RootData May Crypto Market Data Summary: Financing data slightly decreased, Animoca Brands is the most active investor
In May, the total financing amount in the cryptocurrency sector was $1.019 billion, a year-on-year increase of 30.1% and a month-on-month decrease of 1.3%.Author: Biscuit & Elvin, RootData
In May 2024, BTC maintained a volatile market, primarily influenced by expectations of interest rate cuts and geopolitical risks. Sub-sectors such as AI, Meme, and RWA experienced rotation trends. Meanwhile, investment and financing data in the crypto space remained active, with total financing amounting to $1.019 billion and 155 financing rounds, representing year-on-year increases of 30.14% and 44.85%, respectively, although both figures saw a slight decline compared to the previous month.
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
In May, the total financing amount in the cryptocurrency sector was $1.019 billion, a year-on-year increase of 30.1%, but a month-on-month decrease of 1.3%. The number of financing rounds was 155, a year-on-year increase of 44.8%, but a month-on-month decrease of 8.2%. The decentralized social network Farcaster completed a $150 million Series A financing at a valuation of $1 billion, becoming the largest financing event of the month. Other popular projects that completed financing include Layer1 blockchain Babylon, decentralized information market platform Polymarket, and anti-witch blockchain network Humanity Protocol.
In terms of financing amounts and rounds, the $1-3 million range accounted for the largest share. Seed rounds remained the most popular financing stage, with 39 projects completing seed round financing. Notable projects include the on-chain options AMM protocol IVX, DePIN asset re-staking protocol Parasail, Bitcoin lending protocol Zest Protocol, and Bitcoin-native application platform Arch Network.
In terms of sectors, infrastructure received approximately $328 million in financing in May, accounting for about one-third of the total venture capital amount of $1.019 billion. DeFi followed closely with a financing amount of $105 million, nearly 10% of the total financing.
In terms of sub-sectors, Layer1 and Layer2 remain the most favored areas by capital, with 11 and 7 projects completing financing, respectively, including established public chains like Fantom and Ton, as well as emerging blockchains like Humanity Protocol, Plume Network, Arch Network, and Mint. Six DePin projects completed financing, including Weather XM, Ambient Network, and MetaPhone. Five AI-related projects completed financing, namely Hemera, TheoriqAI, GaiaNet, Aperture Finance, and Play AI.
Additionally, there were 9 merger and acquisition events in May, which is lower than the average number in previous months. The Web3 content publishing platform Mirror was acquired by Paragraph, which will focus on developing "Kiosk," a Web3 social application that integrates blockchain and e-commerce based on Farcaster. Zora acquired the NFT minting aggregator mint.fun. The Solana wallet Phantom acquired Bitski, which is supported by a16z.
II. Active Investors
Animoca Brands was the most active venture capital firm in May, making a total of 15 investments, including in the anti-witch blockchain network Humanity Protocol, modular data access layer Lava, multi-chain SocialFi infrastructure OpenSocial, and modular blockchain E Money Network. Notably, this firm made 12 investments last month, maintaining an upward trend in activity.
OKX Ventures and SNZ Holding made 8 and 7 investments in May, respectively. Following closely were DWF Labs, P2 Ventures, and Cogitent Ventures, each making 6 investments.
Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal also invested in 5 projects in May, becoming the most active individual investor of the month. The projects he invested in include the dynamic modular service platform Crestal, modular data access layer Lava, Ethereum universal zk aggregation layer Electron Labs, P2E gaming guild Gamic Guild, and modular blockchain Play AI.
In terms of new fundraisings in the crypto space, the crypto venture capital firm New Form Capital launched a $100 million fundraising effort aimed at re-entering the previously troubled cryptocurrency industry, focusing on crypto-related technologies that reshape traditional finance, including trading markets and payment systems. They also revealed plans to invest in some AI startups related to cryptocurrency and blockchain.
TrueBridge's blockchain fund TrueBridge Blockchain I completed a $62 million fundraising, marking the firm's first blockchain fund launch. The fund's general partner, Mel Williams, stated that the fund recognized the potential of blockchain technology early on, and launching this dedicated fund emphasizes their ongoing commitment to the field.
III. Trending Projects
Based on a large amount of user search data from RootData, we summarized some of the projects with the highest user search volume in May, including:
Initia is a full-chain Rollup network that is built by integrating novel L1 with application-specific L2 infrastructure systems. The Initia platform provides product-ready Rollups, enabling teams to build scalable sovereign systems while eliminating the user experience complexities faced by end-users when interacting with a modular multi-chain universe. Initia has a complete tech stack that aligns the economic interests of users, developers, L2 application chains, and L1.
Movement is a modular framework for building and deploying Move-based infrastructure, applications, and blockchains in any distributed environment. The team is building a suite of products and services that allow non-Move protocols to leverage the power of the Move programming language without writing a single line of Move code. The team's first version, M1, redefines L1 as a vertically composable and horizontally scalable first-layer framework that is compatible with Solidity, connects EVM and Move liquidity, and allows builders to customize modular and interoperable application chains with different user bases and liquidity out of the box.
Sanctum is a new primitive built on Solana that powers liquid staking and brings Solana into the future of infinite LSTs. Sanctum enables users who stake SOL natively or use liquid staking tokens (LST) to leverage a powerful unified liquidity layer.
Morph is a fully permissionless EVM L2 that combines optimistic and zk rollup technologies, providing developers building financial, gaming, social media, and entertainment applications with user-friendly options.
BOB (Build On Bitcoin) is an EVM rollup stack with native Bitcoin support. Developers build decentralized applications on top of Ordinals, Lightning, and Nostr.
Particle Network is a modular L1 blockchain that powers chain abstraction by creating universal accounts, providing users with a single address and interaction point across chains while extracting gas and unifying liquidity. This enables existing L1 and L2 to coordinate seamlessly across ecosystems.
Taiko is a decentralized Ethereum-equivalent (Type-1) ZK-VM and general-purpose ZK-Rollup layer two network. Its goal is to allow Ethereum L1 dApp developers and users to deploy and use on Taiko without any changes or friction, maximizing the inheritance of Ethereum's security while providing faster speeds and lower transaction fees than L1.
Scroll is Ethereum's native zkEVM layer two solution. It achieves native compatibility with existing Ethereum applications and tools. Scroll handles off-chain transactions and publishes concise correctness proofs on-chain. This results in higher throughput and lower costs compared to the Ethereum base layer.
Babylon is a layer1 blockchain founded by Stanford University Professor David Tse. The project's mission is to bring Bitcoin's unparalleled security to all PoS blockchains without any additional energy costs. The team consists of researchers from Stanford University and experienced developers, along with seasoned business advisors.
10. UXLINK
UXLINK is a groundbreaking web3 social system designed for mass adoption, allowing users to build social assets and trade cryptocurrencies. It includes a range of highly modular Dapps, from onboarding to graphical formation, group tools to social trading, all seamlessly integrated within Telegram.
Monad is building a high-performance layer one blockchain for the next generation of decentralized applications, with a mission to accelerate the disruptive power of decentralization by building a blockchain that is 100 to 1000 times faster than its closest competitors, alleviating severe bottlenecks in existing blockchains, and enabling more complex applications and broader adoption.
Farcaster is a decentralized social network that enables developers to build novel social networks. It is an open protocol that can support many clients, just like email. Users will always be able to freely move their social identities between applications, and developers will always be free to build applications with new features on the network.
MyShell is a decentralized AI consumer layer that allows creators to build AI agents or bots for consumers or users to use. Its ecosystem includes robots like OpenVoice (an instant voice cloning program); MeloTTS, a multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) library; and Alice, an AI agent capable of performing various tasks, including topic research, coding, and literature reviews.
TabiChain is a gaming blockchain built on Cosmos with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility. Tabi Chain connects the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems through innovative cross-chain capabilities for seamless communication. The asset layer concentrates the liquidity of chains and shards for seamless gaming blockchain interactions.
Berachain is a high-performance EVM-compatible blockchain built on liquidity proof consensus. Liquidity proof is a novel consensus mechanism designed to coordinate network incentives and establish strong synergies between Berachain validators and project ecosystems. Berachain's technology is built on Polaris, a high-performance blockchain framework for building EVM-compatible chains on top of the CometBFT consensus engine.
Elixir is a web3 game launcher that provides advanced distribution and connection tools, game verification services, and anti-cheat and anti-hack layers to help provide players and guilds with a safer web3 gaming experience. Elixir also has a social platform to facilitate community building and promote the gaming economy.
Bitlayer is a layer two solution that provides Bitcoin-equivalent security and Turing completeness. It is also the first built on BitVM. Bitlayer aims to bring secure scalability to the Bitcoin ecosystem, promote asset diversity, and stimulate innovation to provide a faster, safer, and more flexible user experience.
zkSync is a layer two scaling solution that retains the security properties of the underlying blockchain by leveraging the latest generation of succinct zero-knowledge proofs. All funds in zkSync are held by smart contracts on the main chain, while computation and storage are performed off-chain. For each Rollup block, a state transition zero-knowledge proof (SNARK) is generated and verified by the main chain contract. This SNARK includes validity proofs for each transaction in the Rollup block.
Linea is a zk-rollup designed by ConsenSys R&D and operated by ConsenSys. It allows developers to deploy any smart contract, use any tools, and develop as if building on Ethereum. For users, this makes the Ethereum experience and security guarantees possible, but at a lower transaction cost.
Puffer is a native liquidity re-staking platform built on Eigenlayer. It introduces native liquidity re-staking tokens (nLRT) that accumulate PoS and re-staking rewards. Nodes in the protocol use Puffer's anti-slashing technology to reduce risk and improve capital efficiency while increasing their returns through native re-staking. Puffer's core mission is to maintain Ethereum's "trusted neutrality" and enhance and preserve Ethereum's decentralization.
IV. Project Updates
In May, RootData also recorded many projects' mainnet launches, new token issuances, and other events to help users understand important project dynamics in the market and grasp earlier alpha opportunities.
Projects that launched mainnets in May (sorted by date, not exhaustive):
GoldLink is an on-chain under-collateralized lending protocol that provides users with detailed insights and full control over their positions through real-time data feeds and modular risk management.
Kinto is an L2 network focused on providing secure access to financial services. It is built on the Ethereum network using OP Stack and is non-custodial, transparent, permissionless, and community-managed. Kinto is designed to provide a secure environment for users and financial institutions. Kinto defaults to providing blockchain-level KYC, insurance, AML, and fraud monitoring.
Forma is a blockchain built specifically for fully on-chain creation, constructed on Astria with Celestia as the underlying layer.
Taiko is a decentralized Ethereum-equivalent (Type-1) ZK-VM and general-purpose ZK-Rollup layer two network. Its goal is to allow Ethereum L1 dApp developers and users to deploy and use on Taiko without any changes or friction, maximizing the inheritance of Ethereum's security while providing faster speeds and lower transaction fees than L1.
Splice is a DeFi yield market that unleashes the full potential of long yields and leverage or fixed income. Splice is a fork of Pendle V2.
Data Ownership Protocol (DOP) is leveraging zero-knowledge proofs to achieve flexible transparency on Ethereum L1. DOP allows users and DApps to privately store and trade assets or selectively disclose token holdings and historical information.
Panana Finance is a community-driven decentralized exchange for trading cryptocurrencies, forex, and commodities. Users can enjoy leverage of up to 250 times without paying financing fees.
Common is a decentralized multi-chain digital asset exchange that enhances privacy. With ultra-low latency and enhanced privacy design, Common will become a DEX that mitigates the maximum extractable value (MEV) problem.
real.al is a permissionless L2 for tokenizing RWA, built on Arbitrum Orbit.
DUPER is an on-chain RTS game where players harvest resources, build bases and defenses, command armies, and capture opponents' towers in a rich 2D world, similar to Sid Meier's Civilization and Markus Persson's MiniCraft. Unlike crypto games that focus on on-chain assets, DUPER stores all game logic and state changes on the blockchain, replacing traditional game servers. Therefore, game instances are not only fully transparent but also open to "modifications"—any player can interact with and enrich the core game logic through smart contracts.
Catalyst is an open-source protocol that provides liquidity between modular blockchains. With Catalyst, any new modular chain can automatically connect liquidity and trade with any chain—including liquidity hubs like Ethereum and Cosmos.
Projects that launched testnets in May (sorted by date, not exhaustive):
MultichainZ is a cross-chain interoperability protocol that acts as a unified layer, allowing different blockchain networks to seamlessly interact, communicate, and trade with each other.
Smart Transactions (STXN) is a transaction creation and execution framework run by decentralized solvers. With smart transactions, users can set exact conditions to determine when or how to execute transactions, providing better control over the timing and conditions of trades.
SynonAI is an AI protocol that utilizes GPU capabilities for decentralized computing and advanced AI model training, machine learning, and large language models (LLM). SynonAI's SDK and seamless node onboarding enable developers to cut costs, scale quickly, and penetrate the market effectively.
Kakarot is a zkEVM written in Cairo. It aims to allow users to leverage the scaling advantages of validity rollups while maintaining compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem. Therefore, Kakarot can be used to run Ethereum smart contracts on Starknet.
Initia is a full-chain Rollup network that is built by integrating novel L1 with application-specific L2 infrastructure systems. The Initia platform provides product-ready Rollups, enabling teams to build scalable sovereign systems while eliminating the user experience complexities faced by end-users when interacting with a modular multi-chain universe. Initia has a complete tech stack that aligns the economic interests of users, developers, L2 application chains, and L1.
Airchains is a Web3 middleware SaaS product for creating customized Rollups with multiple options, supporting EVM, SVM, and CosmWasm-based Rollups.
AppLayer (formerly SparqNet) is an Ethereum scaling solution based on C++, allowing developers to deploy Solidity smart contracts and state precompiles coded in C++. In AppLayer, Solidity smart contracts are 10 times faster than competing networks based on Golang and 65 times faster than state precompiles.
Projects that launched tokens in May (sorted by date):
Source: RootData Market
Aperture Finance is an intent-centric solver network that combines AI with Intent, building a new type of chatbot supported by underlying Intent infrastructure that enables users to "declare their goals" in natural language and leverage the solver network for better execution and pricing.
IntentX is a decentralized derivatives exchange based on intent, offering perpetual futures trading. The platform leverages various cutting-edge technologies, including LayerZero, cross-chain communication protocols, account abstraction, and zero-to-one breakthrough request for quote (RFQ) architecture, addressing key challenges in delivering on-chain derivatives.
Elixir is a web3 game launcher that provides advanced distribution and connection tools, game verification services, and anti-cheat and anti-hack layers to help provide players and guilds with a safer web3 gaming experience. Elixir also has a social platform to facilitate community building and promote the gaming economy.
Common Wealth is a powerful integrated early Web3 investment platform that provides retail investors with a comprehensive pass to take control of their financial future. It aims to disrupt, scale, and optimize traditional venture capital models using Web3 principles and blockchain technology. By opening up to 99% of people, Common Wealth incentivizes higher investment and investor education standards through crowdsourced wisdom and scalable due diligence.
Param Labs is a AAA game and blockchain development studio focused on delivering the highest quality blockchain-integrated games to the masses through player-owned digital assets.
LandRocker is an innovative P2E game about discovery and space exploration, where players can explore distant planets and mine rare resources in search of valuable materials and treasures.
MetaPhone is a DePIN project based on the TON blockchain. MetaPhone collaborates with an advanced, leading 3C manufacturer to launch flagship devices. MetaPhone brings high-quality hardware, a simplified Android interface, and cutting-edge Web3 features, enabling users to handle everything they need on a single smartphone.
Vtrading provides AI-driven quantitative services in the digital asset space. Over the years, Vtrading has offered intelligent quantitative custody, smart copy trading, independent rebate systems, customized deployments for large clients, and KOL opinion subscriptions. Users can achieve AI automated trading with just API authorization.
Mon Protocol is an IP governance project in collaboration with Pixelmon, aimed at incentivizing and rewarding NFT holders who help develop the Pixelmon brand. Mon Protocol effectively allows monster NFT holders to actively participate in decisions related to their species, with the MON token becoming the ecosystem token powering the Pixelmon game.
Hiveswap is a DEX in the Bitcoin ecosystem that utilizes the interoperable Bitcoin layer MAP protocol to provide liquidity services for assets in the Bitcoin ecosystem, including assets on Bitcoin L1, the MAP protocol interoperable layer, and various assets on Bitcoin L2.
Multipool is a fair and equitable limit order DEX for RWA and cryptocurrencies built on existing AMMs.
SoulLand is a gamified social subscription platform that addresses the Web3 immersive information and social needs by introducing gamification elements, allowing users to obtain first-hand information from KOLs through social interactions while participating in gaming battles, staking, and other gameplay to earn token rewards, thus gaining a fun learning experience with profit objectives.
Holograph is a full-chain tokenization protocol that enables asset issuers to mint natively composable full-chain tokens. Holograph works by burning tokens on the source chain, sending messages to the target chain via a messaging protocol, and then re-sending the same number of tokens to the same contract address. This unifies liquidity, eliminates slippage, and maintains interchangeability between blockchains.
Nim Network is an AI gaming chain based on Dymension that will provide the ultimate ecosystem for exploring and developing games at the intersection of Web3 and AI.
Kim is a community-driven DEX built on Mode, centered around an ecosystem that provides efficient and customizable protocols. By leveraging Mode's sequential fee-sharing mechanism, Kim offers greater incentives for projects.
Due to space limitations, the above is a partial overview of mainnet and token information. For more complete and timely data, please visit the RootData official website (https://www.rootdata.com/zh/) for more information.
