Financing Highlights｜Polychain Capital leads investment in infrastructure Polyhedra Network; a16z participates in investment in game studio Carbonated Inc

According to BlockBeats statistics, the total number of financings last week was 12, which was less than before. The total amount was approximately US$85.9 million, and the average financing amount was US$7.1583 million. Among them, the infrastructure field occupies the main body, the DeFi field and the Metaverse/GameFi field are relatively large, the Web3.0+AI field and the digital asset management/payment field are increasing, the NFT/digital fashion field is small, and other fields of financing and social/creation There are currently none in the economic field. The figure below shows the proportion of financing in each sector last week:

Metaverse/GameFi

There were a total of 3 financings in the Metaverse/GameFi field, with a total amount of US$20 million, accounting for 30% of the total financing last week 23.28%.

Carbonated Inc

On March 16, Carbonated Inc, the development studio of the NFT shooting game "MadWorld", announced the completion of a US$11 million Series A financing. This round of financing was led by South Korean gaming giant Com2uS. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Bitkraft Ventures, Cypher Capital, Blocore, Goal Ventures and WAGMI Ventures also participated.

Set to officially launch sometime in 2024, MadWorld combines competitive shooting action from a third-person perspective with territory control gameplay based on NFT land assets. The game takes place on earth in the apocalyptic future. Players can own, upgrade and trade tokenized versions of real-world locations on a hexagonal grid of over 250,000 lands. Each land in MadWorld has specific available resources and other potential benefits, and if tribes in the game want to fight on these lands and take advantage of the unique benefits, they must pay homage to the NFT landowner.

Tributes are paid in the form of “Rounds,” an in-game currency that will eventually be converted into an on-chain cryptocurrency, driving a tokenized economy. It is reported that the studio raised $8.5 million in 2020, and a16z and Bitkraft Ventures were also investors in this round of financing.

Studio 369

On March 13, Studio 369, the developer of blockchain game MetalCore, announced the completion of US$5 million in financing. This round of financing was participated by Delphi Digital, Bitkraft Ventures and Sanctor Capital.

MetalCore is an open-world first-person space combat game built using Unreal Engine 4. MetalCore will offer PvP combat, cooperative PvE combat and open-world conflict and is the first massively multiplayer online (MMO) fighting game powered by Immutable X. The team consists of approximately 40 people, including concept artists, blockchain engineers, and game developers. They have worked with Epic Games on specific parts of the game and have consultants who have worked with Umbrella Network.

Studio 369 will use the newly raised funds for ongoing development and upcoming features, such as leveraging artificial intelligence to generate unique missions, goals and tasks.

Blockus

On March 11, according to VentureBeat reports, Web3 game technology stack and payment provider Blockus announced the completion of a $4 million seed round of financing, led by Maple VC, Altos Ventures and Magic Eden Zhuoxun Yin of Zhuoxun Yin, Michael Ma of CreatorDAO and Bryan Pelligrino of LayerZero participated in the investment. Prior to this funding round, Blockus participated in a16z Crypto’s Startup Accelerator.

Blockus is designed to build a one-click full-stack technology solution for web3 games, including social login/built-in marketplace/fiat currency channel. It can help web3 games to be established quickly, reduce costs and focus on game content. Blockus' technology platform can help game studios build on-chain functions for games on players, including "wallet-as-a-service" models, white-label NFT markets, and payment processing for legal and encrypted payments.

Blockus combines the common technical and business advantages of full-stack game technology solutions. Technically, in addition to the team's many years of SAAS technology accumulation, another core advantage is that its technical architecture is prepared for legal compliance, integrating compliance into Game's full financial and technology stack. For this purpose, its lead investor A16Z has equipped the team with 4 lawyers. In terms of business resources, in addition to its own web3 games, its CEO’s strong resources in Roblox and web2 game studios have occupied more game business entrances from web2. Currently providing technical solutions for 3 games, including Aybss world and Double Jump.

NFT/digital fashion

A total of 1 financing in the field of NFT/digital fashion, totaling The amount exceeded US$2.5 million, accounting for 2.91% of the total financing last week.

Pallet Exchange

On March 14, according to TechCrunch reports, Sei ecological NFT market Pallet Exchange completed a $2.5 million private placement round of financing from Spartan Group, Symbolic Capital, Cypher Capital, and investors from Coinbase and MoonPay Angel investors from other companies will participate in the investment. Co-founders Wang and Li created one of the most popular Web3 games on Arbitrum, The Beacon.

Pallet Exchange hopes to create a platform that brings liquidity, the general cryptocurrency crowd and ordinary users through the gamification of social functions, becoming "a good platform for ordinary people" Trading experience". Sei’s layer 1 blockchain is extremely fast, capable of processing 12,500 transactions per second, and has low gas fees (i.e. transaction costs). Additionally, the creators of the Sei blockchain are working to attract developers based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) by creating a technology called "parallel stack" that hopes to make Ethereum faster and cheaper.

Pallet launched in September and had a "boom" in December. That’s when Seiyans brought Sei and the market into discussion in the crypto world. Seiyans NFTs can be bought and sold on Pallet. Today, it holds about 99% of the NFT market share on Sei, has seen more than $20 million in transaction volume so far this year, and had more than 2 million users access its platform last year, with 40,000 to 50,000 users per day.

DeFi

A total of 2 financings in the DeFi field, with a total amount of more than 10 million US dollars, accounting for 10% of last week’s financing 11.64% of the total.

D2X

On March 17, according to CrowdFundinsider, the crypto derivatives trading platform D2X completed a $10 million Series A financing, led by Point72 Ventures, GSR Markets, Tioga Capital, Fortino Capital, Jabre Capital Partners, Picus Capital and TRGC also participated in the investment.

It is reported that D2X is the first entity in the EU to obtain the MiFID MTF encryption derivatives license. Through cooperation with "EU first-level credit institutions", D2X Off-site mortgage servicing will be provided. By bringing together the capabilities of traditional finance and cryptocurrencies, D2X hopes to meet growing institutional demand for digital assets, which can be enhanced by the connectivity of Talos and the liquidity of market makers like Flow Traders.

D2X’s MiFID MTF license will enable the exchange to operate under the EU digital asset regulatory framework MiCA. According to the EU webpage, the new framework will be implemented by the end of this year Fully effective. D2X CEO Frederic Colette said the company plans to use the funds for product launches planned for the second quarter of this year and to look to expand into new markets.

Honeypot Finance

On March 16, according to the official announcement, Berachain ecological DeFi Hub project Honeypot Finance completed a seed round of financing. This round of financing was funded by DEXT Force Ventures, Candaq Ventures, PudgyAlpha, Sanyuan Capital , 0xsky404 and Khan's Kitchen participated in the investment, and the specific amount was not disclosed.

Honeypot proposes four aspects of innovation based on the characteristics of the Berachain chain and the innovation of DEX. Among them, DreamPad refers to a launchpad with a built-in trust layer (DAO), taking into account community drive, deep liquidity and fair launch mechanism (FTO). HelonDEX refers to a (Batch-A2MM) trading protocol with low slippage and MEV proof. HiveNode refers to the PoL consensus mechanism that is deeply integrated with Berachain. The guide chain consensus mechanism rewards the liquidity from our products and simplifies the PoL mining process. And DeFi-Hub refers to DreamPad, HelonDEX and HiveNode.

From the user side, Honeypot uses the fair launch of DreamPad as the liquidity entrance. The launched token pairs can be directly injected into HelonDEX for trading and providing liquidity, and finally through HiveNode Nodes are incentivized by Proof of Liquidity (PoL). It is reported that Honeypot Finance is building a community-operated DeFi center that integrates a unique AMM model to unite the community-led launchpad (Dreampad) and DEX (HenloDex) to solve the low liquidity utilization problem of DeFi.

Infrastructure

A total of 4 financings in the field of infrastructure, with a total amount of more than 37 million US dollars, accounting for 43.07% of total financing last week.

Polyhedra Network

On March 14, according to The Block, Polyhedra Network, a full-stack interoperability infrastructure for Web3, completed a strategic financing of US$20 million at a valuation of US$1 billion, led by Polychain Capital. Investment, Animoca Brands, Hashkey Capital, Longhash Ventures, Emirates Consortium, Mapleblock Capital, etc. participated in the investment.

Polyhedra is a web3 infrastructure company that develops tools such as zkBridge. zkBridge is a zero-knowledge blockchain interoperability protocol that supports cross-chain transactions. According to Vreeland, Polyhedra’s zero-knowledge proofs are “much faster” than existing proofs, both in proof generation and proof verification. zkBridge can be compared to blockchain interoperability protocol Wormhole, which was valued at $2.5 billion when it raised $225 million in funding last November. However, Vreeland mentioned that Wormhole has yet to implement zero-knowledge proofs in its interoperability protocol. Earlier this year, Wormhole announced plans to leverage zero-knowledge proofs and partnered with chipmaker AMD to help implement them.

This round of funding and the previous four rounds were all conducted through a simple agreement for future tokens or SAFT. The round closed last month, bringing Polyhedra’s total funding to $75 million. The funding will be used to hire across functions including product, engineering, business development and marketing, expanding the current team of about 50 people to about 80 people.

Elixir

On March 12, Elixir, a decentralized network dedicated to improving order book exchange liquidity, announced that it had recently completed $8 million in Series B financing, bringing the company’s valuation to $800 million. This round of financing was co-led by Mysten Labs and Maelstrom, the family office of BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes, with participation from Manifold, Arthur Hayes, Amber Group, GSR, Flowdesk, etc.

Order book exchanges are favored for their direct trading environment, in contrast to automated market makers who use liquidity pools and mathematical models to trade. However, decentralized exchanges face challenges with liquidity, leading to a shift to an order book model. Elixir solves this problem by allowing liquidity to be exchanged for currency pairs, and rewarding users in the process. The network supports massive liquidity from exchanges such as Vertex, Bluefin, RabbitX and will be integrated with platforms such as dYdX and ApeX.

The Elixir project’s valuation has soared from $100 million to $800 million since its Series A and Series B funding rounds, bringing the total raised to more than $17 million. Elixir CEO Philip Forte announced the upcoming launch of the network’s mainnet and introduced an “apothecary” feature for users to track contributions and interact with Elixir on social media.

Obscuro Labs

On March 16, according to The Block, Obscuro Labs, the developer of the Ethereum Layer 2 network TEN (The Encrypted Network), announced the completion of US$9 million in financing, led by R3. Republic Crypto, KuCoin Labs, Big Brain Holdings, Magnus Capital and DWF Labs participated in the investment.

TEN is a crypto-focused Ethereum layer 2 network that allows developers to choose which parts of their smart contracts they want to keep private and which parts are public. TEN essentially generates "secret" summaries and is designed to provide efficiency similar to Optimistic-based Layer 2 networks while maintaining "full encryption." TEN values secure enclaves because of a variety of factors, including performance, minimal friction for users and developers to experience "the same as Ethereum," and support among institutions.

Gavin Thomas, co-founder of Obscuro Labs, said that the US$9 million in financing was divided into three phases and was completed within the past two years. The latest tranche is approximately US$3 million. Financing closed last December. Thomas said all phases are structured as Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE), with token warrants attached. He added that SAFE is optional because "some investors are only interested in signing token warrants." Thomas noted that the latest round of funding raised Obscuro's fully diluted token valuation to $30 million.

Remaining financing for infrastructure includes:

On March 15, Solana ecological MR infrastructure DeMR announced the completion of angel round financing, with participation from Kucoin Labs, DWF Labs, LD Capital, JDI, Redline Labs, Meteorite Labs, and Paka. DeMR said it is preparing for the upcoming airdrop and listing of the DMR token.

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Digital asset management/payment

A total of 1 financing in the field of digital asset management/payment, with a total amount of over 10 million US dollars, accounting for 11.64% of total financing last week. Includes:

ClearToken

On March 13, according to CoinDesk, the cryptocurrency clearing platform ClearToken completed a $10 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was funded by Nomura Securities’ digital asset subsidiary Laser Digital, Flow Traders, GSR, LMAX Digital and Zodia Custody participated in the investment.

ClearToken seeks to demonstrate that CCPs can reduce systemic and counterparty risk for members managing multiple exposures, including across a variety of venues and instrument types. Over-the-counter (OTC) trading. The ClearToken scheme is fully regulated in the UK and has initiated the process of becoming recognized by the Bank of England Clearing House. The company plans to offer initial settlement services this year and central counterparty clearing (CCP) services within the next 12-18 months. Clearinghouses reduce counterparty risk by acting as a buyer to every seller and a seller to every buyer, and ClearToken will provide digital assets with the benefits of horizontal clearing and settlement.

Additionally, Cleartoken plans to illustrate how it can minimize digital asset transfer and trading risks by eliminating the need for upfront payments, while improving capital efficiency by pledging positions that are maintained as margin by CCPs. Clearing houses connect multiple trading venues "horizontally" rather than "vertically" (serving only one venue in a silo). The horizontal model enables participants to trade across multiple venues and provides mechanisms to streamline clearing and settlement activities in one place, delivering operational and cost efficiencies and encouraging wider access to multiple liquidity pools.

Web3+AI

There is a total of 1 financing in the field of Web3+AI, with the total amount exceeding US$6.4 million, accounting for 7.45% of total financing last week. Including:

On March 15, mmERCH, a fashion start-up based on blockchain technology and driven by artificial intelligence (AI), announced the completion of a US$6.4 million seed round. Financing, led by Liberty City Ventures, 6529 Holdings LLC, Christie’s Ventures, Flamingo DAO, Paxos CEO and co-founder Charles Cascarilla, Web3 investor Mike Jacobellis, collector and investor Daniel Maegaard (Seedphrase), American entrepreneurs and Model Karlie Kloss, luxury fashion designer and philanthropist Tory Burch, and Web3 fashion alliance Red DAO participated in the investment.

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