Highlights of this issue
According to incomplete statistics from PANews, there were 17 blockchain investment and financing events around the world last week (April 7-April 13), with a total funding of over US$150 million, a significant increase compared to the previous two weeks. An overview is as follows:
- DeFi announced three investment and financing events, among which the yield-based stablecoin protocol Cap raised $11 million in funds from institutions such as Franklin Templeton and Triton Capital;
- The Web3 gaming track announced two investment and financing events, among which DashFun completed a new round of financing, with HTX Ventures and others participating in the investment;
- Web3+AI announced three investment and financing events, among which AI network security company Octane completed a seed round of financing of US$6.75 million, led by Winklevoss Capital and others;
- The Infrastructure & Tools sector announced two investment and financing events, among which the L2 project OpenZK Network completed an early financing of US$6 million, with Animoca Brands and others participating in the investment;
- Four investment and financing events were announced in the Others category, among which the encrypted catering application Blackbird Labs completed a $50 million Series B financing, led by Spark Capital;
- The centralized finance track announced three investment and financing events, among which the cryptocurrency insurance company Meanwhile completed a $40 million Series A financing, led by Framework Ventures and others.
DeFi
Cap, a yield-based stablecoin protocol, announced that it has raised $11 million in funding from well-known financial institutions such as Franklin Templeton and Triton Capital. The total funds were announced at the end of a recent $8 million seed round and will be used to develop Cap's stablecoin engine, which is scheduled to go live later this year. Previously, Cap raised $3 million in the previous round of financing. According to the statement, Cap will provide users with a way to earn additional income through re-staking protocols such as EigenLayer. According to reports, Cap's system is designed to allow users to earn passive interest or income based on these tokens.
Firefish, an open Bitcoin mortgage marketplace, completes $1.8 million in seed funding
Firefish, an open Bitcoin mortgage market, has completed a $1.8 million seed round of financing, with participation from Braiins, the creator of Braiins OS, and venture capital firm Miton. The funds will be used to further expand Firefish's institutional lending program to cover more investors and high-net-worth individuals seeking traditional investments in the Bitcoin space. According to reports, Firefish was launched in 2022 and is built natively on Bitcoin using multi-signature escrow contracts, price and payment oracles, and pre-signed recovery transactions. Its vision is to create an open lending market with minimal trust.
Bitcoin DeFi aggregation protocol Sats Terminal has completed a $1.7 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Coinbase Ventures and Draper Associates, with participation from Draper Dragon, BitcoinFi Accelerator, UTXO Management, Core Chain Ventures, Sats Ventures, Delta Blockchain Fund, Tenzor Capital and 3Commas Capital, as well as a group of angel investors. The new funds will be used to expand its platform. By providing de-DEX, cross-chain bridges and yield aggregation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, Sats Terminal will use this financing to further develop infrastructure. According to reports, the core of Sats Terminal is to aggregate major Bitcoin DeFi protocols, allowing users to obtain the best staking returns, the most competitive token exchange rates and seamless bridging options through a single interface.
Web3 Games
DashFun Completes New Round of Financing to Build AI-Driven Web3 Game Ecosystem
DashFun announced that it has completed a new round of financing, with investors including Metalpha, HTX Ventures, tbv, Ledger Capital and FDES. DashFun is a Web3 game platform based on Telegram applets. In the future, it plans to expand to social platforms such as Line and Kakao, and is committed to building a sustainable, AI-driven game ecosystem.
Web3 gaming startup Gunzilla Games receives strategic investment from 1kx
Crypto venture capital 1kx announced a strategic investment in Gunzilla Games, the blockchain game developer of the dystopian cyberpunk shooter "Off The Grid". The specific amount has not been disclosed yet. It is reported that 1kx has been skeptical about deploying cryptocurrency strategies in AAA games due to the risks involved in early product execution. This investment is suspected to be a transformational adjustment to the previous investment strategy.
AI
Octane, an AI cybersecurity startup, announced the completion of a $6.75 million seed round of financing, co-led by Archetype and Winklevoss Capital (the family office of Gemini founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss). Other supporters include crypto exchange Gemini Frontier Fund, Circle, Duke Capital Partners and a group of strategic angel investors, including former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. The funds will be used for product development, expanding the engineering team and expanding Octane's influence. According to reports, Octane's core proposition is to supplement the passive audit model with always-on AI defense. Octane currently focuses on smart contract vulnerabilities, but in the future the company's goal is to detect and prevent more complex attacks.
Plastic Labs Completes $5.35 Million Pre-Seed Funding and Launches AI Identity Platform Honcho
Plastic Labs announced the completion of a $5.35 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Variant, White Star Capital and Betaworks, with participation from Mozilla Ventures, Seed Club Ventures, Greycroft and Differential Ventures, and angel investors including Scott Moore, NiMA Asghari and Thomas Howell. At the same time, its personalized AI identity platform "Honcho" is now open for early access. Honcho provides user identity modeling and social cognition capabilities through cloud APIs, helping developers build AI agents with personalized memory and adaptability. Plastic plans to expand Honcho from a platform to a decentralized network, allowing users to share and sovereignly own their "digital identity representations" across multiple AI applications, promoting an individual-led AI alignment paradigm.
Related reading: "A quick look at the personalized AI identity platform Honcho: How to enable LLM applications to enable ultra-personalized experience?"
Web3 AI project DecentralGPT completes $3 million in angel round and Series A strategic financing
Silicon Valley Web3 AI project DecentralGPT announced that it has recently completed angel round and A round strategic financing of US$3 million in assets, led by AGICrypto Capital, and co-invested by several Web3 institutions such as Cherry Ventures, BTR Capital, DePINX, and Aethir. The project team announced that it will accelerate the promotion of core modules such as multimodal large model support and zero-knowledge proof privacy layer research and development. It is reported that DecentralGPT is a decentralized large-scale language model (LLM) infrastructure, which realizes the decentralized deployment of multiple open source large models including DeepSeek R1 and Llama4.0 through a distributed AI inference network. Since the launch of the mainnet in June 2024, the platform has accumulated more than 2 million registered users and the number of token holding addresses has reached 900,000.
Infrastructure & Tools
OpenZK Network announced the completion of $6 million in early financing, with investors including Animoca Brands, Coinstore, Sovereign Trust and other institutions. This round of financing will be used to support its technology research and development and ecological construction. It is reported that OpenZK was founded by Dave Sandor, former executive president of Goldman Sachs Asia Pacific, and is currently actively negotiating cooperation with many institutions to promote subsequent strategic layout. OpenZK is a Layer2 solution based on ZK rollup technology, which integrates native ETH staking, liquidity re-staking and stablecoin staking into one platform.
Modular blockchain platform Plume receives strategic investment from Apollo's fund
Plume, the first modular blockchain platform built specifically for real-world assets (RWA), announced that it has received a strategic investment from a fund managed by Apollo, a leading global alternative asset management company. This round of financing will accelerate the development of Plume's full-stack infrastructure and further consolidate its leading position in the RWAfi field. Plume is building an EVM-compatible blockchain environment and full-stack infrastructure, aiming to transform alternative assets such as traditional financial instruments, carbon credits, GPUs, collectibles, etc. into composable and interactive digital assets, and give them new application value in DeFi scenarios.
other
Consumer applications:
Crypto dining app Blackbird Labs has completed a $50 million Series B financing round, led by Spark Capital, with participation from Coinbase, a16z crypto, Union Square Ventures and Amex Ventures. The financing is used for company equity and token warrants, which are allocations of unreleased cryptocurrencies. Founder Ben Leventhal said he raised the money in the fourth quarter of 2024, and he declined to disclose the implied valuation of the round. Blackbird Labs has raised $85 million since 2022.
According to reports, Blackbird is a restaurant loyalty and payment application. Every time a user visits a restaurant registered on the app, they will receive rewards in the form of an internal cryptocurrency FLY. Users can use this cryptocurrency to pay for meals anywhere in the Blackbird network, which covers more than 600 restaurants in New York City, San Francisco, and Charleston, South Carolina. Blackbird Labs released its own blockchain in February, which is built on Coinbase's Base and is called Flynet.
Related reading: "With a total financing of up to 85 million US dollars, what is the Web3 project Blackbird targeting the catering industry going to do?"
Web3 financial education platform BugsCoin completes $12 million Series A funding
Web3 financial education platform BugsCoin announced the completion of a $12 million Series A financing round, with participation from Becker Ventures, Castrum Istanbul, BullPerks, DuckDAO, Maxx Capital Official and an Asian family office. The new funds will be used to expand global and localized education projects, upgrade its decentralized asset management protocol BugsFunded, develop AI-driven smart advisor tools, and optimize token economics and explore new ecosystem use cases.
Libraro, a decentralized publishing and reading platform, announced that it has received additional investment from Ayre Ventures, bringing the total investment in Libraro to £1 million (about $1.28 million) since the initial seed funding in October 2024. It is reported that the Libraro platform uses blockchain technology to protect author identity, prevent copyright infringement, and increase transparency of ownership and distribution rights. The platform deepens the connection between readers, authors, and publishers through the Web3 loyalty program.
Web3 Social:
Web3 social media platform Wunder.Social announces $50 million in funding
Web3 social media platform Wunder.Social announced the completion of a $50 million financing round led by Rollman Management. Wunder.Social said in the announcement that the project uses blockchain technology to verify user identities, thereby eliminating robots, and shares advertising revenue with users, allowing users to fund the causes they care about. The company plans to issue tokens later this month, and potential users who are interested can register on the company's website. The project also announced that Ryan Martin, former marketing director of TikTok, has joined Wunder.Social as chief marketing officer.
(Note: Due to doubts about its authenticity, this round of financing is not included in the relevant statistics of this issue of the financing weekly report)
Related reading: "Under the guise of VC, but selling marketing dog meat, digging deep into the capital game of Rollman Management"
Social communication protocol Towns completes $10 million Series B financing, led by a16z crypto
The decentralized communication protocol Towns announced the completion of a $10 million Series B financing round, led by a16z crypto, with Coinbase Ventures joining the investment and Benchmark continuing to participate. Towns is committed to building on-chain communication infrastructure and promoting the development of Web3 social and collaboration tools. The project owner said that "the future of communication will move to the chain."
Centralized Finance
Crypto insurance company Meanwhile has completed a $40 million Series A round led by Framework Ventures and Fulgur Ventures, with participation from Wences Casares, founder of cryptocurrency bank Xapo. This round values Meanwhile at $190 million, almost double its valuation in its most recent round of funding in 2022. Meanwhile will use the funds raised from this round to expand globally and ensure that its products meet regulatory requirements.
Meanwhile, a life insurance policy is similar to an ordinary life insurance policy. The insured needs to pay the monthly premium calculated by the actuary. However, unlike paying from a bank account or using a check, customers need to pay with Bitcoin from a cryptocurrency wallet. When the insured dies, his family will receive the claim amount in the form of Bitcoin.
Crypto payment center Lyzi completes approximately $1.4 million in seed round financing
Crypto payment hub Lyzi has raised €1.3 million (about $1.4 million) in a seed round of funding from angel investors including Christopher Grilhault des Fontaines, founder of Dfns, and Jean-Luc Bernard, founder of Astek.
According to reports, Lyzi is built on the Tezos Layer1 blockchain, allowing consumers to use cryptocurrencies for daily payments in retail and e-commerce environments. Merchants receive payments in cryptocurrencies and deposit fiat currency directly into their bank accounts. The next step for Lyzi is to launch on Tezos' Layer2 block Etherlink, which is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Tokenization platform Progmat completes Pre-A round of financing, and the holdings of 4 institutions including Mitsubishi UFJ and Mizuho Bank are diluted
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) has reduced its stake in tokenization platform Progmat from 49% to 42%. It is reported that the reason for the reduction is that Progmat has completed its Pre-A round of financing at the beginning of this week and introduced three new investors, including Nochun Trust and Banking, Aozora Bank and real estate company Kenedix. The specific amount of this round of financing has not been disclosed. It is reported that the completion of the new round of financing has also led to the dilution of the equity of other shareholders of Progmat, including Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Mizuho Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank. They previously held 7.5% of the shares respectively, and now their shareholding ratio is slightly less than 6.5%.
According to previous news, Progmat is one of the two major licensed blockchain networks currently used in Japan to issue digital securities. Its platform will issue Japanese yen stablecoins on public blockchains such as Ethereum. Mitsubishi UFJ is also discussing the issuance of global stablecoins with multiple institutions. Its Mitsubishi UFJ Trust Bank plans to cooperate with Binance Japan to launch a new stablecoin.
Venture Capital Fund
DWF Labs announced that its $250 million liquidity fund is now open for applications, aiming to provide strategic capital and ecosystem support to medium and large token projects, helping them achieve sustainable growth and real-world application implementation.
Mantra Launches $108 Million Fund to Support Real-World Asset Tokenization and DeFi
The Mantra blockchain network has launched a $108,888,888 Mantra Ecosystem Fund (MEF) to accelerate the development of startups focused on the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) and decentralized finance (DeFi). Mantra said it will look for investment opportunities through its partner network over the next four years to deploy funds to "high-potential blockchain projects" around the world. The fund's supporters include a number of institutional partners including Laser Digital, Shorooq, Brevan Howard Digital, Valor Capital, Three Point Capital and Amber Group. Mantra CEO John Patrick Mullin said the fund will have an "open policy and welcome projects at any stage of development around the world, with a particular focus on the RWA and DeFi fields."
