Venture financing of crypto projects rises by 179% in a month

Investors were particularly active in supporting infrastructure and Web 3.0 projects

05.12.2023 - 08:25

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4 min

What’s new? Venture capital funding for crypto projects rose by 179% in November to hit the $1,2 billion mark, the highest since last September. It was also 76% higher than the 2023 monthly average, according to analyst Colin Wu. According to the report, 92 new projects attracted investment over the past month, most of them specializing in blockchain infrastructure (28) or Web 3.0 applications (26). At the same time, projects in the field of centralized finance (CeFi) are leading in terms of funds raised.

Colin Wu’s report

CeFi projects. The largest centralized project was Phoenix Group, the Abu Dhabi-based bitcoin mining and custody service provider, which held an initial public offering (IPO) on the local ADX exchange and raised $370 million.

It is followed by Blockchain com, an exchange and crypto wallet service, which raised $110 million in a Series E funding round led by Kingsway Capital, with its valuation falling below $7 billion compared to last year’s $14 billion. At the same time, the company was backed by US financial platform SoFi. The latter announced it was winding down its crypto business and urged customers to move assets to Blockchain com.

SoFi financial platform will stop working with cryptocurrencies on December 19

As an alternative, customers were offered to move their coins to the Blockchain com exchange

Fnality, a blockchain payment company, is in third place. It raised $95 million in a Series B round led by Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas, with participation from DTCC, Euroclear, Nomura Securities, and WisdomTree.

Canadian miner Bitfarms raised $44 million through a private placement, including three-year warrants to purchase 22 million shares. In the first three quarters, the company has already raised $68 million in equity financing. In November, the company mined 392 BTC and sold 350, earned $12,8 million, and increased its hashrate by 2% to 6,4 EH/s.

Rounding out the top five CeFi leaders is asset management company Superstate, which raised $14 million in a Series A funding round with Distributed Global and CoinFund. The funds will be used to launch private funds for institutional investors.

Other projects. The largest infrastructure project in November in terms of funding was the cross-chain protocol Wormhole. It raised $225 million with participation from market maker Jump Trading and the venture capital arm of the Coinbase crypto exchange, raising its valuation to $2,5 billion. The team established Wormhole Labs to help develop the project.

Decentralized BTC mining pool OCEAN raises $6,2 million under Jack Dorsey’s leadership

The project differs from traditional pools in that it does not store participants’ funds

Another $20 million was raised by Ingonyama, a developer of chips based on zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology. AI21 Lab Walden Catalyst, with participants including Geometry, BlueYard Capital, Samsung Next, Sentinel Global, and others led the seed round. Ingonyama’s first chip is a programmable parallel computing processor, similar to a GPU, designed to accelerate advanced ZKP encryption and fully homomorphic encryption.

Rounding out the top three infrastructure projects is data protection solution Privy, the team in the A round raised $18 million led by Paradigm and with participation from Sequoia Capital. The funds will be used to expand staff and build a developer library.

In the top ten, the only L2 project was Blast, launched by the team of the Blur NFT marketplace with $20 million backed by Paradigm, Standard Crypto, and eGirl Capital. Users invested $500 million in the project just five days after launch, which became a record in the segment of L2 solutions, by December 5 the figure rose to $726,6 million. Blast offers high yields in ETH and stablecoins, but users will not be able to withdraw funds until February next year.