Financing Weekly Report | 19 public financing events; OpenFX, a stablecoin cross-border payment infrastructure company, completed a $23 million financing round, led by Accel

Highlights of this issue

According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 19 investment and financing events in the global blockchain last week (May 19-25), with a total funding amount of over US$287 million, which is an increase compared to the previous week. The overview is as follows:

• DeFi announced 6 investment and financing events, among which the decentralized stablecoin funding market Hyperdrive completed a $6 million Series A financing, led by Hack VC and Arrington Capital;
• The Web3+AI track announced one investment and financing event. Web3 project ARAI announced the completion of a $4 million seed round of financing, with investors including Sequoia China.
• The Infrastructure & Tools sector announced two investment and financing events, among which Astar Network, a Japanese multi-chain Web3 infrastructure, announced that it had received strategic investment from Animoca Brands;
• Six investment and financing events were announced in the centralized finance sector, among which Catena Labs, newly founded by Circle co-founder Sean Neville, completed a seed round of financing of US$18 million, aiming to build an "AI native bank";
• In other applications, two investment and financing events were announced. Among them, Indian technology startup Data Sutram completed a US$9 million Series A financing, led by B Capital and Lightspeed Ventures.

DeFi

Stablecoin cross-border payment infrastructure company OpenFX completes $23 million financing, led by Accel

OpenFX, a cross-border payment infrastructure company, has completed a $23 million financing led by Accel. The company is committed to solving the "last mile" problem of cross-border payments through stablecoins, aiming to replace the traditional SWIFT network. Its technology can reduce the spread of foreign exchange transactions from 69 basis points to less than 10 basis points, and 90% of transactions can be settled within 60 minutes. OpenFX founder Prabhakar Reddy once founded the crypto broker FalconX (valued at $8 billion). The new company will serve clients such as remittance companies and digital banks. It currently supports seven currencies including the US dollar and the euro, and plans to expand to the Southeast Asian market within the year.

Decentralized Stablecoin Funding Marketplace Hyperdrive Completes $6 Million Series A Funding, Led by Hack VC and Arrington Capital

Hyperdrive, a decentralized stablecoin funding market based on Hyperliquid, announced the completion of a $6 million Series A financing round, led by Hack VC and Arrington Capital, with participation from Delphi Ventures, Proof Group, SIG, Caladan Group, Amber Group, CMS Holdings, Breed VC and several angel investors. The project aims to build a stablecoin money market and yield hub on the Hyperliquid blockchain, providing stablecoin deposits and loans, liquid pledge $HYPE and one-click yield strategies.

Bitcoin Liquidity Staking Protocol Rover Completes $4.1 Million Seed Round, with Animoca Ventures and Others Joining

Bitcoin liquidity staking protocol Rover has completed a $4.1 million seed round of financing, with participation from institutions such as Bloccelerate, Animoca Ventures, CMS Holdings, UTXO, Maelstrom, and angel investors such as Meltem Demirors. The project was founded by former Citibank executive David Mass and Meir Bank, and aims to develop a liquidity staking solution for Botanix, Bitcoin's first fully decentralized sidechain. Rover is about to go online on the mainnet, and users can obtain liquidity staking tokens rovBTC by staking Bitcoin, earning Bitcoin income while maintaining liquidity. The token can also be used for DeFi operations such as trading and lending in the Botanix ecosystem. The project has reached cooperation with Chainlink and others, and has passed audits by three security companies including Trail of Bits.

Tradoor Completes $3.2 Million in Funding to Build TON’s Fastest Decentralized Exchange

The decentralized trading platform Tradoor announced that it has raised a total of US$3.2 million in financing, aiming to bring CEX-level trading experience to Telegram. The financing was led by TON Ventures and Kenetic Capital, with participation from Sigil Fund, Protagonist, VentureSouq and others. Tradoor integrates Perps, options and SocialFi trading functions, and launches Turbo Mode, with the fastest transaction confirmation time of only 50 milliseconds, supporting multi-chain one-click access and zero slippage trading. The platform will launch the "Turbo Rewards" trading reward mechanism and launch AI-driven text trading and copy trading functions.

Canadian stablecoin issuer Stablecorp completes $1.8 million in financing, with Coinbase Ventures and others participating

Canadian stablecoin issuer Stablecorp has completed a $1.8 million financing round, with investors including Coinbase Ventures and Side Door Ventures. The funds will be used to expand the infrastructure of the Canadian dollar stablecoin QCAD, including establishing on-chain foreign exchange liquidity and payment channel integration. The company announced that it will simultaneously carry out structural reforms of QCAD, including the establishment of an independent trust QCAD Digital Currency Trust to manage reserve assets, implement daily market value reports, monthly reserve certificates and annual audits. QCAD is currently jointly operated by crypto asset management company 3iQ and blockchain developer Mavennet Systems. In 2022, it received an investment of 1.9 million Canadian dollars from Circle Ventures and other institutions.

Plasma Announces Strategic Investment from Founders Fund

According to Plasma's official announcement, the project has received strategic investment from Founders Fund founded by Peter Thiel.

Web3 Games

Web3 game developer Voya Games completes $5 million financing, led by 1kx and others

Web3 game developer Voya Games has completed a $5 million financing round led by 1kx and Makers Fund, with participation from RockawayX. Angel investors include Sky Mavis co-founder Jeff 'Jihoz' Zirlin and The Sandbox COO Sébastien Borget.

The funds raised will be used to support the development of the casual Web3 game Craft World. Craft World is a casual resource management game where players will work with friendly dinosaurs to rebuild civilization after a meteorite destroyed humanity. The game is currently in the testnet stage.

AI

ARAI Completes $4 Million Seed Round to Build an AI-Driven On-Chain Intelligent Ecosystem

Web3 project ARAI announced the completion of a $4 million seed round of financing, with investors including Sequoia China, Redpoint Ventures, Animoca Brands, Folius Ventures, Skyland Ventures, Gate Ventures and other well-known institutions. ARAI is building a new interactive ecosystem driven by AI agents, reshaping the way of playing games and participating in on-chain finance. Its core product, Arai Systems, provides modular Co-Pilot Agents with real-time perception, strategic decision-making and cross-scenario adaptation capabilities, supporting users to achieve automated and personalized operation experience in complex on-chain environments and game scenarios. At present, ARAI has launched the first strategy SLG game to verify the capabilities of agents, and deployed the cross-chain settlement infrastructure Astra Layer to provide native support for multi-chain ecology. In the future, the project will use AppLovin's global traffic network to promote the large-scale application of AI agents in Web3 scenarios.

Infrastructure & Tools

Astar Network receives strategic investment from Animoca Brands

Astar Network, a Japanese multi-chain Web3 infrastructure, announced that it has received a strategic investment from Animoca Brands, but the specific amount has not been disclosed. The two parties will focus on promoting the on-chaining of Japanese and Asian entertainment IPs and jointly develop a scalable blockchain entertainment ecosystem for consumers. The first project to be implemented in this cooperation is the Anime ID identity system based on Moca Network, which will be deployed on the Astar subnet Soneium to achieve seamless migration of Web2 users to Web3. Another key project, Anime Art Fest, will expand the coverage of on-chain entertainment IPs. Astar's native token ASTR will serve as a unified circulation and incentive tool within the ecosystem to support developer funds and user incentives. Animoca Brands said that this cooperation values Astar's position as a hub for the on-chaining of Asian entertainment IPs. The two parties are exploring the establishment of a special fund focusing on IP and entertainment, which has attracted the attention of institutional investors.

NERO Chain completes early financing, the specific amount has not been disclosed yet

NERO Chain has received investments from several leading Japanese institutions and global capital. Arcanum Capital (with Tether as a participant), Csquare Venture, Oddiyana Ventures, Triple GEM Capital and other institutions have completed early investments, and the specific amount of financing has not been disclosed. Recently, NTT Digital, a subsidiary of NTT, Japan's largest telecommunications company, and CoinTrade, an exchange under Ceres, a listed company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange main board, have officially become NERO node operators. At the same time, they have reached a strategic investment cooperation with Mercury, including the establishment of a joint venture with CoinPost, a large Japanese Web3 media, and the leading law firm Dentons as the legal and strategic partner of NERO Chain. In addition, NERO is also negotiating with a number of Japanese traditional industry giants and well-known car companies to accelerate the implementation of RWA scenarios in Japan. In addition, NERO Chain is preparing for the release of NFT and the main network, and it is expected that NFT will be launched next week.

Centralized Finance

Slash, a startup that provides crypto-related vertical banking services, completes $41 million in Series B funding

Vertical banking startup Slash announced the completion of a $41 million Series B financing, with a post-money valuation of $370 million. This round was led by Goodwater Capital (whose investment amount was $37 million). This financing comes two years after the company's Series A and Seed rounds, when Slash raised $19 million. The new funds will be used to expand into new areas such as e-commerce, online travel and property management.

The company's two post-95 co-founders, Victor Cardenas and Kevin Bai, are both college dropouts. Slash initially focused on providing banking services to sneaker resellers. In 2023, the value of the Yeezy series plummeted due to Kanye West's anti-Semitic remarks, and the company's revenue shrank by 80% overnight. In the following 18 months, the company transformed into providing customized financial services to vertical fields such as performance marketing agencies, crypto companies and HVAC operators, and its monthly transaction volume has now reached US$300 million. Slash cooperates with licensed bank Column to provide crypto companies with special services such as fiat currency and cryptocurrency exchange.

Catena Labs, founded by Circle, completes $18 million seed round of financing to build an "AI native bank"

Catena Labs, a new venture founded by Circle co-founder Sean Neville, has completed a $18 million seed round of financing, aiming to build an "AI native bank". This round of financing was led by the crypto department of a16z, with participation from Breyer Capital, Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and football star Tom Brady. Neville predicts that financial transactions will be entirely executed by AI agents in the future. Catena Labs has developed an open source protocol to standardize AI payment and digital identity verification processes. The company has made it clear that it will not issue cryptocurrencies or stablecoins for the time being, but investors will receive equity with token warrants. It is worth noting that Neville still serves as a director of Circle. The Catena Labs team currently has only 9 people, and its technology will integrate but not rely on stablecoin solutions.

Bitcoin project Roxom Global completes $17.9 million in financing to build BTC reserves and media networks

Bitcoin project Roxom Global has completed a $17.9 million financing to build a Bitcoin-denominated securities trading platform and an all-weather media network RoxomTV. This round of financing was led by Draper Associates, Borderless Capital and other institutions, of which $7.9 million will be used for exchange development and $10 million for media business. The project currently holds 84.72 BTC (worth about $8.53 million) and plans to increase its holdings by 30 in the near future, bringing the total value of Bitcoin reserves to more than $12.7 million (based on the current $111,000/BTC). RoxomTV has been launched on platforms such as X and Rumble, and will set up a new operations center in Hong Kong in the third quarter. Its Bitcoin-denominated exchange will provide futures, spot and synthetic financial products, mainly for Latin American, European and some Asian markets, and will not serve US users for the time being. The project follows the MicroStrategy model and converts all its capital reserves into Bitcoin.

Crypto trading platform True Markets completes $11 million Series A financing, led by PayPal Ventures and Variant

Crypto trading platform True Markets announced the completion of a $11 million Series A financing round, which was jointly led by PayPal Ventures and Variant, and followed by existing investors such as RRE Ventures and Reciprocal Ventures. The company was co-founded by Vishal Gupta and Patrick McCreary, former employees of Goldman Sachs and Coinbase, and will launch the Solana on-chain trading application for retail investors this week.

True Markets' core trading system, TrueX, adopts a non-custodial model and uses Paxos to custody assets. It currently supports spot trading of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. The newly launched mobile application will first support Solana ecosystem token trading, and plans to gradually expand to other mainstream cryptocurrencies in the summer. The platform will review new tokens listed every week, while marking risk warnings such as ownership concentration. True Markets aims to attract new and old users by optimizing transaction speed, fees and interface design. The company currently has 10 full-time employees and plans to achieve competitive advantages in price, speed and experience by the end of summer. Previously, in the fall of 2024, the company received $9 million in seed round financing.

African digital lending platform Carrot completes $4.2 million seed round

Carrot, an African digital lending platform, has completed a $4.2 million seed round of financing, led by MaC Venture Capital, with participation from Partech Africa and Authentic Ventures. The funds will be used to expand the team, business and develop AI risk control systems. The platform allows users to obtain credit by using digital financial assets such as stocks and crypto assets as collateral. It has issued more than $2 million in loans and served more than 10,000 users. Founder Bolu Aiki-Raji said that Carrot solves the problem of insufficient traditional credit infrastructure in Africa through a non-cash collateral model.

Crypto asset management company Blockrise completes 2 million euro seed round of financing

Blockrise, a Rotterdam-based crypto asset management company, announced the completion of a 2 million euro seed round of financing, with Golden Egg Check Capital participating. The new funds are intended to be used to prepare for the implementation of European crypto asset market regulatory regulations and strive to obtain the MiCAR license for crypto asset market regulation issued by the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM). The company expects to launch a Series A financing round at the end of the year and expand its Bitcoin custody and asset management platform.

other

Indian tech startup Data Sutram raises $9 million in Series A funding led by B Capital and Lightspeed Ventures

Indian technology startup Data Sutram has completed a $9 million Series A financing round, led by B Capital and Lightspeed Ventures. This round of financing, which consists of Tier 1 and Tier 2 capital, will help the company expand beyond banking into cryptocurrency, gaming, e-commerce, express commerce and insurance, while accelerating its AI product development and international expansion plans in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Data Sutram's platform uses artificial intelligence and more than 250 external data sources to help banks, non-bank financial companies (NBFCs) and other financial service providers detect synthetic identities, map collusion networks and prevent the creation of "mule accounts."

Swedish health company H100 Group completes $2.2 million financing led by Adam Back to buy Bitcoin

Blockstream CEO Adam Back led a $2.2 million funding round for Swedish health technology company H100 Group AB, which will use the funds to purchase Bitcoin. H100 said on May 25 that the funds will be injected in the form of convertible bonds with a 0% interest rate to implement its Bitcoin reserve strategy.

Among them, Adam Back invested about $1.4 million, and the remaining $800,000 was provided by multiple investment institutions. According to the current market price, H100 can increase its holdings by about 20.18 bitcoins. Together with the 4.39 purchased on May 22, the total holding is expected to reach about 24.57 BTC. H100 said that the convertible bonds will expire on June 15, 2028, and can be converted into company shares at any time at 1.3 Swedish kronor (about $0.11) per share. If the stock price rises by more than 33% for 60 consecutive days in the future, the company can force conversion.

OTC

World Foundation sells WLD to a16z and others at market price, raising $135 million

The World Foundation subsidiary raised $135 million by selling WLD tokens at market price to early backers a16z and Bain Capital Crypto to support network expansion and the growth of Orb verification demand. This non-discounted direct purchase increased the circulation of WLD. As of now, World Network has more than 26 million users, and 12.5 million have completed Orb human identity verification.

Venture Capital Fund

Revolut founder's quantitative venture capital firm QuantumLight completes $250 million first fund raising

QuantumLight, a quantitative venture capital firm founded by Revolut founder Nik Storonsky, announced the completion of its first fund raising of $250 million, with investors including billionaire technology founders and large institutions. The fund uses AI to drive investment decisions, focuses on high-growth areas such as AI, Web3, and financial technology, and has invested in many start-ups. QuantumLight also released its second operating manual "Top Talent Recruitment", which systematically sorted out the recruitment framework of Revolut during its rapid expansion period.

The core team of the institution is composed of engineers, quantitative traders and AI researchers. They use algorithms to analyze massive amounts of data to eliminate human bias in investment decisions. Its first fund has reached the fundraising limit, reflecting the market's recognition of the data-driven venture capital model. Earlier news , QuantumLight participated in the $82 million B round of financing of Mesh, a crypto payment company, in March.

Theta Capital Closes $175M Funding for Its Crypto Venture Fund

Theta Capital announced that its crypto fund-of-funds "Theta Blockchain Ventures IV" has completed a $175 million financing, focusing on investing in early crypto venture capital institutions such as Coinfund and Polychain. Theta has focused on digital assets since 2018 and currently manages approximately $1.2 billion in assets. The fund aims to provide differentiated returns to institutional investors through the professional advantages of "crypto-native" venture capital.