billers.

Bluejay Finance

Pay attention to reason: Providing crypto users with multiple currencies is certainly a promising solution, and Web3 also needs a reliable foreign exchange market. Developing other types of stablecoins in the absence of dollar stablecoins is challenging, but worth watching.

BlockBeats news, on July 20, Bluejay Finance, a decentralized stablecoin protocol, announced the completion of a $2.9 million funding round with participation from C2 Ventures, Zee Prime Capital, and Stake Capital Group.

Bluejay Finance is a leading capital efficient decentralized stablecoin protocol that aims to minimize the risk of real-world currency exchange and make financial activities such as borrowing and payments simpler and more efficient by developing more non-dollar stablecoins.

Most stablecoin solutions in the DeFi space are currently based on US dollars and are therefore not suitable for use in the real world where prices are priced in other currencies, forcing many users to deal with currencies they are not familiar with and incurring additional charges for currency exchange. Bluejay Finance hopes to set up an on-chain forex market to reduce frictions and exchange risks for different crypto users.

The team's current focus is on mainstream Asian currencies, due to the current trend of shrinking bank accounts and accelerating mobile finance in Southeast Asia. In addition, the lack of a mature credit record system makes it difficult for many micro and small enterprises to obtain financial support. Bluejay Finance hopes to use this as an entry point to join the Stablecoin circuit.

infrastructure

In total, there were 3 financing deals in the infrastructure sector with a total amount of $10.35 million, accounting for 3.44% of the total funding last week. Although infrastructure is still less Promising, it still sees some of the most Promising items. Much infrastructure takes years to develop, and while institutions pay lip service to payback cycles, their bodies are honest.

Sunscreen

Pay attention to reasonTired of ZK privacy narratives? May as well know FHE, may become a future replacement for ZK.

According to BlockBeats, on July 18, Web3 privacy startup Sunscreen announced the closing of a $4.65 million seed round, led by Polychain Capital and backed by Coinbase Ventures.

Sunscreen, a start-up developing Web3 privacy proof, aims to enhance the potential of the Web3 privacy track with Fully Homomorphic Encryption. FHE encryption technology can allow individuals to directly perform calculations on encrypted data without decrypting it, which can be regarded as a supplement to Zero Knowledge Proof.

Ravital Solomon, CEO and co-creator of Sunscreen, has a master's degree in mathematics and theoretical computer science from Oxford University. While ZKP is currently recognized as the leading solution for privacy racetracks, allowing users to verify on-chain transactions without sharing the underlying data, Solomon believes FHE has more potential to enhance privacy.

One of the problems faced by zero-knowledge proof is its potentially high verification cost. Many projects built based on ZKP require users to achieve far more computing power than ordinary consumers, which brings certain challenges to the development of mobile computers or mobile applications. In comparison, FHE is lighter than ZKP, and users can still verify different types of transactions and calculations while maintaining privacy, but it can be done at a lower cost.

But the team acknowledges that FHE is still in its early stages, years behind technologies such as ZKP. So for this technology to work in the privacy space, you need an underlying public chain that supports FHE. Through this chain, developers can build technology stacks between other protocols such as FileCoin.

Another problem with FHE is that it is very difficult to write. That makes a Sunscreen compiler that makes building FHE programs easier. The team also announced the launch of a grant program to fund developers, academics and researchers using FHE.

Digital Asset management/Payments

The digital asset management/payments segment received four funding rounds totaling more than $130 million, accounting for 44.73% of the total funding last week. The digital asset management and payments circuit caters primarily to institutions and high net worth individuals, making it difficult for ordinary crypto users to get a slice of the pie. But last week there were noteworthy "people-friendly projects."

Halborn

Pay attention to reason: With Coinbase, Solana, Avalanche and other in-depth cooperation, Amazon, Nike and other major professional "crypto consultant".

On July 19, blockchain security firm Halborn completed A $90 million Series A funding round led by Summit Partners, Castle Island Ventures, Digital Colurncom Group and Brevan Howard were among the participants.

Halborn focuses on crypto asset security and aims to prevent exploits by evaluating smart contract code and developing security measures. Founded in 2019 by renowned white hat hackers Steven Walbroehl and Rob Behnke, the company has more than 100 members. The demand for Halborn's services has increased in the past year due to a number of "spectacular theft" incidents.  

Halborn has partnered with Coinbase, Solana, Avalanche, and others for the Web3 meta project. For traditional businesses, Halborn offers education and strategies on crypto asset protection to non-crypto companies like Amazon, BNY Mellon, and Nike. Halborn also advises VCS, family offices and banks on the risk level of crypto projects.

Halborn's funding round will be used to refine its product, expand its team and increase its market share in the security sector.

Meow

Pay attention to reason: Tiger Global and FTX participated in the investment.

BlockBeats news, on July 19, crypto finance company Meow announced the completion of $22 million series A financing, Tiger Global led the investment, QED Investors, FTX and other participants.

Meow primarily provides compliance solutions for institutional and corporate investors to participate in investing in the crypto market, aiming to be a "one-stop shop" for corporate financing. Meow offers corporate users the potential rate of return on an ultra-traditional savings account, while its lending partners adopt better risk management strategies and vet their institutional counterparties.

In addition to recruiting for its marketing and engineering teams, Meow will also use the funding to develop new products. Meow will launch GAAP accounting solutions in the coming months, as well as B2B Stablecoin suite capabilities, including cross-border payment solutions and more.

Covey

Pay attention to reason: In addition to "investing in DAO", another way to achieve multi-win.

According to BlockBeats, on July 21, Covey, an on-chain community investment strategy service platform, announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed round of financing, led by Social Leverage and Portage Ventures, and participated by Cue Ball and BoxOne.

Covey is an investment community open to all, designed to remove the barriers between ordinary investors and top managers and create more managers. Covey was founded by well-known investor Brooker Belcourt, who previously managed investments at Citadel, Tiger's funds, and Coatue.

Covey currently has more than 100 anonymous market analysts on the platform. They provide investment strategies for securities, equities and crypto markets in an open and transparent manner, and crowdfund to implement their own strategies. Users can learn about their performance and investment philosophy from these experienced investors, and all data and information can be tracked on the blockchain.

Covey will rank analysts based on their earnings performance, and the top 10% of analysts can choose to become investment managers for Covey's upcoming Copy Trading app to create higher profit potential for themselves and platform users. Covey will also issue tokens to reward outperforming investment strategies and members who contribute to the community.

Covey will use the funding round to continue building its Copy Trading app, which it hopes to launch this fall, to help investment managers and users more easily and efficiently leverage their money and investment strategies on the platform. Covey is also expanding his development team, which he plans to double in size by the end of the year.

Other financing

The other three rounds of financing totaled $29 million, accounting for 9.64% of last week's total. Include:

On July 18, cryptocurrency hedge fund Modular Capital closed a $20 million funding round with participation from Multicoin Capital, ParaFi Capital, Road Capital and LedgerPrime, among others. Modular Capital was co-founded by James Ho and Vincent Jow and invests in liquidity tokens, DeFi and others. In addition, the fund will also seek to invest in computer primitives that allow applications to build rich experiences for users, such as the Layer-1 and Layer-2 blockchains or various Web3 infrastructure tools.

On July 20, Veremark, a blockchain-based global background check recruitment service tool, completed an $8.5 million (7.08 million pounds) equity funding round led by venture Capital firm Stage 2 Capital. Samaipata, Triple Point Ventures, ACF Investors, Vulpes, SOV and others participated in the investment. Veremark plans to double its headcount in the coming year. Companies with recruitment needs can conduct background checks on prospective employees through Veremark, and Veremark will generate a "professional passport", which will store the work credentials on the blockchain.

On July 19, Brixie Group, a Singapore-based blockchain real estate fintech company, announced that it had completed a seed round of funding of over $500,000, Julien Glassey, founder and CEO of Archer Aviation; Molika Meas, co-founder and Group CEO of iCare Benefits Group; and Maximiliano, Director of Business Development at ADA Berger, Fireworks Solutions co-founders Lee Tseng Yip and Lee Kok Lim participated. Brixie supports tokenization of real estate assets in countries around the world, allowing users to trade these tokens for income within the platform. Brixie's physical assets mainly cover Southeast Asia, Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia and Spain.

BlockBeats' previous financing recommendations:

"The 30th week of 2022: more than $300 million of injected assets and GameFi"

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