According to BlockBeats statistics, there were a total of 17 financing deals last week, with a slight increase in quantity compared to previous weeks. The total amount was approximately $74 million, with an average financing amount of $4.35 million. Other industries accounted for the majority of financing, with relatively more in the digital asset management/payment sector and an increase in the DeFi sector. The NFT/digital fashion and infrastructure sectors had fewer deals, while the metaverse/GameFi and social/creator economy sectors had none. The following chart shows the financing distribution across various sectors last week:

NFT/Digital Fashion

There were a total of 1 financing in the NFT/digital fashion field, with a total amount exceeding 5 million US dollars, accounting for 6.76% of the total financing amount last week.

fxhash

On August 8th, fxhash, a platform for generating art NFTs, completed a $5 million seed round of financing, with 1kx leading the investment and participation from Fabric Ventures, Bright Opportunities DAO, Union Square Ventures, Tezos Foundation, Tane Labs, Daedalus, Everyrealm, PunkDAO, KRPDM, Casey Reas, Thefunnguys, Lemonde2d, and Gus Lee. Fxhash will use this funding to expand its team and prepare for significant platform upgrades in the next six months. Fxhash allows users to create new iterations of generated art, with artists limiting the minting quantity of their works. Collectors discover specific iterations they obtained at exhibitions, adding a unique aspect to the process of collecting generated art.

Initially, fxhash chose the Tezos blockchain because of its attractive proof-of-stake consensus, especially when Ethereum was still using proof-of-work. The implementation of fxhash 2.0 aims to break down the barriers currently existing between chains. Currently, artists can often sell their works at higher prices on Ethereum, which also provides them with greater visibility. (The Block)

DeFi

In the DeFi field, a total of 6 financings were completed with a total amount of over 15.6 million US dollars, accounting for 21.08% of the total financing amount last week.

Puffer Finance

On August 8th, LSD protocol Puffer Finance announced the completion of a $5.5 million seed round of financing, led by Lemniscap and Lightspeed Faction, with other participating institutions including Brevan Howard Digital, Bankless Ventures, Animoca Ventures, Kucoin Ventures, DACM, LBK, SNZ, Canonical Crypto, and community funds 33DAO, WAGMI33, and Concave. Angel investors include Anand Iyer (Lightspeed partner), Sreeram Kannan (Eigen Layer founder), Frederick Allen (Coinbase staking business director), Shen Yu (F2pool and Cobo co-founder), Mr. Block (Curve core contributor), Ramble (North American Blockchain Association President), Calvin Liu (Eigen Layer Chief Strategy Officer), Richard Malone (Obol Chief Business Officer), and Ladislaus von Daniels (staking community leader).

This round of financing will be used to further develop Puffer Finance's open source project "Secure-Signer", which aims to prevent validators from being penalized during the verification process. The project has received a $120,000 grant from the Ethereum Foundation and has core researcher Justin Drake as an advisor. In addition, Puffer Finance is creating a permissionless staking pool that lowers the entry barrier for independent validators from 32 ETH to 2 ETH, improving capital efficiency. Puffer Finance received a pre-seed investment of $650,000 in June last year, led by Jump Crypto with participation from Arcanum Capital and IoTeX.

GoldLink Finance

On August 9th, DeFi lending protocol GoldLink Finance announced the completion of a $1.4 million Pre-Seed round of financing, with Polychain Capital leading the investment and participation from Kronos, Modular Capital, Reverie, Veda, SkyVision Capital, Double Peak, as well as angel investors George Zeng and Vijay Chetty.

GoldLink is an on-chain leveraged lending protocol designed to provide real-time data feeds and modular risk management, supporting real-time feedback on lending data, allowing users to closely monitor their positions and fully control their funds. GoldLink co-founder and CEO Sam Weinberg is a dYdX protocol and backend engineer. GoldLink co-founder and CPO Keelan Miskell is responsible for growth/product at Pinterest and Meta.

D8X

On August 7th, D8X, a perpetual contract DEX protocol on Polygon's zkEVM, completed a $1.5 million pre-seed round of financing led by Polygon Ventures, with participation from Axelar Network, Swissborg Ventures, Cogitent Ventures, Veris Ventures, G1 Ventures, Pragma Ventures, and CryptoDiscover. D8X aims to bring DeFi to institutional investors. Currently, D8X is live on the Polygon testnet, with USDC or MATIC as collateral assets and market and limit orders available. AMM serves as the counterparty for each transaction. (DL News)

The financial engineering method of D8X fundamentally changes the on-chain trading method of perpetual contracts, and its pricing mechanism adapts to constantly changing market conditions, protecting liquidity providers and profitable traders, thus achieving the best trading conditions seen in DeFi.

DeFi Other financing includes:

On August 8th, LSD protocol unshETH announced the completion of a $3.3 million seed round of financing, with participation from MH Ventures, Soma Capital, ICONIQ Capital, EFENT, 922 Capital, Electric Ant, Backend Capital, The LAO, Fan Zhang (Sequoia China), and others. As previously reported by BlockBeats, unshETH has launched the LSDfi product vdAMM, which can convert unshETH into an AMM pool, allowing users to access deep liquidity in unshETH and exchange it between different LSDs.

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On August 11th, decentralized derivatives trading platform Holdstation announced on social media that it has received a $2 million seed round investment from K300 Ventures. The investment will accelerate the development of an on-chain futures trading smart contract wallet, with a focus on Layer 2 and privacy transactions, and promote the adoption of Web3 and development in other areas.

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On August 12th, according to official sources, DeFi yield protocol Affine announced that its total funding has increased to $7 million. DeFi yield protocol Affine Protocol announced in February of this year that it had completed a $5.1 million funding round, with Jump Crypto and Hack VC leading the round and Circle Ventures and Coinbase Ventures participating.

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Infrastructure

There were a total of 1 financing in the infrastructure field, with a total amount exceeding 1 million US dollars, accounting for 1.35% of the total financing amount last week.

Zeeve

On August 10th, Web3 infrastructure provider Zeeve announced the completion of a $1 million strategic financing round, with participation from ExpertDojo VC. It is reported that Zeeve is an enterprise-level automation platform that provides deployment, monitoring, and management of blockchain nodes and networks, currently supporting 45 blockchain protocols.

Zeeve is a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) product that allows customers to build, host, and use their own blockchain applications, smart contracts, and blockchain functionalities using cloud-based solutions, while cloud service providers manage all necessary tasks and keep infrastructure agile and operational. This is an interesting development in the blockchain ecosystem that indirectly helps adopt blockchain across enterprises. It is based on the concept of software as a service (SaaS) model and works similarly. Zeeve simplifies complex web3 infrastructure, significantly reducing costs and deployment time, enabling projects to bypass multi-layer infrastructure management and quickly go into production. Zeeve has become a trusted brand in the Web3 space, serving thousands of startups and investors worldwide. Additionally, it is the only blockchain automation platform in India that offers public and permissioned protocol deployment. (EINPresswire)

Digital Asset Management/Payment

In the field of digital asset management/payment, a total of 2 financings were completed with a total amount exceeding 8 million US dollars, accounting for 10.81% of the total financing amount last week.

MPCVault

On August 9th, MPCVault, a multi-signature wallet, completed a $3 million seed round of financing in March last year. Investors include Fenbushi Capital, Tess Ventures, Youbi Capital, and individual investors such as Chen Yizhou, the founder of Renren, and Ye Shuhong, former CFO of Meituan.

MPCVault provides non-custodial, multi-signature encrypted wallet as a service, with the goal of serving the encryption business, just like a corporate bank serves traditional enterprises. Non-custodial means that users, not MPCVault or any other centralized party, retain full control over their wallet keys. MPCVault's wallet uses multi-party computation algorithms and provides transaction approval policies, meaning that users cannot directly access the full private key and can set up multiple signatures required before a transaction is completed. To protect customer assets in a web2 antivirus software-like way, the MPCVault wallet solution is equipped with a security layer that can scan phishing URLs, detect suspicious behavior, check interaction addresses, and perform semantic analysis and transaction simulation to help users understand the transactions they actually sign. (TechCrunch)

Xverse

On August 10th, Bitcoin Web3 wallet Xverse completed a $5 million seed round of financing. The round was led by Jump Crypto, with participation from RockawayX, Sfermion, Alliance, NGC Ventures, V3ntures, Old Fashion Research, 2140 Bitcoin Ecosystem Fund, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Newman Capital, Franklin Templeton, New Layer Capital, Miton C, Gossamer Capital, Daxos Capital, Sora Ventures, Tyhke Block Ventures, IOBC Capital, and Despread. The new funds will help the company accelerate the development of advanced features related to decentralized finance (DeFi), as well as Stacks, Lightning, and other Bitcoin scaling solutions.

Xverse, headquartered in Hong Kong, supports Ordinals, a method for generating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Bitcoin blockchain using inscriptions that was launched in January. (Coindesk)

Other Financing

There were 7 other financing deals totaling $44.4 million, accounting for 60% of last week's total financing amount. These deals include:

On August 7th, Web3 community management tool Rep3 announced the completion of its pre-seed round of financing. The specific amount of financing has not been disclosed yet. Better Capital and Lightspeed India led the investment, with participation from Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, Ryan Sean Adams, host of the Bankless podcast, Sandeep Nailwal, founder of Polygon, and others. Rep3 uses gamification tools to help manage communities, members, and their contributions in the crypto industry. It provides dynamic and upgradable NFTs to represent their member identity in the community and establish on-chain reputation, which leads to benefits such as low-cost staking and fair voting.

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On August 9th, Cube3.ai, a Web3 security startup, completed an $8.2 million seed round of financing. The round was led by Blockchain Ventures, with other participants including Dispersion Capital, Symbolic Capital, Hypersphere Ventures, ICLUB, and TA Ventures. Cube3 plans to use the funds to expand its platform to enhance the security of Web3 and educate the community on transaction security risks and their exploitation. Einaras Gravrock, founder and CEO of Cube3, said, "These funds will be used to continuously improve our existing products and develop new ones to ensure that developers are protected from the constantly changing threats in the Web3 security field."

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On August 9th, Web3 security company SphereX completed an $8.2 million financing round at a valuation of $24 million. Aleph led the investment, with participation from Pillar VC, Fabric Ventures, and Mensch Capital Partners. SphereX's product, SphereX Protect, allows blockchain applications to prevent the execution of suspicious transactions. Developers of protocols and applications can inject SphereX's code into their software to flag future transactions that SphereX deems suspicious by analyzing past normal and abnormal transactions. (fortune)

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On August 9th, according to Fortune magazine, Parcha AI, a generative artificial intelligence fintech startup founded by former Coinbase Senior Product Director AJ Asver, announced the completion of a $5 million seed round of financing, with participation from YC President Garry Tan and Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz. Parcha AI mainly helps fintech companies, including cryptocurrency companies, to achieve labor automation, using large language models to process fraud detection, understand business compliance, customer acquisition, and other operations. Currently, its clients include cryptocurrency payment company Bridge and US financial services and technology company Brex.

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On August 10th, according to TechCrunch, Web3 security company Spearbit completed a $7 million financing round, led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Nascent, 1kx, Volt Capital, Breed VC, and Robot Ventures. The funds will be used to build Cantina, an open market for Web3 security auditors, and to hire more software engineers to automate service and product market workflows. Spearbit previously raised $1.5 million in Pre-Seed financing at the end of 2021, bringing their total capital raised to $8.5 million.

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On August 12th, according to biz journals, Node40, a startup company specializing in cryptocurrency accounting and taxation, announced the completion of a $12 million financing round led by Card1Ventures. The funds will be used to accelerate the development of its tool products, expand its IT team, and strengthen its cooperation with regulatory agencies. Node40 mainly provides enterprise-level digital asset accounting and taxation services for large investment advisory management companies, ensuring that relevant reports, evidence, audits, and tax accounting information meet regulatory requirements.

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On August 12th, according to The Block, HypeLab, a Web3 advertising startup, completed a $4 million seed round of financing. The round was led by Shima Capital and Makers Fund, with no specific financing information disclosed. HypeLab aims to use on-chain data for personalization and provide advertising services. It was founded by Ed Weng, a former Google product manager with a background in digital advertising.

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