Author: WuBlockchain

According to statistics from RootData, there were 75 publicly disclosed investment projects by crypto VCs in October, a month-on-month decrease of 10% (83 projects in September 2023), and a year-on-year decrease of 45% (135 projects in October 2022). Note: Since not all financing is announced in the same month, the above statistics may increase in the future. The primary industry classifications are as follows.

In October, infrastructure projects accounted for about 24% of financing, DeFi about 21%, CeFi about 9%, and NFT/GameFi about 13%.

The total financing amount in October was $430 million, a month-on-month decrease of 20% (compared to $530 million in September 2023), and a year-on-year decrease of 63% (compared to $1.15 billion in October 2022). The rounds exceeding $12 million are as follows.

Web3 security development company Blockaid secured $33 million in financing, including a $6 million seed round participated in by Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Cyberstarts, and a $27 million Series A round led by Ribbit Capital and Variant. Blockaid was founded in September 2022 by Ben-Natan and his former colleague Raz Niv, who previously worked in the cybersecurity R&D team of Unit 8200 in the Israeli military intelligence division and in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office. Blockaid recently collaborated with MetaMask to launch an alert feature to prevent users from phishing attacks.

Blackbird announced the completion of a $24 million Series A financing round led by a16z. Blackbird provides loyalty and connectivity tools for restaurants. Every check-in through Blackbird earns access rights, rewards, privileges, and FLY loyalty points. In 2022, it completed a seed financing round of $11 million.

Decentralized derivatives exchange SynFutures raised $22 million in its Series B financing round, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from HashKey Capital and others. SynFutures is currently the second-largest derivatives protocol on Polygon, and its co-founder and CEO Rachel Lin is open to the idea of launching a native token in the future.

Cryptocurrency trading and lending platform Membrane Labs raised $20 million in its Series A financing round, with participation from notable firms such as Brevan Howard Digital and Point72 Ventures. The funds will be used to help establish mature trading infrastructure needed in the cryptocurrency field.

Gaming company NEON Machine announced the completion of a $20 million financing round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from IOSG Ventures and others. The investment will be used for game development. The company is set to launch Shrapnel, a blockchain-based shooting game, with a paid early access version to be released in December and a free public test version expected in August next year.

Binance announced the launchpool of its 39th new coin mining project, Memecoin (MEME), which will be listed on November 3, 2023, at 16:00. MEME is the ecosystem token of Memeland, a Web3 creative studio under 9GAG. The community pre-sale of Memecoin (MEME) has ended, raising approximately 8737 ETH (about $15.67 million).

RWA lending platform Untangled Finance completed a $13.5 million financing round and launched on the Celo network. The main investor in this round was Fasanara Capital. Untangled also announced plans to expand to Ethereum and Polygon through the Chainlink cross-chain interoperability protocol.

Startup smlXL announced the completion of a $13.4 million seed financing round, with participation from a16z crypto, Greylock, and others. The new funds will be used to establish a 16-person team and develop products, including evm.codes and evm.storage. Founder Dor Levi stated that evm.storage is aimed at developers and more experienced blockchain users, and the company is also expanding its coverage to unverified Solidity contracts.

The Uniswap community passed the proposal to “invest in Ekubo Protocol.” According to the proposal, Uniswap invested 3 million UNI (about $12 million) in Ekubo, a leading exchange on Starknet, in exchange for 20% of its future governance tokens. Ekubo’s founder, Moody Salem, was previously the engineering manager at Uniswap.

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