Which early projects are leading crypto venture capital firms betting on recently? | 8.1-8.31

2022-09-03 12:42:00

Collection

Limit Break, Coherent, Halliday, .bit, Clockwork, SolanaFM, Sei Labs, etc.

整理：饼干，链捕手

In this article, Chain Catcher will introduce early projects recently backed by leading crypto venture capital firms (August 1-31), including basic information, official websites, related reports, etc., to help readers further understand potential projects for the future.

1. Gym Class

On August 3, the VR basketball application Gym Class completed an $8 million seed round financing, led by a16z, with participation from Y Combinator.

Gym Class leverages its background in consumer, virtual reality, and gaming to create social experiences through digital sports. It combines the fun of real-world sports, fitness, social interaction, and entertainment provided by top-tier VR basketball.

Gym Class VR utilizes realistic basketball mechanics and physics principles, allowing users to shoot, catch, block, jump, and sprint just like in the real world.
At the same time, users can meet and compete with other digital athletes from around the globe without having to put on their basketball gear and head outdoors. There are competitive game modes for 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3.

Most importantly, users can personalize, customize, and decorate their full-body avatars in the game, while virtual avatars can also be tokenized, allowing users to sell skins and accessories.

The app has a rating of 4.9 on the Meta Quest App Lab with over 14,000 reviews and is set to launch on the Meta Quest Store this fall.

Official website: https://gymclassvr.com/

2. Lifeform

On August 3, decentralized visual digital identity service provider Lifeform secured seed round financing, led by Binance Labs.

Lifeform's conceptual product design revolves around user-generated content (UGC). Lifeform continues to build easy-to-use and low-barrier editor tools that enable users to spontaneously create and share. This helps expand the thriving creator community and generates native Web3 intellectual property through technological solutions.

Launched in 2021, Lifeform's vision is to establish interoperability between the digital and physical realms. The company's core technologies include: ultra-realistic 3D avatar creation tools; visual DID protocols; secure and innovative contract solutions; a decentralized identity system for Web3 avatars;

Metaverse engine software development kit (SDK). On the backend, Lifeform uses DID NFTs to populate these avatars, allowing users to bring their avatars into the Web3 space as representations of their own identity.

Currently, Lifeform has created a plug-and-play tool that allows users to bring their avatars into Web2 social media for interaction. Lifeform has also incubated the virtual human NFT project HALO, dedicated to creating an ecosystem around virtual avatars and separation technology.

Official website: https://lifeform.cc/

3. Volare Finance

On August 3, options protocol Volare Finance completed over $6 million in financing, with participation from Digital Currency Group, Ava Labs, Spark Digital Capital, and others.

Volare focuses on options trading, providing users with transparent, trustworthy, and decentralized European options, option combinations, and exotic options. It also allows investors to customize option strategy combinations and provides tools for hedging, speculation, and yield enhancement based on its infrastructure.

Volare has built trading view tools into its exchange UI, allowing users to create charts and trade simultaneously. The bar at the top of the chart panel displays the cryptocurrency or fiat currency pair the user is viewing, the current market price, and changes in price and trading volume over the past 24 hours. Compared to other major market participants, Volare offers users advantages such as AMM, profit sharing, exotic options, financial instructions, hedging, on-chain, interest-bearing, and collateralization.

Currently, Volare Finance has launched a test version on the Avalanche network, and due to Volare's low collateral rate, it may even offer limit order book functionality in the future, providing users with a trading environment similar to centralized exchanges. Additionally, Volare offers trading options using NFTs. Users can create and trade Volare options on NFT exchanges, reducing trading costs while increasing liquidity.

Official website: https://volare.finance/

4. Coherent

On August 5, blockchain data startup Coherent completed $4.5 million in seed round financing, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and others.

Coherent is developing a multi-chain, readable enterprise-level API for Web3 developers, allowing developers to build applications and provide new features using its data. The company focuses on three types of data: on-chain transaction history, NFT data, and digital credentials. Coherent serves as the core infrastructure for providing Web3 data, aimed at enabling application developers to easily build rich user experiences. Its rich APIs provide truly useful data points for creating Web3 applications.

Specifically, Coherent's APIs center around user addresses in Web3, easily parsing all user activities on-chain, including balances, NFTs, on-chain credentials, and more. Therefore, protocols built using Coherent's APIs will allow user data to be portable across applications.

Coherent was founded by former Coinbase senior software engineer Carl Cortright, and its product is currently in the testing phase, expected to launch in September.

Official website: https://coherent.sh/

5. Halliday

On August 5, Web3 startup Halliday completed $6 million in seed round financing, led by a16z, with participation from Hashed and others.

Launched in November 2021 by Akshay Malhotra and Griffin Dunaif, Halliday (named after James Halliday, the protagonist of Ready Player One) offers gamers the option of "play now, pay later." Halliday aims to make in-game purchases and NFT ownership proof more affordable and convenient for gamers who may be frustrated by the high prices of NFTs in games.

Halliday uses a buyback structure to separate access rights and ownership: if a player defaults on payment for an NFT, their access rights to the NFT will be revoked. Once a player provides funds and purchases the NFT, ownership transfers to Halliday. The buyback process can only be completed after the lessee has made the payment.

Currently, Halliday accepts USDC, ETH, wETH, and traditional payment methods such as credit cards.

Official website: https://www.halliday.xyz/

6. Cashmere

On August 9, Solana ecosystem enterprise wallet management company Cashmere completed $3 million in seed round financing, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Y Combinator, and others.

Cashmere is a company that provides enterprise wallet management for Solana blockchain users, with its multi-signature solution requiring multiple wallets to approve transactions before funds can be moved out of Cashmere, eliminating single points of failure and making self-custody more secure. Cashmere aims to become the preferred wallet for startups and DAOs managing their treasury.

Currently, users can interact with Cashmere's multi-signature through IDL. Additionally, Cashmere has integrated the yield aggregator Castle Finance, allowing users to directly manage their funds in the multi-signature to earn yields.

In the future, Cashmere will provide a complete SDK to make integration easier and plans to build NFT support, cross-chain compatibility with Wormhole, and native integration with Wallet Adapter.

Official website: https://www.cashmere.finance/

7. Fair.xyz

On August 9, NFT minting platform Fair.xyz completed $4.5 million in financing, with participation from OpenSea, NFX, and others.

Fair.xyz is a one-stop shop for NFT creators and collectors, with the ultimate goal of bringing fairness, integration, and democratization to a highly technical and decentralized market. It allows creators to launch NFT collections without paying developers 20-25% and absurd upfront costs, and without letting NFT markets take a 40% cut. Additionally, smart queuing technology prioritizes genuine collectors and removes malicious bot scripts, ensuring fans have a fair minting opportunity.

Creators only need artwork and a crypto wallet to launch NFT collections through Fair.xyz, while everything else, such as collection homepage, minting integration, smart contract deployment, metadata generation, and decentralization, is handled by the Fair.xyz platform. Furthermore, the platform will send the sales proceeds of NFTs to creators, but will charge a 6% sales fee.

Fair.xyz was founded by engineers from Meta, Instagram, and Goldman Sachs, who will leverage their industry experience to build the best consumer products in Web3. Fair.xyz has optimized its code, making the launch of NFT collections 10.5 times cheaper compared to traditional deployments. The platform also supports upgrading NFTs to L2, with users choosing to reduce gas fees by 22 times on the Polygon network.

Official website: https://fair.xyz/

8. EtherMail

On August 11, Web3 email communication service provider EtherMail completed $3 million in seed round financing, led by Fabric and Greenfield One.

EtherMail is an email solution that sets the standard for anonymous and encrypted wallet-to-wallet communication, allowing Web3 users to communicate P2P completely anonymously and encrypted, while rewarding users for reading relevant content in their inbox. This solution is also applicable to Web3 companies, DAOs, and NFTs. With EtherMail, companies can send rich relevant content directly to their asset holders based on real-time information synchronized with the blockchain.

EtherMail chooses to store encryption keys on the blockchain through integration with ThorProtocol. This ensures that key pairs are easy to manage and that users have complete control over their keys via their Web3 wallets.

EtherMail plans to launch its native utility token $EMT early next year. $EMT will be an ERC-20 token based on the Ethereum network. This token will be the first incentive mechanism designed to reward users for their time and attention spent reading unsolicited emails, creating the necessary framework for token economics.

Official website: https://ethermail.io/

9. .bit

On August 15, Web3 identity protocol .bit completed $13 million in Series A financing, led by HashKey Capital and others.

.bit is an open-source decentralized identity protocol based on blockchain, dedicated to providing permissionless and irrevocable decentralized identities for individual users and DAOs, raising awareness of identity sovereignty globally. Any application can read .bit's data, but only the owner can write data, achieving absolute ownership and control over the container by the user.

Specifically, users can transfer tokens/NFTs through .bit without remembering complex addresses, have a unified username across different DApps, assign sub-accounts to community members for work, send end-to-end encrypted messages to .bit friends, and more.

.bit supports Ethereum, BNB Chain, Tron, Nervos CKB, and Polygon. In the future, .bit will cover all mainstream public chains such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Polkadot, and Solana.

.bit will launch the NameDAO and sub-account modules in the future, allocating a portion of the protocol's revenue to the DAO, with the team aiming to incentivize more people worldwide to spread their culture and access Web3 better through NameDAO.

Official website: https://www.did.id/

10. Quivr

On August 23, decentralized social ID platform Quivr completed $3.55 million in seed round financing, led by Infinity Ventures Crypto, with participation from Tencent co-founder Jason Zeng and others.

Quivr is an interoperable verification and social recognition protocol for users to verify and validate their digital narratives. The platform allows users to represent themselves online more comprehensively, integrating key aspects of their social graph data in a fully authentic way.

Quivr verifies consumers' online footprints and issues verification badges through applications associated with different social platforms (i.e., Twitter, Spotify, LinkedIn, etc.), which are minted into their personal NFTs and recorded on the blockchain. Additionally, Quivr will leverage financing to build a platform that creates badge-based passes and digital resumes, aiming to create a more humanized and trustworthy digital world.

Quivr's features will include: connecting multiple social graphs into a portable wallet; an on-chain tagging system for verifying expertise, credentials, events, and passions; and gamification to unlock rare and unique badges for personal achievements.

Official website: https://quivr.com/

11. Mural

On August 23, DAO infrastructure provider Mural completed $5.6 million in seed round financing, with participation from DCG, Galaxy Ventures, and others.

Mural is a crypto company focused on decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) infrastructure, launching a test version for its fintech-focused platform to help brands deploy DAO treasury funds ranging from $50 to $100 million.

Mural brings top-notch security and design practices from Palantir and Digits to build a well-architected financial infrastructure that brands with the highest performance and compliance requirements can rely on. It will solve financial management issues for DAOs, track spending, and manage financial reporting.

At the same time, Mural allows communities to have mature DAO treasuries for easy storage, management, and deployment of crypto funds, enabling brands to keep their entire community informed about their DAO's financial dynamics.

Official website: https://www.mural.xyz/

Related reading: 《Mural raised $5.6M to help brands deploy DAO treasuries》

12. Comm

On August 25, Web3 communication application Comm completed $5 million in seed round financing, led by CoinFund.

Comm is a crypto-native chat protocol designed to build a private, decentralized alternative to Discord. The protocol emphasizes user privacy, with each community having its own backend, referred to as a key server.

Users can write mini-apps and custom modules in React, design community skins, and customize tags and homepages. At the same time, users can log in with their wallets, using ENS as their username. On Comm, users control their identity and data. Comm allows each user to decide what content they want to receive through detailed notification controls and a powerful unified inbox.

Currently, Comm hosts users' chat data on Ashoat's key server, which operates outside a data center in California. In the future, the team plans to host chat data on other key servers, depending on the communities users join, with chat data stored on the devices of users in the same chat thread. Additionally, the team expects to launch direct messaging (DM) features by the end of the year.

Official website: https://comm.app/

13. Mellow Protocol

On August 26, Mellow Protocol completed $2.75 million in seed round financing, led by ParaFi, Arrington Capital, and others.

Mellow Protocol is a liquidity optimization solution that allows users to deposit liquidity into different underlying protocols such as Uniswap, Sushiswap, Yearn, Compound, etc., with different market events triggering corresponding strategies. The protocol aims to establish a robust ecosystem of automated tools.

Users first select a liquidity management strategy and liquidity pool, then add liquidity to the selected treasury to experience optimized APR and use Mellow LP tokens in other protocols. The treasury holds tokens and rebalances investments in other protocols based on smart contract strategies. The tokens managed by the treasury are fixed and cannot start managing additional tokens or stop managing existing tokens.

MStrategy is a strategy for token pairs (e.g., WBTC/WETH or USDC/WETH). This strategy simulates Uniswap V3 ranges in terms of token shares while investing funds in different token pairs. A portion of the portfolio (e.g., 20%) is stored in an ERC20 treasury, while the remainder is placed in lending market protocols like AAVE or Compound to earn yields.

Additionally, the Mellow Strategy SDK is used to define custom strategies and backtest them on real Uniswap V3 data in a few steps. Currently, data is available for WBTC/WETH, USDC/WETH, and USDC/USDT liquidity pools.

Official website: https://mellow.finance/

14. SolanaFM

On August 26, Solana block explorer SolanaFM completed $4.5 million in seed round financing, led by SBI Group, with plans to expand to the Aptos network.

SolanaFM is an indexer for the Solana blockchain, helping users collect and process data with maximum efficiency. It provides easy access to data within the Solana network, containing complete historical data of Solana, to easily create fast and scalable applications or simply simplify indexing and querying services.

Despite Solana's high-performance features, SolanaFM adopts the principle of "never trust user input" in its engineering. Since December 2021, SolanaFM has provided users with two types of use cases. Program indexing: a method for extracting, transforming, and storing transactions based on user program executions. Hyper index API: a set of fast, efficient, and scalable APIs for extracting data from the protocol's indexed programs.

Official website: https://solana.fm/

15. Limit Break

On August 29, NFT project DigiDaigaku's parent company Limit Break completed two rounds of financing totaling $200 million, led by Paradigm, with participation from FTX, Coinbase, and others.

DigiDaigaku is a collection of 2022 unique characters developed by Limit Break, co-founded by game designers Gabriel Leydon and Halbert Nakagawa, using a stealth drop format, with all NFTs minted for free, requiring only gas fees (approximately 0.003 ETH) from participating users. According to official descriptions, DigiDaigaku characters live in a mysterious world unknown to outsiders.

Limit Break's new concept of "Free to Own" mode states that under the "Free to Own" model, NFTs are given for free to initial players, and the genesis NFT assets can become "factories for future assets," allowing holders to obtain more NFTs in the future.

Currently, the Limit Break team consists of 40 people, and founder Gabriel Leydon has over 20 years of experience in the gaming industry. He began investing in the blockchain space as an individual investor in 2021, with a notable investment in YGG in August 2021. Additionally, he assembled an 80-person team that secretly developed for 18 months, launching GAME OF WAR: Fire Age.

Official website: https://limitbreak.com/

16. GammaX

On August 29, crypto derivatives trading platform GammaX completed $4 million in seed round financing, led by StarkWare and Dexterity Capital.

GammaX Exchange is a decentralized derivatives exchange based on an order book, combining the speed, performance, and liquidity advantages of centralized exchanges with the governance, self-custody, and security of blockchain.

GammaX addresses the security and custody issues faced by centralized exchanges through audited smart contracts on StarkWare, while providing a fast, streamlined user experience through its optimized off-chain order book, matching engine, and intuitive UI. Due to GammaX's partnership with Dexterity Capital, it has a liquidity advantage compared to other exchanges, ensuring all markets have tight spreads and depth. Additionally, GammaX has designed its token economics and reward mechanisms from the ground up, creating a trading reward system that incentivizes real trading and retention while preventing wash trading and dumping of token value.

GammaX plans to open its testnet to beta testers in the coming weeks, followed by a mainnet launch this fall. Initially, it will offer only two trading pairs, BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT, supporting up to 20x leverage for trading.

Official website: https://gammax.exchange/

17. Clockwork

On August 30, Solana ecosystem automation network Clockwork completed $4 million in financing, led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Solana Ventures and others.

Clockwork, formerly known as Cronos, is a decentralized alternative to cloud computing infrastructure while maintaining the same high level of security, reliability, and scalability. The protocol aims to solve the automation dilemma on the Solana network, where developers must choose between using decentralized applications (dapps) or automation applications. Clockwork helps blockchain developers automate and schedule transactions without relying on centralized cloud service providers like Amazon or Google.

Clockwork has two main components: an on-chain program where users can schedule transactions, and a work network that can execute user-scheduled transactions. The on-chain program provides a way for users and smart contracts to create "tasks"—transactions with trigger conditions. The work network monitors these tasks and executes them when the trigger conditions are met.

Clockwork plugins can enhance validator earnings by launching tasks for users and charging automation fees. Clockwork plugins run alongside validators. Validators can achieve higher annual yields by running their validation nodes using Clockwork plugins, and developers have a network of incentivized participants to run their scheduled tasks.

Official website: https://www.clockwork.xyz/

Related reading: 《Solana automation network Clockwork raises $4 million》

18. Sei Labs

On August 31, DeFi optimization network Sei Labs completed $5 million in seed round financing, led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Delphi Digital, and others.

Sei is a Layer 1 blockchain based on Cosmos, designed to optimize DeFi applications. Sei optimizes every part of the network, including a built-in order matching engine that any application can utilize, as well as built-in MEV and front-running prevention mechanisms. At the same time, Sei features network speeds that allow transactions to be finalized in about 600 milliseconds. One of Sei's key features is order-based trading. Any application can utilize Sei's built-in order matching engine to instantly launch and customize order books for spot, derivatives, options, sports betting, and more.

Sei is designed with developers in mind, serving as the infrastructure and shared liquidity center for the next generation of DeFi applications. Applications can easily plug and play, trading on Sei's order book infrastructure and accessing aggregated liquidity from other applications. To prioritize developer experience, Sei supports Solidity and CosmWasm smart contracts.

The Sei Labs team consists of members from three backgrounds: 1. Developers from Robinhood, Databricks, Airbnb, etc., with extensive expertise in order book design, infrastructure, and the Cosmos stack. 2. Cosmos OGs who have navigated the ecosystem for years. 3. Financial and strategic members from Goldman Sachs and other market makers, bridging the gap between DeFi and institutions. Currently, the Sei mainnet has not yet launched, but over 20 applications from ecosystems such as Solana, Terra, and NEAR are already building on the network.

Official website: https://www.seinetwork.io/

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