Author: WuBlockchain

According to statistics from RootData, there were a total of 161 publicly announced investment projects in the crypto VC field in April, a decrease of 13.4% from March 2024 (186 projects), and an increase of 29.8% year-on-year from April 2023 (124 projects). Note: Since not all financing deals are announced in the same month, the above statistics may increase in the future. The classification of various sub-sectors is as follows:

CeFi accounts for approximately 3%, DeFi accounts for approximately 22%, NFT/GameFi accounts for approximately 19%, L1/L2 accounts for approximately 12%, RWA/DePIN accounts for approximately 11%, Tool/Wallet accounts for approximately 9%, and AI accounts for approximately 8%.

The total financing amount in April was $1.02 billion, a decrease of 6.4% from March 2024 ($1.09 billion), and an increase of 12.1% year-on-year from April 2023 ($0.91 billion). Among them, the top 10 rounds by amount are as follows:

Monad Labs completed a $225 million financing round led by Paradigm, with participation from Electric Capital and Greenoaks, with the funds being used to build a Layer1 blockchain. Monad will fully support EVM and aims to deploy its mainnet by the end of this year, with a testnet deployment planned in the coming months.

The Series B financing size of Layer1 blockchain Berachain increased to $100 million, with co-leads Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures, and participation from Polychain Capital, Hack VC, and Tribe Capital, currently valuing the company at $1.5 billion. Berachain aims to be compatible with Ethereum-based applications and is positioned as a community-driven blockchain.

Auradine raised $80 million in its Series B financing, with participation from StepStone Group, Marathon Digital, among others, but did not disclose a specific valuation. Previously, Auradine raised $81 million in Series A financing with a valuation of $500 million. Auradine both manufactures mining machines and operates a mining business, founded in 2022, and launched the Teraflux Bitcoin miner in November last year.

San Francisco-based software development team Movement Labs is building an Ethereum Layer2, having raised $38 million in financing, with Polychain leading, and participation from Hack VC, dao5, and Robot Ventures. Movement uses the Move programming language and MVM and is also building a tool called Move Stack to enable the Move virtual machine to be adopted by blockchains outside of Ethereum.

Blockchain XION, developed by smart contract development company Burnt, announced the completion of a $25 million Series A financing round, with participation from Multicoin, Animoca, and Arrington Capital, among others. The new funds will accelerate the development of XION’s ecosystem.

Thesis announced the launch of a Bitcoin Layer2 named Mezo after completing a $21 million Series A financing round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Multicoin, Hack VC, among others. The company stated in a points program called “HODL Proof” that holders can store idle Bitcoin in Mezo, with the longer the storage time, the more “HODL score multiplier” they receive.

Aligned Layer, a decentralized zero-knowledge proof verification layer for Ethereum developed based on EigenLayer, announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing round, led by Hack VC, with participation from Nomad Capital, among others. Aligned Layer currently has a simple testnet that works with Cosmos SDK and will migrate to the EigenLayer testnet in the coming weeks, with the mainnet planned to launch in the second quarter of 2024.

Ellipsis Labs, the developer of the DeFi protocol Phoenix on Solana, announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing round, led by Paradigm, with participation from Electric Capital. In August last year, Ellipsis Labs announced the completion of a $3.3 million seed round led by Electric Capital.

Puffer, an Ethereum Restaking protocol, announced the completion of an $18 million financing round, led by Brevan Howard Digital and Electric Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Lemniscap, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Mechanism, Lightspeed Faction, Consensys, Animoca, and GSR. The new round of funding will help launch Puffer’s mainnet.

Wallet developer Turnkey, co-founded by former Coinbase employees, announced the completion of a $15 million Series A financing round, led by Lightspeed Faction and Galaxy Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, Alchemy, Figment Capital, and Mirana Ventures, among others. Turnkey aims to help application developers build user-friendly blockchain wallets.

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