RootData February Cryptocurrency Market Data Summary: Bull Market Boosts Rapid Recovery of Investment and Financing Market, Number of Financing Deals Hits Nearly 16-Month High

Author: Biscuit & Elvin, RootData

In February 2024, BTC surged to $64,000, and the monthly increase of popular AI and Meme project tokens exceeded 400%, attracting significant market attention. The investment and financing data in the crypto space once again reached remarkable figures, with total financing amounting to $700 million and the number of financing events exceeding 138, creating a new high in nearly 16 months, marking the return of the investment and financing market to a bull market.

Financing trends in the crypto space over the past two years
In this article, we will focus on specific financing data, active investors, trending projects, and other aspects to present the changing trends in the crypto market.

I. Financing Data

The total financing amount in the cryptocurrency sector in February was $700 million, an increase of 8.15% month-on-month, but a decrease of 26.89% year-on-year. The number of financing events was 138, an increase of 21.93% month-on-month and an increase of 4.54% year-on-year. The Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer completed a $100 million financing round led by a16z, becoming the largest financing event of the month. Other popular projects that completed financing include Layer1 blockchain Flare Network ($35 million), liquid staking protocol Ether.Fi ($27 million), modular blockchain Avail ($27 million), and cryptocurrency exchange Backpack ($17 million), among others.

In terms of financing amounts, the $3-5 million range remains the most common, with notable projects including institutional compliance DeFi access layer Singularity, zkSync lending protocol ZeroLend, Filecoin network tool GLIF, and Bitcoin ZK rollup layer Citrea. Seed rounds remain the hottest financing stage, with 39 projects completing seed round financing in February.

Additionally, there were 8 merger and acquisition events in February. Yuga Labs acquired the Moonbirds development company PROOF; Worldcoin acquired the Solana wallet Ottr Finance; and digital asset custodian BitGo acquired alternative asset investment infrastructure Brassica, which provides backend infrastructure services for private securities and alternative investments, including multi-asset custody, record-keeping, and transfer agency services. The rapidly increasing number of M&A events in the crypto space highlights that leading industry participants are accelerating their pace and actively seeking quality targets to fill their strategic gaps, thereby expanding the synergistic effects of their ecosystems.

II. Active Investors

HashKey Capital and Cypher Capital were the most active venture capital firms in February, each with 8 investment records. As one of the most active Crypto VCs, HashKey Capital shared a comprehensive analysis of the Web3 investment landscape for 2024, covering 14 tracks including ZK, MEV, AA, Intents, DA, Bitcoin, and DePIN.

Following closely were OKX Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Animoca Brands, and MH Ventures, each with 7 investment records. Both HashKey Capital and OKX Ventures disclosed their participation in the AltLayer financing round last September.
In addition, 5 other investment firms had 5 investment records in February, and the following are the active firms and their investment projects:

• Amber Group: Backpack, Ether.Fi, Carbcoin, Kodiak, Pixelmon
• Hashed: Humanity Protocol, Backpack, NAVI, Concrete Protocol, Overworld
• Cogitent Ventures: Humanity Protocol, Silencio, Beoble, Exverse, Truflation
• Big Brain Holdings: Initia, Sphere, Overworld, Watches.io, GLIF, Exabits
• Tribe Capital: BuildBear, Concrete Protocol, Lava Network, Analog, Nibiru

According to statistics, 4 crypto funds announced fundraising news in February:

Global Millennial Capital: Completed fundraising of $20 million, with investors including the Qatar Al Attiyah family office. The new funds will be used to increase the number of investments, with plans to invest in about 35 companies in fields such as DeFi, blockchain technology, software, and fintech.

Bonfire Union (Mask Network): Will launch its second fund, with a total fundraising amount of $100 million across both funds, aiming for strategic investments in decentralized social networks and infrastructure.

Asymmetry Financial: Plans to raise $21 million for its new fund, Bitcoin DeFi Venture Fund I, focusing on emerging areas of blockchain, led by general partner Dan Held.

Sanctor Capital: Its early-stage Web3 investment fund completed $10 million in fundraising and partnered with Press Star to launch a pre-accelerator program called "The Multiplayer Fellowship" to fund 100 teams over the next 18 months.

III. Trending Projects

Based on a large amount of user search data from RootData, we also summarized some of the projects with the highest user search volume in February, including:

1. Mode

Mode is an OP Stack L2 designed for growth, incentivizing and directly rewarding developers, users, and protocols to develop the Mode and superchain ecosystem. Mode has designed contract revenue-sharing incentives at the protocol layer. Applications and users expanding the Mode blockchain will directly receive a portion of the network sequencer's profits.

2. StarkNet

StarkNet is a permissionless decentralized Validity-Rollup (also known as "ZK-Rollup"). It operates as an L2 network on Ethereum, enabling any dApp to achieve unlimited scaling of its computations—without affecting Ethereum's composability and security, thanks to StarkNet's reliance on the most secure and scalable cryptographic proof system, STARK.

3. Nibiru

Nibiru is a Layer 1 blockchain and financial hub that unifies leveraged derivatives trading, spot trading, staking, and joint curve liquidity provision into a seamless user experience, allowing users from over 40 blockchains to engage in leveraged trading using a suite of composable decentralized applications.

4. Aevo

Aevo is a high-performance decentralized derivatives trading platform focused on options and perpetual contracts. The exchange operates on a custom EVM Rollup that can aggregate to Ethereum. Aevo operates off-chain orders through on-chain settlement. This means that once an order is matched, the trade is executed and settled via smart contracts.

5. Portal

Portal is a Web3 gaming platform. $portal is the native token of the Portal platform. $portal serves as a bridge for web3 games and gamers, providing game distribution and player simplicity for everyone. In an increasingly fragmented gaming ecosystem, Portal aims to provide an interconnected user experience, allowing 1 billion players to jump between any game on any platform.

6. ZetaChain

ZetaChain is a foundational public blockchain that enables full-chain, universal smart contracts and messaging across any blockchain. ZetaChain envisions and supports a truly fluid multi-chain crypto ecosystem. These "full-chain" smart contracts can send data and value across connected blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and ultimately non-smart contract chains like Bitcoin and Dogecoin. ZetaChain is built on the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint consensus.

7. Babylon

Babylon is a project designed to create secure protocols for the decentralized world. Babylon's mission is to scale Bitcoin through three innovative security-sharing protocols to ensure the security of the decentralized world: Bitcoin staking protocol, Bitcoin timestamp protocol, and Bitcoin data availability protocol.

8. Dymension

Dymension is a modular settlement layer that provides all the tools and infrastructure needed to easily launch rollups as part of the Cosmos ecosystem, opening up new dimensions for decentralized application scenarios. Dymension introduces a paradigm shift in scalability by enabling the easy deployment of dedicated rollups tailored to their needs, allowing future metaverse applications, games, and other ultra-TPS services to reside on the blockchain.

9. Ethena

Ethena is building derivatives infrastructure that allows Ethereum to transform into a global internet bond through delta-neutral positions on stETH, creating the first crypto-native yield-bearing stablecoin: USDE.

10. Smart Layer

Smart Layer is a unique solution to address integration, privacy, and trust challenges in the digital environment. It introduces a new integration layer that enables trustless token logic, paving the way for a representative network with unlimited integration potential. Smart Layer allows large Web2 companies to easily enhance customer experience and business efficiency through tokenization, ushering in the next wave of digital transformation.

IV. Project Updates

In February, RootData also recorded many events such as mainnet launches and new token issuances, helping users understand important project dynamics in the market and grasp earlier alpha opportunities.

Projects that launched mainnets in February (sorted by date from recent to distant, not exhaustive):

1. DFlow
DFlow is a decentralized order flow market supported by the order flow payment (PFOF) model of the DFlow Protocol. DFlow aims to support order flows from various L1 chains and Rollups. On one hand, brokers create, manage, monitor, and analyze order flow auctions. On the other hand, market makers submit bids for the auctions. The auction winner gains exclusive rights to complete the related orders.

2. Ethena
Ethena is building derivatives infrastructure that allows Ethereum to transform into a global internet bond through delta-neutral positions on stETH, creating the first crypto-native yield-bearing stablecoin: USDE.

3. Paradex
Paradex is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange and the first application chain on Starknet. Paradex will offer perpetual futures trading with deep liquidity, capital efficiency, and performance while maintaining transparency and self-custody. Paradex is incubated by the Paradigm team.

4. MYX.Finance
MYX Finance is a decentralized derivatives exchange based on the MPM model, employing smart rates and risk-hedging mechanisms to ensure protocol stability and provide sustainable high returns. MYX Finance features deep liquidity and up to 50x leverage, maximizing capital efficiency for users.

5. ZKFair
ZKFair is a community ZK-Rollup based on Polygon CDK and Celestia DA, supported by ZK-RaaS provider Lumoz. ZKFair uses the stablecoin USDC as the gas token. 100% of ZKF tokens will be airdropped to the community immediately after the mainnet launch. After the ZKF token airdrop, 100% of L2 gas fee profits will be returned to the community.

6. Harbor
Harbor Market is a decentralized non-custodial lending market. Using the provided collateral, users can leverage the market on Harbor (BNB, BTC, ETH, USDC, and USDT) to take out loans against their assets.

7. DragonSwap
DragonSwap is an open-source DEX platform supporting Klaytn and Finschia. DragonSwap offers various services, including token swaps, liquidity provision (LP), and mining.

8. Ducky City
Ducky City is a metaverse virtual world game designed to help users socialize easily and combines a play-to-earn gaming mechanism to enable users to achieve wealth growth.

9. Dymension
Dymension is a modular settlement layer that provides all the tools and infrastructure needed to easily launch rollups as part of the Cosmos ecosystem, opening up new dimensions for decentralized application scenarios. Dymension introduces a paradigm shift in scalability by enabling the easy deployment of dedicated rollups tailored to their needs, allowing future metaverse applications, games, and other ultra-TPS services to reside on the blockchain.

10. Avantis
Avantis is an oracle-based synthetic derivatives protocol that allows users to trade cryptocurrencies and real-world assets with up to 100x leverage and earn yields by providing USDC liquidity as market makers.

11. ZetaChain
ZetaChain is a foundational public blockchain that enables full-chain, universal smart contracts and messaging across any blockchain. ZetaChain envisions and supports a truly fluid multi-chain crypto ecosystem. These "full-chain" smart contracts can send data and value across connected blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and ultimately non-smart contract chains like Bitcoin and Dogecoin. ZetaChain is built on the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint consensus.

Projects that launched testnets in February (sorted by date from recent to distant, not exhaustive):

1. Tea

Tea is developing a decentralized open-source software platform that fairly rewards developers based on their contributions to the entire ecosystem. Tea co-founder and CEO Max Howell is known for creating Homebrew, one of the most contributed open-source software programs globally.

2. Inco Network

Inco Network is an EVM-compatible Layer-1 that utilizes fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to achieve composable and operable privacy states. Its fhEVM (FHE + EVM) enables the writing of privacy smart contracts and executing computations on encrypted data without decryption. This innovation unlocks a wide range of use cases through confidential components, paving the way for possibilities in a new era, such as card games, DID, private voting, dark pools, etc.

3. CrossFi

CrossFi Chain is a Layer-1 blockchain with a modular architecture. It consists of two components: Cosmos and EVM. In an integrated ecosystem, the Cross Finance ecosystem combines seamless cross-border payments, decentralized finance, multi-currency cards, business solutions, and a familiar EVM development environment.

4. Allspark

Allspark is a full-yield perpetual contract DEX, with its native yield built on Blast. It supports trading various assets, including cryptocurrencies, stocks, forex, and more.

Projects that launched tokens in February (sorted by date from recent to distant):

Source: RootData Market

1. Portal
Portal is a Web3 gaming platform. $portal is the native token of the Portal platform. $portal serves as a bridge for web3 games and gamers, providing game distribution and player simplicity for everyone. In an increasingly fragmented gaming ecosystem, Portal aims to provide an interconnected user experience, allowing 1 billion players to jump between any game on any platform.

2. Beoble
Beoble is a communication infrastructure and ecosystem that allows users to chat between wallets. Its products include a web-based chat application and a toolkit that allows Dapps to integrate.

3. QnA3
QnA3 is an AI-driven Web3 knowledge-sharing platform aimed at becoming one of the most accurate crypto products with knowledge in the cryptocurrency field.

4. Tao Bank
TaoBank is a lending protocol designed for $TAO. TaoBank addresses this by allowing $TAO holders to use their assets as collateral for loans. The system has a dual benefit: it provides instant liquidity for asset holders while allowing them to retain ownership of $TAO. By doing so, TaoBank bridges the gap between the static holding of digital assets and the dynamic financial flexibility that other assets already possess.

5. Dechat
Dechat is a web3 communication protocol that supports decentralized user interactions. Users can seamlessly chat, discover, and trade digital assets within and between applications.

6. Smart Layer
Smart Layer is a unique solution to address integration, privacy, and trust challenges in the digital environment. It introduces a new integration layer that enables trustless token logic, paving the way for a representative network with unlimited integration potential. Smart Layer allows large Web2 companies to easily enhance customer experience and business efficiency through tokenization, ushering in the next wave of digital transformation.

7. XRGB
XRGB Labs aims to revolutionize digital assets by integrating Bitcoin into second-layer solutions to enhance scalability, speed, and cost efficiency. XRGB Launchpad and XRGB Swap together form a comprehensive ecosystem that fosters creativity and facilitates seamless digital asset exchanges on the RGB network.

8. Forgotten Playland

Forgotten Playland redefines social party games, featuring a range of mini-games such as Bump-A-Ball and Jungle Rumble. The Social Hub, which has exited, is a dynamic interactive space where players can hang out and socialize in games.

9. StarkNet

StarkNet is a permissionless decentralized Validity-Rollup (also known as "ZK-Rollup"). It operates as an L2 network on Ethereum, enabling any dApp to achieve unlimited scaling of its computations—without affecting Ethereum's composability and security, thanks to StarkNet's reliance on the most secure and scalable cryptographic proof system, STARK.

10. bitsCrunch
BitsCrunch is a decentralized NFT data platform that enables developers to quickly and easily build reliable NFT applications (dApps). By leveraging AI technology, the network provides accurate and in-depth analysis of NFTs, helping users make informed investment decisions. The BitsCrunch Network also offers detailed forensic data on NFTs, enabling users to identify potential risks, fraudulent activities, and maintain security.

13. Pixels
Pixels is a charming open-world farming and exploration game where players build a pixel at a time. Collect resources, improve skills, and build relationships while exploring the stories and quests that run through the Pixels Universe, immersing players in a captivating blend of management, creation, and exploration that combines blockchain ownership with player progress and achievements.

14. DevvE
DevvX is a Layer-1 blockchain composed of shards or independent blockchains that can communicate through novel cross-shard mechanisms. DevvE aims to support efforts to address environmental and social challenges by creating financial models to support the operational costs of securing and maintaining ESG data and assets, raising funds for supporting ESG goals and creating green projects.

15. Ta-da

Ta-da is a Talk-to-Earn web3 application that connects businesses and individuals. Users earn tokens by recording their voices through an application. Vivoka, a French AI company, is the predecessor of Ta-da.

16. Lynex

Lynex is a decentralized exchange and liquidity market on the Linea blockchain. It serves as a DeFi hub where users and DAOs can engage in various operations within its dynamic protocol ecosystem. Lynex allows for token swaps, earning LYNX dollars as liquidity providers, accepting voter bribes, and influencing emission directions to maximize trading income.

17. MOBY

Moby aims to redefine the ICO paradigm. Unlike traditional ICOs, Moby ensures significant community ownership and influence. This is achieved through a model where the majority of the token supply and platform fees are allocated to community members. Additionally, Moby's structure is built on the pillars of transparency and democratic governance, ensuring that every stakeholder has a voice in the platform's operations. Moby plans to allocate 50% of the fees generated by the platform to $Moby token holders.

18. Lends

Lends is a decentralized lending protocol based on THORChain, featuring no interest, no liquidation, and no oracles.

19. NAVI Protocol

Navi is a native one-stop liquidity protocol on Sui. It enables users to participate in the Sui ecosystem as liquidity providers or borrowers. Liquidity providers supply assets to the market, earning passive income through yields, while borrowers can flexibly obtain loans in different assets. Navi focuses on providing the necessary DeFi infrastructure, aiming to be a key player in the rapidly growing DeFi world of the Sui ecosystem. The protocol's innovative features, such as automatic leverage vaults and isolation modes, allow users to leverage their assets and gain new trading opportunities with minimal risk. NAVI's design supports digital assets of varying risk levels while its advanced security features ensure the protection of user funds and mitigation of systemic risks.

20. Heroes of Mavia

Dymension is a modular settlement layer that provides all the tools and infrastructure needed to easily launch rollups as part of the Cosmos ecosystem, opening up new dimensions for decentralized application scenarios. Dymension introduces a paradigm shift in scalability by enabling the easy deployment of dedicated rollups tailored to their needs, allowing future metaverse applications, games, and other ultra-TPS services to reside on the blockchain.

21. Dymension
Inspect is a Web3 social data protocol for navigating the complex structures of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and blockchain technology. As a pioneering center for comprehensive insights, trend analysis, and community engagement, Inspect is dedicated to empowering cryptocurrency enthusiasts, investors, and creators. The platform provides real-time analytics, tracks performance metrics, and offers actionable insights.

22. ZetaChain

ZetaChain is a foundational public blockchain that enables full-chain, universal smart contracts and messaging across any blockchain. ZetaChain envisions and supports a truly fluid multi-chain crypto ecosystem. These "full-chain" smart contracts can send data and value across connected blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, and ultimately non-smart contract chains like Bitcoin and Dogecoin. ZetaChain is built on the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint consensus.

23. Matr1x

Matr1x is a metaverse brand that plans to build the Matr1x brand through self-developed boutique games or collaborations with third parties, game IP development partnerships, and global esports events. Matr1x will showcase its gaming trilogy (Cyber Earth---Mars Colonization---Interstellar Exploration) through three large games with a unified worldview: Matr1x FIRE (first-person shooter), Matr1x WAR (shooter + MMORPG), and Matr1x EVOLUTION (SOC).

24. TURNUP

TURNUP is a Web3 social gaming ecosystem where TURNUP players can play games, live stream in real-time, chat, and build high-quality social networks while earning rewards through trading and completing tasks (which are collectively referred to as mining). TURNUP is a progressive web application that can be installed on mobile and desktop through a browser.

Due to space limitations, the above is a partial list of mainnet and token information. For more complete and timely data, please visit the official RootData website (https://www.rootdata.com/zh/) for more information.