Inventory of 15 promising potential projects favored by Circle in 2023
Get to know in advance and layout potential projects favored by large institutions.Original Title: “15 Potential Projects Circle is Optimistic About in 2023”
Original Author: MooMs, Crypto Researcher
Original Compilation: Leo, BlockBeats
The issuer of USDC, Circle, is one of the largest companies in the crypto industry. According to CoinGecko data, the current market capitalization of USDC is approximately $28.4 billion, and its investment division, Circle Ventures, currently holds a significant amount of capital available for investment. Crypto researcher MooMs wrote an article on "Circle's Investment Projects in 2023," which BlockBeats has compiled as follows:
Circle, valued at $9 billion, is one of the largest companies in the crypto industry. Below is the complete list of projects Circle Ventures has invested in so far in 2023:
Alkimiya
Alkimiya is a decentralized protocol dedicated to the capital markets of blockchain consensus, enabling consensus producers (PoW miners, staking validators) to create contracts supported by underlying "consensus resources" (such as hash power).
Funding Amount: Over $7.2 million, with investors including Dragonfly and others.
Hourglass
Hourglass is a market for trading time-bound tokens. Through TBT (Time-Bound Token), this market will allow users to gain liquidity for their locked assets by selling time options on the secondary market, enabling users to earn returns through long-term consistency and protocols to find promised liquidity.
Funding Amount: $4.2 million, with investors including Electric Capital and others.
LI.FI Protocol
LiFi Protocol is a cross-bridge and DEX aggregator that can transfer any asset on any chain to the desired asset on the selected chain, providing an excellent user experience.
Funding Amount: $23 million, with investors including 6MV, Coinbase Ventures, and others.
DFlow
DFlow is a decentralized order flow market supported by the order flow payment (PFOF) model of the DFlow protocol, designed to support order flows from various L1 chains and Rollups. Brokers create, manage, monitor, and analyze order flow auctions, while market makers submit bids to the auctions, with the winners gaining exclusive rights to execute the related orders.
Funding Amount: $7.5 million (Note from BlockBeats: total funding of $7.5 million across two rounds, with Circle Ventures participating in the $5.5 million round), with investors including The Spartan Group, Multicoin Capital, and others.
Affine DeFi
Affine is an investment platform that allows users to purchase a basket of assets (rebalancing treasury) to invest in multiple strategies simultaneously.
Funding Amount: $6.9 million, with investors including The Spartan Group, Jump Crypto, and others.
Term Labs
Term is a scalable, fixed-rate DeFi liquidity solution characterized by participants determining a fair and transparent single market clearing rate through weekly auctions.
Funding Amount: $2.5 million, with investors including Robot Ventures, Electric Capital, and others.
Catalyst
Catalyst is an open-source protocol that also serves as a permissionless liquidity layer for the future of modular blockchains. With Catalyst, any new modular chain can automatically connect liquidity and exchange with any chain—including liquidity hubs like Ethereum and Cosmos—achieving seamless liquidity connections and asset exchanges between blockchains.
Funding Amount: $4.2 million, with investors including Robot Ventures, The Spartan Group, and others.
Architect
Architect is an infrastructure solution that provides low-latency trading for traders, designed for institutions and large traders seeking secure, robust, and customizable trading tools.
Funding Amount: $5 million, with investors including Coinbase Ventures and others.
Huma Finance
Huma Finance is a DeFi project that allows users to borrow against future income streams without collateral. Similarly, users can contribute to liquidity pools, earning rewards from idle funds while supporting the community.
Funding Amount: $8.3 million, with investors including ParaFi Capital and others.
OpenTrade
OpenTrade provides access to on-chain structured financial products backed by investments in real-world assets (RWA) in the Web3 financial management space, sourcing short-term RWA investments through a global network of financial institutions, asset management companies, and B2B networks, and building them into yield-generating on-chain financial products.
Funding Amount: $1.5 million, with investors including Polygon Labs and others.
Fractal
Fractal allows all on-chain assets—from cryptocurrencies to real-world assets—to interact and collateralize through a universal margin account.
Funding Amount: $6 million, with investors including The Spartan Group and others.
In addition to introducing Circle's recent DeFi investments, I have also listed their recent investments related to blockchain services and infrastructure as follows:
TipLink: TipLink is a lightweight wallet designed to make transferring digital assets as simple as sending a link. Cryptocurrency holders can create a TipLink and send it to anyone via any platform (text, Discord, email, etc.). Once users connect their wallets to TipLink, they can deposit funds and transfer ownership by sharing the link. Each transaction also creates a new wallet, so recipients can use the funds without downloading a new browser extension or app. Moreover, if the recipient does not claim the funds, the sender can still reclaim them.
zkME: zkMe, a zero-knowledge identity oracle provider, allows users to encrypt their data and use ZKP to prove on their own devices, effectively validating user eligibility while protecting their privacy.
Msafe: The first and only multi-signature, non-custodial digital asset management solution on Aptos to date.
Rarimo: Rarimo is a multi-chain protocol aimed at solving liquidity, access, and interoperability issues between non-fungible and fungible use cases. Rarimo makes it easier to work across different chains, allowing users to perform operations such as transferring tokens, staking tokens, and providing cross-chain proof of ownership. The Rarify Labs behind it serves as service providers and community members for Rarimo.
Among these, TipLink is my favorite creative project.
Finally, in 2023, Circle was also one of the investors participating in LayerZero Labs' $120 million Series B funding round, and LayerZero is a highly anticipated full-chain interoperability protocol. I hope the future of L0 will be bright!
