Author: Nianqing, ChainCatcher
Attention in crypto is everything?
This year’s narrative may be unique to Meme, the craze of which is so fierce that one wave is even greater than the other.
Bitcoin continues to break records, but altcoins have not seen the expected rise, value investments have been in vain, and the founders have thrown their hands up in surrender, mocking themselves by saying “We can also be Memes.”
If Meme is a paradise for adventurers, it is full of stories of crossing classes, becoming rich overnight, and full of survivor bias. On the dark side of the paradise, participants who follow the crowd are ruthlessly cleansed, and the “diamond hands” grab most of the wealth, while the “paper hands” are left with nothing.
Then we may regard value investing as an honest man’s game. It must be admitted that technology and application innovation are still supporting the entire crypto industry.
Last week, at the “DeInsight 2024” annual summit held during Devcon in Bangkok, Web3 data platform Rootdata officially announced the RootData List 2024 annual list. There are five items on the list, namely: Top 50 projects (coins have been issued), Top 50 projects (coins have not been issued), Crypto VC Top 50 investment institutions, Top 10 angel investors, and Top 20 best CEOs.
We believe that the most noteworthy item on the list is the “Top 50 Projects (Unissued)”. As a value investor, these 50 projects may be the most important investment opportunities in the crypto market in the coming period. This article will sort out the fundamentals and recent developments of these 50 projects.
Overview
The median financing amount of the projects selected for the “Top 50 Projects (No Tokens Issued)” list is US$25.71 million, the average financing round is 2 rounds, 7 projects are valued at US$1 billion (inclusive), and 4 projects have not publicly disclosed financing.
Most of the listed projects cover 26 tracks, among which modularization, DeFi, infrastructure, and AI account for a large proportion. In the past four quarters, although the GameFi, CeFi, and NFT tracks have fallen into a period of stagnation, there are still projects that continue to innovate and have made important progress this year.
The 50 projects on the list are:
Chain: Volume performance, volume ecology, volume community
Since the first half of 2023, emerging public chains and Layer 2 have emerged in large numbers. The competition among public chains has gradually evolved into a competition for the existing liquidity of the market. The overcapacity of infrastructure has also caused the emergence of public chain ghost towns, and the ecosystem lacks real users and consumer applications. However, some new chains based on concepts such as chain abstraction, privacy, intent, modularity, and parallelism can still stand out in the fierce competition.
Anomanetwork is the leading project in the intent track. It has created an intent-centric privacy architecture, introduced a new paradigm for building infrastructure layers and a new operating system for decentralized applications, allowing existing web2.5 dApps to be fully decentralized. Anoma founders Brink, Awa Sun Yin and Christopher Goes previously worked and met at the Cosmos development company All in Bits.
The Anoma Foundation has been recognized by institutions such as Polychain and Coinbase, and has completed seed, A and B rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of US$57.8 million. Recently, people familiar with the matter revealed that Anoma is negotiating a new round of financing and its valuation may reach US$1 billion.
Anoma has not yet launched a testnet, but its first fractal instance, the privacy public chain Namada, has announced token economics, opened applications for validator nodes in October, and is now testing IBC asset transfers and shielding.
EspressoSystems is an EVM-compatible blockchain that provides a scalability and privacy system for Web 3 applications. By combining the PoS consensus protocol with the zk Rollup mechanism, multiple transactions are packaged in a more resource-efficient way. Its configurable asset privacy smart contract application can provide users with customizable privacy about sender and receiver addresses and the amount and type of assets held or transferred. These elements can all be set to be public, private, or transparent only to selected parties.
Espresso Systems announced on November 11 that the Espresso Network has been launched on the mainnet, but the current mainnet is still in the primary (0) stage. It plans to launch Mainnet 1 and Mainnet 2 in the first quarter of next year, gradually integrate the new stack and transition to PoS next year.
In March this year, Espresso Systems completed a $28 million Series B financing. Previously disclosed financing also includes a $32 million seed round completed in 2022. Its investors include a16z, Electric Capital, Graylock, Coinbase Ventures, etc.
Monad aims to be a high-performance blockchain capable of parallel processing within the EVM. Monad’s goals are not limited to speeding up the consensus mechanism. It seeks to fundamentally change the execution environment, introduce parallel processing, and improve data storage methods to build a truly fast EVM chain that makes the EVM as high-performance as Solana.
In April this year, Monad Labs completed a round of financing of up to US$225 million, which is one of the largest crypto project financings in 2024. Well-known institutions such as Paradigm, IOSG Ventures, SevenX Ventures, and Electric Capital have participated. In addition to its own capital favor, projects in the Monad ecosystem such as Kintsu, Kuru, Monad Pad, and aPriori have also received support from many institutions.
Monad has recently begun a phased rollout of its testnet. Monad launched its development network in March and has reached 10,000 transactions per second in internal testing.
Movement is different from other new public chains based on Move. Its first Ethereum L2 based on Move language is an integrated solution from “Ethereum killer” to “joining Ethereum”. It aims to leverage the execution performance and security advantages of Move’s underlying layer, and further integrate the ecological advantages of EVM, so that developers can start Solidity projects on M2 without writing Move code.
In April this year, Movement completed a $38 million Series A financing round, with participation from investment institutions such as Polychain Capital, Binance Labs, OKX Ventures, and Hack VC. At the end of July, Movement announced the launch of the public testnet Parthenon.
Berachain is a high-performance EVM-compatible public chain built on a liquidity proof consensus. It originated from a Rebase NFT project called Bong Bears, and was subsequently jointly launched by several DeFi OGs. The name “Bera” pays tribute to the classic crypto meme “HODL”, so Bear was rewritten as Bera. The Berachain community has very distinctive Ponzi culture, Meme culture and NFT culture characteristics.
Berachain innovatively proposed the PoL mechanism, which aims to attract liquidity by giving token rewards to on-chain liquidity and avoid the ghost town dilemma of existing public chains. In April this year, Berachain announced the completion of a $100 million Series B financing round, led by Brevan Howard Digital’s Abu Dhabi branch and Framework Ventures, with participation from Polychain Capital, Hack VC and Tribe Capital.
Berachain is currently in the testnet stage, and the mainnet and tokens are scheduled to be launched before the end of 2024.
Sophon is an entertainment-centric ecosystem. Sophon is built as a modular rollup based on Validium and Elastic Chain using ZKsync. It provides the necessary infrastructure for high-throughput applications such as social, artificial intelligence, and games.
Sophon believes that there is still a huge space for innovation at the current application level. Its goal is not to directly provide the final product, but to focus on building platforms and products that support users’ self-expression. Therefore, Sophon focuses on ecological construction. Its founder once revealed in an interview that there are many new applications in the ecosystem, such as NFT and AI girlfriends, which are similar to bidding for space seats.
In October this year, Binance Labs announced an investment in Sophon, bringing its total financing to more than $70 million. In March, Sophon completed a $10 million financing, with Paper Ventures, Maven 11, The Spartan Group, SevenX Ventures, OKX Ventures, HTX Ventures and others participating. The Sophon mainnet is expected to be launched in November, and the token will be deployed soon.
ParticleNetwork is developing a modular L1 blockchain that enables each user to have a single, unified on-chain address and balance across all blockchains by implementing chain abstraction. It also extracts gas and unifies liquidity. It enables existing L1 and L2 to collaborate seamlessly across ecosystems, solving the problem of liquidity fragmentation in multi-chain ecosystems and eliminating manual multi-chain interactions in the user experience.
Particle’s Universal Accounts have been capped on the mainnet and are currently undergoing final testing. At the just-concluded Devcon in Bangkok, the team demonstrated its Universal Accounts for the first time. Particle has also previously promoted the establishment of the Chain Abstraction Coalition with more than 60 participants.
In June this year, Particle Network announced the completion of a $15 million Series A financing round, with participation from Spartan Group, Gumi Cryptos Capital, SevenX Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, Flow Traders, HashKey Capital, etc. In August, Binance Labs announced its investment in Particle.
RISCZero is building the next generation of scalable blockchains using zero-knowledge proof technology and RISC-V zkVM. RISC Zero allows developers who are accustomed to programming in Rust, Go, C++ and other standard programming languages to build ZK applications.
Recently, RISC Zero launched the general ZK protocol and verifiable computing layer Boundless, which provides a decentralized ZK infrastructure that can handle proof generation, aggregation, data availability and settlement on any chain. It allows developers to use Steel to move Solidity contract execution off-chain to save 99.99% of gas. Boundless has entered the early testing phase and will open access to developers in the fourth quarter. RISC Zero also recently launched a hybrid architecture for Kailua OP Rollups, which can provide finality within 1 hour for OP chains without the need for continuous ZK proof costs.
RISC Zero has three public financings, with a total financing amount of US$54 million. The most recent one was a US$40 million Series A financing in July last year, which valued it at US$300 million, with participation from institutions such as Blockchain Capital, Galaxy Digital, and IOSG.
Succinct is building a decentralized network of attesters so that anyone can build trustless applications and infrastructure. Succinct unifies the attestation supply chain, providing highly available attestation generation infrastructure and best-in-class pricing for Rollups, coprocessors, and other applications that use zero-knowledge proofs.
In August this year, Succinct launched SP1, a high-performance open source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) for verifying the execution of any Rust (or any LLVM compiled language) program. Projects such as Polygon, Celestia, Avail, Hyperlane, Taiko, Sovereign, etc. have adopted SP1. In September, Succinct also worked with the OP Labs team to combine OP Stack and zkVM SP1 to create OP Succinct, allowing existing OP Stack chains to use ZKP, which can be completed in just 1 hour.
Succinct has raised a total of US$55 million in financing, with participation from Paradigm, Robot Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Geometry, and ZK Validator.
Base is an Ethereum L2 developed by Coinbase based on Optimism’s open source OP Stack, which aims to bring the next billion users to Web3 and plans to gradually decentralize in the next few years. In just one year, Base has rapidly grown into an important on-chain participant with its integration with Coinbase, an active developer and user ecosystem, and key collaborations with important partners such as Stripe. Base once became the largest L2, surpassing Arbitrum at one point.
The Base ecosystem is very active, covering applications such as DeFi, NFT and social. It has cooperated with Stripe to launch stablecoin services and has become a hub for launching third-layer (L3) solutions. Unlike other major L2 chains, Base has not yet launched tokens and has not yet disclosed plans to launch tokens in the future.
Base has not yet raised any public funding, but it has been known for its high returns on its sequencers, with revenues exceeding $50 million so far this year and expected to reach about $60 million by the end of the year.
Eclipse is a customizable modular Rollup solution that focuses on providing developers with flexible blockchain expansion tools. Its technology allows selection and combination between multiple execution environments (such as EVM, SVM, MoveVM) and data availability layers (such as Celestia, Polygon Avail). This allows Eclipse to adapt to a variety of application scenarios, including DeFi, Web3 games, and on-chain asset management.
Eclipse has raised $65 million in funding so far, and completed a $50 million Series A round in March this year, led by Placeholder and Hack VC, with participation from OKX Ventures and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. On November 7, the Eclipse mainnet was launched.
Initia is a full-chain Rollup network that aims to build a multi-chain interoperable interwoven network to simplify the user’s cross-chain experience. In fact, Initia has built an entire new technology stack from 0-1, developing both Layer 1 and Layer 2. Having a complete technology stack will enable Initia to implement chain-level mechanisms to coordinate the economic interests of users, developers, Layer 2 application chains, and Layer 1 itself.
In September, Initia completed a $14 million Series A financing and a $2.5 million community round financing, bringing the total financing amount to $25 million. Theory Ventures, Hack VC and others participated in the investment. In October last year, Initia completed a $7.5 million seed round financing participated by Binance Labs, Delphi Ventures, and Hack VC.
Initia launched the public testnet in May this year and plans to complete the mainnet launch and TGE in Q4.
MegaETH is a fully compatible Layer 2 of Ethereum, focusing on reducing execution redundancy through node specialization, and improving performance through real-time compilation and parallel execution of EVM. The goal is to achieve more than 100,000 transactions per second, build the “first real-time blockchain”, and make the response speed and functional logic of DApp the same as ordinary Web2 applications.
In June, MegaETH completed a $20 million seed round of financing, with participation from Dragonfly, Figment Capital, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, and other investors. Angel investors such as Vitalik, ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin, EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan, ETHGlobal co-founder Kartik Talwar, and Helius Labs co-founder Mert Mumtaz also participated.
MegaETH’s public testnet was originally scheduled to go live this fall, and the mainnet is expected to go live at the end of the year or early 2025.
Consumer applications: prediction markets and meme platforms
Polymarket is a blockchain-based prediction market platform founded in 2020 by Shayne Coplan, who was only 22 years old at the time. Its timely launch quickly attracted a lot of attention during the 2020 US election cycle. Despite the subsequent volatility in the crypto market, Polymarket survived tenaciously and returned with even greater popularity during the 2024 US election cycle.
In May this year, Polymarket completed a $45 million Series B financing led by Founders Fund. It raised $70 million in two rounds of financing (US$25 million in Series A), and its supporters also include Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. In addition, it was recently reported that Polymarket is negotiating plans to raise more than $50 million in new funds and launch tokens.
In October, the Polymarket website received 35 million visits, twice the number of visits to popular gambling websites such as FanDuel. The cumulative transaction volume of the US presidential election on the Polymarket platform exceeded US$3.6 billion, and its predictions for the US election were frequently cited by mainstream media such as the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
Pump.Fun is a coin issuance tool and community platform focused on Meme coins. It was launched on Solana in January 2024 and added support for Ethereum L2 Blast shortly after the mainnet went live. Pump.fun provides users with a simple and low-cost way to deploy and issue tokens by simplifying the coin issuance process and lowering the technical threshold. Users only need to pay a fee of 0.02 SOL and can easily use the platform without development experience. This simplified and low-cost feature made Pump.fun quickly popular in a short period of time. Compared with traditional coin issuance platforms, Pump.fun is not only fairer in the coin issuance model, but it also combines coin issuance with social attributes, which has become one of its major innovations.
Pump.fun has attracted many Meme speculators due to the frequent release of “magic projects” after its launch, making it the biggest money-making machine in this round of Meme craze, and also popularizing imitation projects of other chains. As the fastest-growing application in the history of the crypto economy, it achieved $100 million in revenue in just 217 days.
Pump.fun has not yet raised any public financing. Pump.fun co-founder Sapijiju revealed future token and airdrop plans in October. In October, Pump.fun also supported the issuance of video tokens, where users can choose to upload videos and create tokens, and allow other users to access them on the front end.
DeFi: A severely underestimated track in this cycle
DeFi ushered in the summer of 2021, but when the hype and bubble faded, DeFi began to decline in 2022. In the past two years of development, DeFi has gradually matured and entered a new stage of productivity, preparing for long-term scalability. Arthur, founder of DeFiance Capital, pointed out in a recent article that after two years of adjustment, key indicators such as the total locked value (TVL) of the DeFi protocol are rebounding, and it is expected that the market value of DeFi will increase to 10% in the next two years. Specifically in the sub-sectors, DeFi infrastructure including MEV, Perps (decentralized perpetual contract exchange), DePIN, etc. may be a few areas that are definitely valuable this year, and a large number of innovative projects have emerged.
bloXroute is a DeFi transaction acceleration tool that builds a blockchain distribution network (BDN) for DeFi traders, allowing users to bypass network congestion and instantly obtain key information, including buy and sell orders, pricing, positions, liquidations, and oracle updates. bloXroute’s unique network architecture can increase block propagation speed by 2 seconds, transaction propagation speed by 1 second, and transaction detection speed by 50-400 milliseconds. By providing mempool services and transaction/block propagation facilities, these services help DeF traders win more trades.
In 2022, bloXroute completed a $70 million Series B financing round with a valuation of $410 million. SoftBank Vision Fund II, Blindspot, Dragonfly, Flow Traders, Flybridge, GSR, Jane Street, Lightspeed and other institutions participated.
Flashbots is a research and development company focused on MEV, committed to mitigating the negative impact of MEV and avoiding the risks that MEV may pose to blockchains such as Ethereum. Flashbots has three main focuses: Flashbots Auction, a private communication channel between miners and searchers for transparent and efficient MEV extraction; Flashbots Data, a set of tools for increasing MEV transparency and reducing information asymmetry; Flashbots Research, which aims to solve short-term and long-term research problems related to MEV.
In July last year, Flashbots completed a $60 million Series B financing round with a valuation of $1 billion. Early investors also included well-known institutions such as Paradigm, Pantera Capital, Dragonfly, and OKX Ventures.
FigureMarkets combines the liquidity of traditional finance with decentralized asset control to provide investors with a variety of blockchain native assets, including cryptocurrencies, stocks, bonds, credit, etc. Figure Markets has launched the decentralized crypto asset custody market Figure Markets Exchange, which uses decentralized multi-party computing (MPC) wallet custody and provides bankruptcy remote custody solutions. The US dollar deposits of domestic users of the platform are deposited in banks insured by the FDIC.
In March this year, Figure Markets was spun off from its parent company Figure Technologies and announced the completion of a $60 million Series A round of financing led by Jump Crypto, Pantera Capital and Lightspeed Faction. Other participants included Distributed Global, Ribbit Capital and CMT Digital.
Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual exchange that operates on its own Layer 1 and provides similar functions to traditional centralized exchanges. It mainly includes an order book exchange that uses USDC as margin for trading. It is characterized by supporting the trading of many long-tail assets and is one of the few projects that supports leveraged or perpetual contract trading of certain specific assets on the chain.
The recent Memecoin craze has made players prefer DEXs with higher odds and more diverse gameplay, making Perp DEXs such as Hyperliquid the biggest beneficiaries of on-chain liquidity aggregation. In the past three months, Hyperliquid has become the Perp DEX with the largest market share and the most popular Perp DEX in the English region. In October, Hyperliquid announced the establishment of the Hyper Foundation, and TGE is approaching.
Hyperliquid has not yet disclosed any public financing and is one of the very few well-known projects on the RootData List 2024 that is not VC-backed.
Infinex is a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform launched by Synthetix. It officially opened account creation and deposit channels in May this year. The project’s vision is to bridge the experience gap between CeFi and DeFi through its own on-chain experience layer, and then provide users with more tokens, more derivatives, and more innovative income products by integrating on-chain DeFi protocols, and ultimately serve its customers more effectively.
In October this year, Founders Fund invested in Infinex’s new “sponsorship” fundraising model, which sold Patron NFTs to venture capitalists, angel investors and the community, raising a total of $67.7 million. Wintermute Ventures, Framework Ventures, Solana Ventures, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Aave founder Stani Kulechov participated in the investment.
Morpho is a lending protocol that combines the current liquidity pool model used in Compound or AAVE with the capital efficiency of the P2P matching engine used in the order book. As a peer-to-peer (P2P) layer built on top of lending pools such as Compound and Aave, Morpho solves the problem of high borrowing rates and low supply rates caused by low utilization of lending pools by matching P2P and P2Pool, thereby improving capital efficiency. At the same time, Morpho also maintains the same liquidity and liquidation guarantees as the underlying protocol, and users can obtain the annual yield (APY) of the underlying pool or better P2P APY.
The total deposits of Morpho Markets, Morpho’s core product, have exceeded 2 billion US dollars. Recently, the preparation of the Morpho protocol’s governance token MORPHO has been completed, and the token transfer function will be enabled on November 21.
In August this year, Morpho completed a US$50 million financing round, with participation from Ribbit Capital, Hack VC, IOSG, Rockaway, L1D, Mirana, Cherry, Semantic, Fenbushi, Leadblock Bitpanda and Robot Ventures.
SolvProtocol is a decentralized Bitcoin staking protocol and a project built by Meng Yan, a well-known crypto KOL. It unleashes the full potential of Bitcoin assets through a liquidity consensus infrastructure. By addressing the fragmentation, yield opportunities, and custody solutions of BTC assets, Solv provides Bitcoin holders with a gateway to BTCFi, constantly building pathways and confidence for traditional funds to enter the world of cryptocurrency.
In October this year, Solv Protocol completed a $11 million financing with a valuation of $200 million, with Laser Digital, Blockchain Capital and OKX Ventures participating. In August last year, Solv Protocol completed a $6 million financing, with Laser Digital, Bytetrade Labs and others participating.
Glow is building a Proof of Physical Work (PoPW) protocol for carbon credits, incentivizing the creation of carbon credits by rewarding solar panel operators with tokens and displacing dirty energy from the grid. Its ultimate goal is to create the world’s largest solar network. Glow rewards solar farms for their electricity output and verified carbon credits using GLW tokens and stablecoins such as USDC. Glow is one of the most profitable DePIN projects, with over $5 million in revenue since its launch in 2023.
At the end of October this year, Glow completed a $30 million financing led by Framework and Union Square Ventures. This round of financing includes $6.5 million in funding for the company and $23.5 million in solar energy investment. These funds will support its expansion to regions such as India, where Glow’s infrastructure is expected to meet the energy needs of 34,000 households.
AI+Web3
0G is the first modular artificial intelligence chain with a scalable and programmable DA layer suitable for AI dapps. Its modular technology will enable frictionless interoperability between chains while ensuring security, eliminating fragmentation and maximizing connectivity to achieve a weightless and open metaverse.
On November 13, Zero Gravity Labs (0G Labs) announced that it had received $40 million in seed round financing from Hack VC, Delphi Digital, OKX Ventures, Samsung Next, Bankless Ventures, Animoca Brands, etc., and the 0G Foundation (the independent management agency of the 0G protocol) received a $250 million token purchase commitment.
The funds will be used to develop the world’s first decentralized AI operating system (dAIOS), which is committed to reforming the use of big data, achieving GB-level on-chain data transmission per second, supporting high-performance application scenarios such as AI model training, and enabling Layer 2 and modular AI to be seamlessly integrated into the Web3 ecosystem. On the same day as the announcement of the financing, 0G also opened the public sale of nodes (a total of 175,000 nodes, about half of which have been sold in the community pre-sale).
Ritual is a distributed AI computing platform that brings together a distributed network of nodes that provide access to computation and model creators, and enables creators to host their models on these nodes. Users can then access any model on the network using a common API. Ritual’s architecture is built on a set of sovereign modular execution layers called Ritual Superchains. These layers are designed to handle various types of arbitrary computations, with a primary focus on AI models.
Ritual has a strong financing lineup. In April, Ritual received a multi-million dollar investment from Polychain Capital. Last November, it also completed a $25 million financing round, which included Archetype, Accomplice, Robot Ventures, etc., and angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasa, Worldcoin research engineer DC Builder, EigenLayer Chief Strategy Officer Calvin Liu, and Monad co-founder also participated.
On November 19, Ritual launched the Ritual Chain testnet, which will provide a platform for building AI-native applications. The team also announced the establishment of an independent Ritual Foundation.
Sahara is a decentralized, privacy-centric AI network infrastructure. On this platform, contributors can receive fair compensation, maintain sovereignty of data and models, and can safely create, share, and trade AI assets while protecting privacy and promoting inclusion. Its first launched Sahara Knowledge Agent (KA) and Sahara Data are two cornerstone products. Sahara KA is an artificial intelligence whose capabilities go far beyond conversational capabilities and can automatically analyze external and internal proprietary data to provide reliable decisions based on specific needs. Sahara Data provides high-value data services for AI model training and solves security and privacy issues in data processing.
Sahara is about to launch a testnet and an AI market. In addition, the team plans to launch the mainnet in Q4. In August this year, Sahara announced the completion of a $43 million Series A financing round led by Binance Labs, Pantera Capital and Polychain Capital, with participation from Samsung, Matrix Partners, Siam Commercial Bank, dao5, Alumni Ventures, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, Mirana Ventures and others.
Sentient is an AI research organization dedicated to building a new open AGI economy for AI builders and creators. It enables open source AI developers to monetize their models, data, and other innovations, and allows AI platforms to be open for collaboration, transcending the boundaries of traditional single and closed API-based AI platforms. Its core contributors include Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
Sentient completed a large seed round of financing of US$85 million in July this year, led by Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, and participated by well-known institutions such as Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, LD Capital, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, Canonical Crypto and Foresight Ventures.
Sentient released the OML (Open, Monetizable and Loyal) white paper in September, and recently launched the OML 1.0 fingerprint library function, which supports fingerprint recognition of AI models to verify the identity of AI model developers. In addition, the team had previously planned to launch a test network this year.
Infrastructure and tools
ChaosLabs is an automated economic security tool. Its initial main business was to stress test DeFi protocols and simulate worst-case scenarios by building “chaos engineering”. As the complexity of the security environment in the crypto field continues to increase, Chaos Labs has also expanded its business types such as risk management, risk oracles, analytical tools, incentive optimization, witch detection, etc. It has served more than 20 head protocols, including Aave, GMX, Arbitrum, Jupiter, etc.
In August, Chaos Lab completed a $55 million Series A financing round, with investors including Haun Ventures, PayPal Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures. Chaos Labs also received support from angel investors such as Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana and Francesco Agosti of Phantom. In 2023, Chaos Labs received $20 million in seed round funding led by PayPal Ventures and Galaxy Digital. So far, the company has received a total of $75 million in financing.
Conduit is a Rollup-as-a-Service project that enables teams to quickly scale their dApps with Rollup features by providing a production-level Rollup solution based on the OP technology stack. Conduit has supported more than 300 Rollups covering mainnet and testnet. The TVL of mainnet Rollups running on Conduit totals approximately $1.2 billion.
In June this year, Conduit completed a US$37 million Series A financing round, led by Paradigm and Haun Ventures, with participation from Bankless Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and others. Conduit completed a US$7 million seed round of financing in March last year, led by Paradigm.
In August, Conduit launched the new Conduit Marketplace, which aims to provide a one-stop integrated solution for Rollup teams. The platform brings together tools from 48 partners. Recently, Conduit launched the sorter Conduit G2, which is 10 times more powerful than the existing sorter. It is 100% compatible with OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit.
Helius is a developer platform focused on the Solana ecosystem and is seen as a key tool to drive the development of the Solana ecosystem.
It aims to help developers quickly build high-performance crypto applications by simplifying the development process and optimizing the toolchain. Founded in 2022 by a team of former Coinbase and Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineers, Helius provides a range of tools to eliminate the complexity of developing Solana applications and improve network performance.
In September, Helius completed a financing of US$21.75 million, with participation from Haun Ventures, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, 6th Man Ventures, Chapter One and Spearhead.
OrbiterFinance is a decentralized cross-Rollup bridge for transferring Ethereum’s native assets, supporting fast asset transfers across multiple Layer 2 networks (such as zkSync, Arbitrum, etc.). Earlier this year, Orbiter Finance rebranded as ZK-based Orbiter Rollup, considering the growing market demand for Intent-Centric’s all-round Rollup solutions, as the infrastructure layer of Ethereum, focusing on ultimate interoperability and improving capital efficiency.
Last year, Orbiter Finance completed its Series A financing, the amount of which was not disclosed; in 2022, Orbiter Finance completed a seed round of financing of US$3.2 million. Its investors include OKX Ventures, Tiger Global, Matrixport Ventures, etc. Orbiter has stated that it plans to launch native tokens this year and will gradually announce the token economy and distribution plan. In June this year, the O-Points ranking system and the latest ranking were announced in preparation for airdrops.
Zama is the most representative startup project in the world in the direction of FHE (homomorphic encryption), building open source homomorphic encryption tools for developers. FHE is a technology that processes data without decryption. It can be used to create private smart contracts on public, permissionless blockchains, where only specific users can see transaction data and contract status. Zama’s founder, Pascal Paillier, is a famous cryptographer and one of the inventors of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which is the core technology of Zama. Since its early research, Zama has achieved a 100-fold performance improvement, and now it aims to achieve another 1,000-fold performance improvement to support large-scale applications.
In March this year, Zama completed a $73 million Series A financing, led by Multicoin Capital and Filecoin developer Protocol Labs, with participation from Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures and Stake Capital. In addition, angel investors including Filecoin founder Juan Benet, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood also participated in this round of investment.
DeBank is a multi-chain asset management and data analysis platform that supports DeFi protocols across multiple chains, enabling users to manage portfolios more efficiently, explore DeFi projects, and compare interest rates across different protocols.
In 2021, DeBank completed a $25 million equity financing round with a valuation of $200 million. Sequoia China led the investment, and other participants included Dragonfly Capital, Hash Global, Youbi Capital, as well as well-known institutions such as Coinbase Ventures, Crypto.com and Ledger.
DEXScreener is a comprehensive analysis platform that aggregates information from more than 80 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, BSC, Solana, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Polygon. DexScreener provides real-time data streaming, and users can view data charts every five minutes. In addition, Dexscreener’s iOS and Android applications can enable push notifications based on percentage changes, target prices, or price changes within a set time period, allowing users to track and plot DEX data in real time.
DefiLlama founder 0xngmi disclosed in August that by tracking DEX Screener’s fees on DefiLlama, the platform earned $150,000 to $250,000 a day by charging $300 per token to add information such as TG links and pictures. Currently, DexScreener has no plans for financing and public token issuance due to its own profit model.
In June this year, Dexscreener released Moonshot, a Solana-based startup platform similar to pump.fun. Moonshot was officially launched on July 18. In just 4 months, it became one of the biggest winners in this meme craze and was even hailed as the “Binance of meme”, becoming a key driving force for the rise of the Big Golden Dog.
Bitcoin Ecosystem
Blockstream is a development platform for the Bitcoin ecosystem, founded in 2014. Blockstream’s core focus is to develop new infrastructure for the traditional financial system, with key developments centered around Bitcoin sidechains and other blockchain-related applications. Core technologies include the Lighting protocol and the Elements Project, a blockchain platform that supports open source sidechains. Blockstream has launched products such as Liquid Network, the first Bitcoin sidechain, and Blockstream Green, a Bitcoin wallet, in addition to providing Bitcoin mining operations hosting services.
Blockstream co-founder and CEO Dr. Adam Back is a British cryptographer and computer scientist known for inventing Hashcash in 1997, which later became the basis for Bitcoin’s proof-of-work system. Back had interacted with Satoshi Nakamoto before he wrote his groundbreaking white paper in 2008. A recent HBO documentary suggested that Satoshi Nakamoto might be Back, but Back has repeatedly denied that he is Satoshi and said it was just a joke.
In October this year, Blockstream completed a $210 million convertible note financing led by Fulgur Ventures. The financing will be used to accelerate the market adoption of its Bitcoin Layer 2 technology, expand mining operations, and increase Bitcoin reserves. Blockstream recently opened a new R&D center in Lugano, Switzerland, aiming to promote financial technology innovation on Bitcoin Liquid and Lightning networks. On November 21, Blockstream established an asset management department to bridge the gap between Bitcoin and mainstream finance.
Babylon is a protocol that uses the security of Bitcoin to provide security for other PoS chains. Babylon can provide a secure, cross-chain-free, and custody-free native staking solution for PoS chains including BTC layer2, enhance the security of PoS chains, shorten the staking cycle of PoS chains through Bitcoin’s timestamp mechanism, and promote cross-chain interoperability. It is often compared to Eigenlayer of the Ethereum ecosystem. Babylon was founded by Professor David Tse of Stanford University.
Babylon received $70 million in financing in May this year, led by Paradigm, with participation from Polychain Capital and the venture capital arm of cryptocurrency exchange Bullish; in December last year, Babylon completed a $18 million Series A financing round, led by Polychain Capital and Hack VC, with participation from Framework Ventures, Polygon Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, OKX Ventures and others.
Babylon launched its mainnet in August this year. Following the successful launch of the first phase Cap-2 mainnet in early October and the staking of 24,000 bitcoins, the Cap-3 mainnet is scheduled to be launched in early December, with a longer staking time window and a higher staking limit for each transaction.
wallet
Phantom is a multi-chain non-custodial crypto wallet originally designed for the Solana blockchain, and now supports Ethereum and Polygon networks, expanding its usefulness for users of decentralized applications (DApps), DeFi protocols, and NFTs. Phantom was launched in 2021, and although MetaMask has established a foothold in the wallet market, Phantom has quickly gained attention for its elegant and silky user experience, and its product optimization and update speed is also relatively fast.
In early 2022, Phantom completed a $109 million Series B financing round at a valuation of $1.2 billion, with participation from Paradigm, a16z, Variant Fund, Jump Capital, DeFi Alliance and Solana Ventures.
On November 20, Phantom acquired Blowfish, a provider of Web3 firewall technology. The Blowfish team will launch new security features for Phantom, ranging from intuitive transaction previews to real-time insights into fraud. Phantom’s ranking has risen rapidly this month. Phantom ranks second in the free utility app rankings in the US Apple App Store, second only to Google; Phantom’s iOS free app ranking hit a record high, ranking ninth, surpassing WhatsApp and Instagram.
Backpack is a next-generation cryptocurrency exchange and multi-chain wallet that provides a self-custody solution that integrates multi-party computing (MPC) technology to ensure the safety of funds. The team originally developed the wallet for the xNFT protocol it launched, but compared to the positioning of a “wallet”, Backpack is more like building a crypto ecosystem. Because it is rooted in the Solana ecosystem, Backpack has a very strong ability to integrate the Solana ecosystem, so it has also become one of the beneficiaries of the rise of the Solana ecosystem.
Last April, Backpack released the first xNFT series Mad Lads on the Solana ecosystem. This NFT project was very popular, and its trading volume once ranked first in the entire network, even surpassing the Ethereum ecosystem blue chip NFT project BAYC. Last October, Backpack launched the exchange Backpack Exchange and obtained a VASP license issued by the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. This year, Backpack began to frequently expand to other popular ecosystems, such as Base, Monad, Polygon, etc.
In February this year, Backpack completed a US$17 million Series A financing round with a valuation of US$120 million, led by Placeholder VC, with participation from Wintermute, Robot Ventures, Selini Capital, Amber Group and others.
Payment
The PayFi network built by HumaFinance is a leading use case of the Solana ecosystem, focusing on building the Payment Financing Layer, with a focus on trillion-dollar commercial payments, trade financing, and remittance scenarios. Its current core application, Arf, solves the problem of prepayments through blockchain and stablecoins, and has processed more than $2 billion in on-chain transactions.
The Huma Finance team has Internet backgrounds such as Google and Meta. Richard Liu is an engineer by profession and worked at Google for nearly 8 years. He participated in the creation of many well-known products such as Google Trusted Stores and Google Fi. The Leap.ai he founded was acquired by Facebook (now Meta).
In September, Huma Finance received $38 million in financing led by Distributed Global, with participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, and TIBAS Ventures, the venture capital arm of İşbank, Turkey’s largest private bank.
Bridge is building a stablecoin-driven capital flow platform to help companies accept stablecoin payments. By providing a series of software tools (such as API interfaces) to provide developers with seamless conversion between fiat currencies and stablecoins, it supports companies to integrate cross-border payments, exchanges and other services based on stablecoins, and even companies can issue their own stablecoins.
In August this year, Bridge announced the completion of a $58 million financing round, with investors including Sequoia Capital, 1confirmation, Index, Haun Ventures, Ribbit Capital and other institutions participating. This was also the first time Bridge made a public appearance. Only two months later, Stripe, a unicorn in the payment field, finally acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion, becoming the largest acquisition in the history of cryptocurrencies and also Stripe’s largest acquisition to date.
Recently, Bridge acquired the Web3 wallet infrastructure platform Triangle. As part of the transaction, the Triangle team will join Bridge to help build a scalable stablecoin system.
M^0 is a decentralized stablecoin issuance protocol that aims to provide financial institutions and developers with cryptocurrency issuance solutions based on high-quality collateral (such as US Treasuries). M^0 users can earn returns on the collateral they hold while using US dollar stablecoins. The protocol was initially launched on Ethereum and will be expanded to other L1 and L2 networks. The core members of the M^0 team come from projects such as MakerDAO and Circle. M^0 plans to issue a stablecoin $M that is compatible and composable with any DeFi service or architecture.
In June this year, M^0 completed a $35 million Series A financing round led by Bain Capital, with participation from Galaxy Ventures, Wintermute Ventures and GSR. M^0 previously raised $22.5 million in seed funding led by Pantera Capital in early 2023.
CeFi
Deribit is currently the largest cryptocurrency options exchange, with its Bitcoin options trading volume accounting for more than 80% of the total market volume, and Ethereum options trading volume accounting for more than 90% of the total market volume. Deribit was officially launched in June 2016. It was originally a fully dedicated BTC trading platform, and later other categories such as ETH contracts were gradually added. Currently, users can trade perpetual contracts, futures and options contracts on Deribit. In addition, the data on the Deribit platform has become an important industry indicator, such as the number of open contracts for Bitcoin options, option delivery dates, and large transaction data.
In September 2022, Deribit completed a financing of US$40 million, and in 2021, Deribit completed a financing of US$100 million. Its investors include Mechanism Capital, Zee Prime Capital, QCP Capital, etc.
Bitcoin futures contracts on trading platform Deribit have reached a historic milestone of $100,000 yesterday, trading above the spot price.
Founded in 2011, Bitstamp is a long-established cryptocurrency exchange that is considered one of the most compliant exchanges. Its business covers Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Slovenia, Singapore, and the United States. It is not only one of the four crypto companies approved by the UK FCA in the past year, but also the first European crypto exchange to obtain approval in principle in Singapore. It has also served as the “royal” exchange of Ethereum founder Vitalik on many occasions.
In June this year, Robinhood acquired Bitstamp for $200 million to expand its international presence. Recently, Bitstamp announced that it had obtained a MiFID MTF license issued by the Slovenian Securities Regulatory Authority, allowing Bitstamp to provide more complex products, including crypto derivatives, to institutional and retail investors.
Founded in 2017, Securitize is a compliant RWA tokenization platform for issuing, managing and trading digital asset securities in compliance with the existing regulatory framework in the United States, with a community of more than 1.2 million investors and 3,000 companies. In short, it helps corporate assets to be tokenized, allowing real-world assets to be seamlessly converted into digital tokens.
Securitize’s tokenized on-chain assets have exceeded $1 billion. In October, Securitize announced the launch of a conversion service between Circle stablecoin (USDC) and the US dollar, dedicated to BlackRock’s US Dollar Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL). It also recently launched a new fund management service, Securitize Fund Services, to simplify the operational and compliance tasks associated with creating new blockchain-based real-world asset products.
In May this year, Securitize completed a strategic financing of US$47 million. This round of financing was led by BlackRock, with participation from Hamilton Lane, ParaFi Capital, Tradeweb Markets, Aptos Labs, Circle and Paxos.
Wintermute is a London-based cryptocurrency market maker founded in 2017. Wintermute’s main business is to provide liquidity services to cryptocurrency trading platforms, institutions and individuals. It also provides market making services in some cryptocurrency derivatives markets.
After Alameda fell, Wintermute began to emerge. In this bull market, Wintermute is almost present in all high-market-cap tokens. Among the four kings (OP / ARB / STRK / ZK), except for ZK, which lacks clear data support, Wintermute participates in market making in the rest and has a huge number of tokens. In addition, Wintermute has become the second largest market maker in Robinhood, with its trading revenue accounting for up to 10%.
In addition, Wintermute also did not miss the Meme craze. The latest data shows that it holds 19 MEME coins with a value of more than $1 million, with a total holding value of more than $100 million. Most of these MEME coins come from Ethereum and Solana, and most of them are popular projects, and most of them have been listed on Binance.
Wintermute’s most recent round of financing was a $20 million Series B financing round completed in 2022, with investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Sino Global Capital, Hack VC, etc.
Wintermute also recently launched a new prediction market OutcomeMarket, which has been launched on Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum.
Social, NFT and GameFi
Farcaster is a decentralized social media protocol that focuses on interoperability, user autonomy, and privacy protection. Unlike traditional social networks, Farcaster does not rely on central servers and aims to create an uncensored environment where users have full control over their social data and social graphs and interact with different applications on the network through one ID. Farcaster is open source and permissionless, and anyone can build applications through its API. Since its launch, Farcaster has attracted more than 700,000 users. Warpcast is a major application on Farcaster and the first Farcaster client.
Farcaster has been praised by Vitalik many times. In May this year, Farcaster received a $150 million Series A financing led by Paradigm at a valuation of $1 billion.
Farcaster announced its work roadmap today, with its 14-person team responsible for protocols, cryptocurrencies, and social. In terms of protocols, it will build and migrate to Snapchain to expand the protocol and provide new FIPs for FC Connect; in terms of cryptocurrencies, it is working to improve the trading user experience as part of Frames v2; in terms of social, it will continue to improve application performance, channel iteration, and user experience.
StoryProtocol is an on-chain IP ecosystem that hopes to create, manage and license on-chain IP in a completely new way. It provides a simplified framework to manage the entire life cycle of IP development, supporting features such as source tracking, frictionless licensing and revenue sharing. Applications built on Story Protocol are designed for creators of all media (prose, images, games, audio, etc.), enabling writers and artists to track the provenance of their works, allowing anyone to contribute and remix while capturing the value of their contributions.
In August this year, Story Protocol developer PIP Labs completed an $80 million Series B financing round, led by a16z crypto, with participation from Polychain, Stability AI senior vice president and board member Scott Trowbridge, K11 founder Adrian Cheng, digital art collector Cozomo de’Medici, No Capital and others.
Currently, Story Protocol has launched the IP-focused Layer1 public testnet Iliad and the IP marketplace Color, where users can buy, sell and discover IP assets and licenses. In a recent interview, the co-founder of Story Protocol revealed that he is in dialogue with many top NFT projects and is also communicating with some of the most famous creators in Hollywood.
MagicEden is a cross-chain NFT market. Founded in 2021, after three years of development, Magic Eden has evolved from a single NFT trading platform on the Solana chain to a comprehensive ecosystem that integrates NFT trading, wallet services, token swaps and cross-chain functions. At present, Magic Eden has integrated ecological assets from multiple chains such as Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, ApeChain, etc., and supports a variety of NFT, Token and other assets to be traded on its platform.
In 2022, Magic Eden completed a US$130 million Series B financing round at a valuation of US$1.6 billion, with Electric Capital and Greylock jointly leading the investment.
Magic Eden recently announced the token economics of its ME token. The total amount of ME is 1 billion. The token distribution will be issued within 4 years, and 50.2% will be allocated to the community. TGE will be launched in a few weeks. In the future, community priority features will be launched to reward loyal users. Users can earn ME tokens through daily use of Magic Eden products.
PudgyPenguins is a collection of 8,888 NFTs. It accelerates Web3 innovation through IP utilization and community empowerment. Each holder has exclusive access to experiences, events, intellectual property licensing opportunities, etc. Pudgy Penguins CEO is called a “marketing genius” by the community. After Pudgy Penguins was acquired for $2.5 million in 2022, it embarked on the road to IPization.
Against the backdrop of sluggish market performance of many NFT projects, in an era when the prices of Boring Ape and Crypto Punks continue to fall and are no longer mentioned, Fat Penguin has been finding ways to stir up trouble.
Earlier this year, Pudgy Penguins launched the beta version of the IP licensing platform OverpassIP; in May, Pudgy Penguins announced a partnership with game studio Mythical Games to develop an immersive mobile game, which will be launched in 2025. In the same month, its plush toys have sold more than 1 million pieces, and it will also cooperate with retailers including Walmart, Target, Smiths, Hot Topic, etc.; in June, Pudgy Penguins and its NFT licensing platform OverpassIP jointly established a parent company called Igloo; in July, it launched the consumer-centric Layer2 “Abstract” and launched the test network, and plans to launch the main network later this year; in September, it launched the Pudgy Penguin Soulbound Token, a soul-bound token of Penguin Club that is held for 1,000 days; in October, Pudgy Penguins announced that it will launch the Web3 mobile (IOS & Android) game Pudgy Party next year in conjunction with Mythical Games.
In July this year, Igloo, the parent company of Pudgy Penguins, announced the completion of a $11 million financing led by Founders Fund. Participants included Distributed Capital, 1kx, Everest Ventures Group and Selini Capital. This financing is mainly used to build its Layer2 network Abstract.
AzraGames is a blockchain gaming company that aims to create a mainstream collectible combat RPG. Its first game is called Project Arcanas, a fantasy collectible and fighting arena RPG. Azra Games began developing its flagship game Project Legends last year, and the game has completed its first round of closed testing in early October.
Most of the core members of the Azra Games team came from EA. Founder Mark Otero is the former general manager of the famous American game company EA. He led the development of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Michael Noriega was the technical art director of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and is currently the game director of Azra Games.
In October this year, Azra Games completed a US$42.7 million Series A financing round, with participation from Pantera Capital, a16z crypto, A16Z GAMES and NFX, bringing Azra’s total financing to US$68.3 million.